Characterization of 3D dynamic textures with estimation of their movements

The human visual system seems very powerful when it is a question to identifying an object or a portion of an object in movement, such as a textured surface moving in a 3D textured environment. In such a situation, the visual impression of an observer depends on many factors, including the nature of relative movement between the scene and the observer, the kind of lighting and the surface aspect of the plane being studied. In this paper, we propose a method of characterization of textured surfaces moving in a 3D scene. The various analyzed images are strongly textured, and do not necessarily include periodic elementary patterns. The autocorrelation function associated with an optical model with the system scene-camera under the hypothesis of a weak perspective projection is used. We use the fact that the autocorrelation function of an image and of its affine transformed version are related by this transformation. 3D-rotations of the textured plane are studied by means of Euler's angles. On a set of 1008 synthetic images, the accuracy obtained for the angles of rotation is characterized by a standard deviation of about 9 degrees. It attains 4.1 degrees on a small database of real images.