Journal of Pattern Recognition Research

We suggest a relationship, called stereo-motion equation, between stereo disparity and optical flow, and a recursive filter, as an efficient algorithm to estimate the two quantities. We show that close spatial and temporal relationships exist between the two quantities. The importance of this discovery is that the vision quantities can be computed simultaneously, on the image level, unlike previous approaches that tried to determine the two quantities separately. This algorithm is general because it can be reduced to the separate methods to estimate either disparity or optical flow. Because the two vision quantities help mutually for the best matches, the results tend to be more accurate and reliable than the separate methods. As an efficient algorithm, we suggest a recursive filter in which the two vision quantities are determined alternatively by time and measurement updates. This algorithm was tested on both synthetic and natural scenes containing moving objects and performed better than separate calculation of disparity and optical flow.