Stuller This research has three major objectives: 1. to derive the mathematical operations that should be performed on two or more stochastic signals to obtain theoretically optimum estimates of the delay or displacement between them; 2. to develop practical systems that attain or closely approximate the theoretically optimum estimates; and 3. to compare the accuracy of the theoretically optimum estimates with the estimates obtained by the practical systems. The research method is primarily theoretical, but includes computational studies and simulation experiments. The approach has the potential to synthesize the traditional divisions between: 1. motion estimation based on optical flow and motion estimation based on feature tracking; and 2. segmentation and motion estimation. This unification should lead to an increased understanding of image motion estimation and improved motion estimation techniques.
