title: Fast, very lightweight algorithm for camera motion detection?
body: <p>I'm working on an augmented reality app for iPhone that involves a very processor-intensive object recognition algorithm (pushing the CPU at 100% it can get through maybe 5 frames per second), and in an effort to both save battery power and make the whole thing less "jittery" I'm trying to come up with a way to only run that object recognizer when the user is actually moving the camera around.</p>
  
  <p>My first thought was to simply use the iPhone's accelerometers / gyroscope, but in testing I found that very often people would move the iPhone at a consistent enough attitude and velocity that there wouldn't be any way to tell that it was still in motion.</p>
  
  <p>So that left the option of analyzing the actual video feed and detecting movement in that. I got OpenCV working and tried running their pyramidal Lucas-Kanade optical flow algorithm, which works well but seems to be almost as processor-intensive as my object recognizer - I can get it to an acceptable framerate if I lower the depth levels / downsample the image / track fewer points, but then accuracy suffers and it starts to miss some large movements and trigger on small hand-shaking-y ones.</p>
  
  <p>So my question is, is there another optical flow algorithm that's faster than Lucas-Kanade if I just want to detect the overall magnitude of camera movement? I don't need to track individual objects, I don't even need to know which direction the camera is moving, all I really need is a way to feed something two frames of video and have it tell me how far apart they are.</p>