Reduction of Flicker in Four-Stroke Motion of Color Images

When two sequential video frames extracted from a single video clip are followed by the negative of the two frames, a viewer often experiences a visual illusion whereby a scene in the frames continuously moves in a single direction (four-stroke apparent motion). To create a four-stroke apparent motion display, the image intensities of the whole of the second pair of images are reversed. However, this intensity reversal creates a strong impression of flicker that can be undesirable for comfortable viewing. This study reports that four-stroke apparent motion can be induced by only reversing the luminance intensities in those spatial areas which contain motion signals in high-pass filtered images. This use of only a partial reversal of image intensities greatly reduces the apparent flicker in the display while retaining motion perception.