In this paper a new concept of the unified optical flow field (UOFF) for 3 D motion analysis from a stereo image sequence is implemented which is an extension of the temporal optical flow formulations developed by Horn and Schunck. A four frame model is established and a spatial optical flow is also introduced.

In order to alleviate the problem of the strict requirement of two identical sensors in common stereo imagery a new imaging system is presented in this paper that needs only one camera, two plane mirrors and two switches to generate a phase shifted binocular sequence of images. It is shown that the structure and motion of the object surface can be reconstructed from the parallelogram four frame sequence set if the information of the experiment, including the focal length, the distance between two mirrors and the intersecting angle between two observing directions are known. Detailed computer simulations are presented and analyzed to illustrate the algorithm discussed.