Dense Optical Flow Estimation Using Sparse Regularizers from Reduced Measurements

Optical flow is the pattern of apparent motion of objects in a scene. The computation of optical flow is a critical component in numerous computer vision tasks such as object detection, visual object tracking, and activity recognition. Despite a lot of research, efficiently managing abrupt changes in motion remains a challenge in motion estimation. This paper proposes novel variational regularization methods to address this problem since they allow combining different mathematical concepts into a joint energy minimization framework. In this work, we incorporate concepts from signal sparsity into variational regularization for motion estimation. The proposed regularization uses a robust l1 norm, which promotes sparsity and handles motion discontinuities. By using this regularization, we promote the sparsity of the optical flow gradient. This sparsity helps recover a signal even with just a few measurements. We explore recovering optical flow from a limited set of linear measurements using this regularizer. Our findings show that leveraging the sparsity of the derivatives of optical flow reduces computational complexity and memory needs.

Energy Efficiency Maximization in IRS-enabled Phase Cooperative PS-SWIPT based Self-sustainable IoT Network

Power splitting based simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (PS-SWIPT) appears to be a promising solution to support future self-sustainable Internet of Things (SS-IoT) networks. However, the performance of these networks is constrained by radio frequency signal strength and channel impairments. To address this challenge, intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRSs) are introduced in PS-SWIPT based SS-IoT networks to improve network efficiency by controlling signal reflections. In this article, an IRS-enabled phase cooperative framework is proposed to improve energy efficiency (EE) of the IoT network $({\mathtt {I}}^{net})$ using phase shifts of the user network $({\mathtt {U}^{net})}$, without constraining hardware resources at ${\mathtt {U}^{net}}$. We exploit transmit beamforming (BF) at access points (APs) and phase shifts optimization at the IRS end with phase effective cooperation between APs to enhance ${\mathtt {I}}^{net}$ EE performance. The maximization problem turns out to be NP-hard, so first, an alternating optimization (AO) is solved for the ${\mathtt {U}^{net}}$ using low computational complexity heuristic BF approaches, namely, transmit minimum-mean-square-error and zero-forcing BF, and phase optimization is performed using semidefinite relaxation (SDR) approach. To combat the computational complexity of AO, we also propose an alternative solution by exploiting heuristic BF schemes and an iterative algorithm, i.e., the element-wise block-coordinate descent method for phase shifts optimization. Next, EE maximization is solved for the ${\mathtt {I}^{net}}$ by optimizing the PS ratio and active BF vectors by exploiting optimal phase shifts of the ${\mathtt {U}}^{net}$. Simulation results confirm that employing IRS phase cooperation in PS-SWIPT based SS-IoT networks can significantly improve EE performance of ${\mathtt {I}^{net}}$ without constraining resources.