OpenCV 3 Computer Vision with Python Cookbook

Computing the dense optical flow between two frames

The optical flow is a family of algorithms which addresses the issue of finding the movement of points between two images (usually subsequent frames in a video). Dense optical flow algorithms find movements of all pixels in a frame. The dense optical flow can be used to find objects moving in a sequence of frames, or to detect camera movements. In this recipe, we will find out how to compute and display the dense optical flow in several ways, using OpenCV functionality.