ON THE REGISTRATION OF AN OBJECT TRANSLATING ON A STATIC BACKGROUND

This work considers the determination of the relative movements betwee n consecutive images, taken from the same scene (registration), a prob lem arising in many application fields. With the exception of speciali zed techniques for specific applications, the most reliable registrati on algorithms are based on the use of 2-D Fourier transforms. They typ ically require a relevant computational effort. The computational bulk iness typical of such methods can be overcome by 1-D techniques, needl ess to say, at the price of a degraded performance in presence of dist urbances. This paper proposes a new 1-D method, which exploits the ava ilability of several frames, typical of practical contexts, in order t o determine the translation of an object moving between two endpoints on a static background. The noise performance of the new technique is shown to be quite superior to that of the reported 1-D methods. For su fficiently long sequences the noise performance favourably compares wi th that of 2-D techniques, with considerable computational savings. Th e possibilities of the method are exemplified by a number of practical examples.