How to detect spiral optical flow using matlab?

3
votes

I have a video of a giant whirlpool, similar to the below image enter image description here

Can anyone give an algorithm / code to detect SPIRAL OPTICAL FLOW?

Is it possible to fit a spiral curve over it depending on the spiral optical flow? If yes how?

Thank you.

1
matlabimage-processingcurve-fittingmatlab-cvstopticalflow
+1 for the awesome image too – rayryeng

1 Answers

2
votes

You can compute optical flow using vision.OpticalFlow object in the Computer Vision System Toolbox. As for determining whether it is spiral, that seems to be the crux of your project.

Optical flow takes a pair of consecutive frames, and attempts to give you a vector at every pixel describing its motion from frame 1 to frame 2.

If you do not care about the motion of every single pixel you can track a sparse set of points over time using vision.PointTracker.

Edit: If you have a recent version of the Computer Vision System Toolbox, try the new optical flow functions: opticalFlowHS, opticalFlowLK, opticalFlowLKDoG, and opticalFlowFarneback.