A new approach is developed for detecting motion boundaries and indepe
ndent motion without explicit estimation of the motion field. The form
ulation is based on the differential optical flow equation and uses a
piecewise linear model for the image intensity data. Compared with pre
vious techniques, our approach has greater simplicity and makes less s
pecific assumptions on the motion held. Experimental results on real i
mage sequences and real time implementation are included. Copyright (C
) 1996 Pattern Recognition Society.