US Patent 10467768 Optical flow estimation using 4-dimensional cost volume processing

Techniques are provided for estimation of optical flow between images using 4-dimensional cost volume processing. A methodology implementing the techniques according to an embodiment includes extracting a first set of feature vectors from a first image and extracting a second set of feature vectors from a second image. Each feature vector of the first set is associated with a pixel of the first image and each feature vector of the second set is associated with a pixel of the second image. The method further includes constructing a 4-dimensional (4D) cost volume to store a distance metric between each feature vector of the first set of feature vectors and a selected subset of feature vectors of the second set of feature vectors. The method further includes performing a flow-semi-global matching (Flow-SGM) on the 4D cost volume to estimate an optical flow vector for pixels of the first image.