Range flow estimation.

We discuss the computation of the instantaneous 3D displacement vector fields of deformable surfaces from sequences of range data. We give a novel version of the basic motion constraint equation that can be evaluated directly on the sensor grid. The various forms of the aperture problem encountered are investigated and the derived constraint solutions are solved in a total least squares (TLS) framework. We propose a regularization scheme to compute dense full flow fields from the sparse TLS solutions. The performance of the algorithm is analyzed quantitatively for both synthetic and real data. Finally we apply the method to compute the 3D motion field of living plant leaves.