Sparse optical flow outliers elimination method based on Borda stochastic neighborhood graph

During the tracking of moving targets in dynamic scenes, efficiently handling outliers in the optical flow and maintaining robustness across various motion amplitudes represents a critical challenge. So far, studies have used thresholding and local consistency based approaches to deal with optical outliers. However, there is subjectivity through expert-defined thresholds or delineated regions, and therefore these methods do not perform consistently enough under different target motion amplitudes. Other studies have focused on complex statistical-mathematical modeling which, although theoretically valid, requires significant computational resources. Aiming at the above problems this paper proposes a new method to calculate the optical outliers by using stochastic neighborhood graph combined with the Borda counting method, which reduces the computation amount on the basis of objectively eliminating the outliers. Sparse optical flow (SOF) values are used as the overall population and the outlier and inlier SOF values are used as samples. Analyze the dissimilarity between SOF data points, obtaining the dissimilarity matrix, introducing the Gaussian function to smooth and reduce the dimensionality of the dissimilarity matrix, and then normalizing the smoothing matrix to generate the binding matrix, where the probability sum of each node to other nodes in the matrix is equal to 1. Stochastic neighborhood graphs are then generated based on a binding matrix to obtain the outlier probabilities of data points in different neighborhood graphs, and outlier samples are obtained based on the probability. To avoid the subjectivity of the expert thresholds, the outlier probabilities are weighted and ranked to calculate the data point Borda scores to obtain accurate optical outliers. The experimental results show that the method in this paper is robust to different amplitude motions and real scenarios, and the accuracy, precision and recall of outliers elimination are better than the current mainstream algorithms.