Detection of surface orientation and motion from texture by a stereological technique

A new approach is given to detect the surface orientation and motion from the texture on the surface by making use of a mathematical principle called ‘stereology’. Information about the surface orientation is contained in ‘features’ computed by scanning the image by parallel lines and counting the number of intersections with the curves of the texture. A synthetic example is given to illustrate the technique. This scheme can also detect surface motions relative to the viewer by computing features of its texture at one time and a short time later. The motion is specified by explicit formulae of the computed features.