The authors show that a new technique exploiting 1-D correlation of 2-D or even 1-D patches between successive frames may be sufficient to compute a satisfactory estimation of the optical flow field. The algorithm is well-suited to VLSI implementation. The sparse measurements provided by the technique can be used to compute qualitative properties of the flow for a number of different visual tasks. In particular, a method is described to combine the 1-D correlation technique with a scheme for detecting expansion or rotation (T. Poggio et al., 1991) in a simple algorithm which also suggests interesting biological implications. The algorithm provides a rough estimate of time-to-crash. It was tested on real image sequences. Its performance is discussed and the results are compared to previous approaches.
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