Motion analysis is used in computer vision, image processing, high-speed photography and machine vision that studies methods and applications in which two or more consecutive images from an image sequences, e.g., produced by a video camera or high-speed camera, are processed to produce information based on the apparent motion in the images. In some applications, the camera is fixed relative to the scene and objects are moving around in the scene, in some applications the scene is more or less fixed and the camera is moving, and in some cases both the camera and the scene are moving.
The motion analysis processing can in the simplest case be to detect motion, i.e., find the points in the image where something is moving. More complex types of processing can be to track a specific object in the image over time, to group points that belong to the same rigid object that is moving in the scene, or to determine the magnitude and direction of the motion of every point in the image. The information that is produced is often related to a specific image in the sequence, corresponding to a specific time-point, but then depends also on the neighboring images. This means that motion analysis can produce time-dependent information about motion.
Applications of motion analysis can be found in rather diverse areas, such as surveillance, medicine, film industry, automotive crash safety, ballistic firearm studies, biological science, flame propagation, and navigation of autonomous vehicles to name a few examples.