William B. Thompson: Analysis of Visual Motion


Visual motion is a compelling cue to the structure of the world around us. In a series of related work, we have developed methods for determining optical flow in the presence of discontinuities, extracting shape properties in a qualitative manner that avoids much of the complexity and noise sensitivity of traditional structure-from-motion methods, and detecting moving objects in the environment when the sensor might also be moving.

Selected publications:


W.B. Thompson, "Exploiting Discontinuities in Optical Flow," International Journal of Computer Vision, 30(3), 1998.

W.B. Thompson, P. Lechleider, and E.R. Stuck, "Detecting Moving Objects Using The Rigidity Constraint," IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, February, 1993.

W.B. Thompson and J.S. Painter, "Qualitative Constraints for Structure-From-Motion," Computer Vision, Graphics, and Image Processing B: Image Understanding, July, 1992.

W.B. Thompson, D. Kersten, and W.R. Knecht, "Structure-From-Motion Based on Information at Surface Boundaries," Biological Cybernetics, February 1992.

W.B. Thompson and T.C. Pong, "Detecting Moving Objects," International Journal of Computer Vision, January 1990 .

W.B. Thompson, "Structure-From-Motion By Tracking Occlusion Boundaries," Biological Cybernetics,  62, 1989.

W.B. Thompson, L.G. Craton, and A. Yonas,  The 2¾-D Sketch, Proc. AAAI Workshop on Physical and Biological Approaches to Computational Vision, March 1988.

A. Yonas, L.G. Craton, and W.B. Thompson, "Relative Motion -- Kinetic Information for the Order of Depth at an Edge," Perception & Psychophysics, January 1987.

J.K. Kearney, W.B. Thompson, and D.L. Boley, "Optical Flow Estimation: An Error Analysis of Gradient-Based Methods with Local Optimization," IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence," 9(2), 1987.

W.B. Thompson and J.K. Kearney, "Inexact Vision," Proc. Workshop on Motion: Representation and Analysis, May 1986.

W.B. Thompson, K.M. Mutch, and V.A. Berzins, "Dynamic Occlusion Analysis in Optical Flow Fields," IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, July 1985.

K.M. Mutch and W.B. Thompson, "Analysis of Accretion and Deletion at Boundaries in Dynamic Scenes," IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence , March 1985.

W.B. Thompson, "Combining Motion and Contrast for Segmentation," IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, November 1980.

S.T. Barnard and W.B. Thompson, "Disparity Analysis of Images," IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, July 1980.

C.L. Fennema and W.B. Thompson, "Velocity Determination in Scenes Containing Several Moving Objects," Computer Graphics and Image Processing, April 1979.