Optical flow is a computer vision technique used to estimate motion between two consecutive frames of a video sequence. It assumes that pixels in an image move in a smooth manner between frames, and it calculates the displacement of each pixel between two consecutive frames.
To implement optical flow in Python, you can use the OpenCV library. Here is a simple example:
```python
import cv2
# read two consecutive frames
frame1 = cv2.imread('frame1.jpg')
frame2 = cv2.imread('frame2.jpg')
# convert frames to grayscale
gray1 = cv2.cvtColor(frame1, cv2.COLOR_BGR2GRAY)
gray2 = cv2.cvtColor(frame2, cv2.COLOR_BGR2GRAY)
# calculate optical flow
flow = cv2.calcOpticalFlowFarneback(gray1, gray2, None, 0.5, 3, 15, 3, 5, 1.2, 0)
# visualize the optical flow
h, w = gray1.shape[:2]
y, x = np.mgrid[0:h:10, 0:w:10].reshape(2, -1)
fx, fy = flow[y, x].T
lines = np.vstack([x, y, x+fx, y+fy]).T.reshape(-1, 2, 2)
lines = np.int32(lines + 0.5)
vis = cv2.cvtColor(gray1, cv2.COLOR_GRAY2BGR)
cv2.polylines(vis, lines, 0, (0, 255, 0))
for (x1, y1), (_x2, _y2) in lines:
cv2.circle(vis, (x1, y1), 1, (0, 255, 0), -1)
cv2.imshow("Optical flow", vis)
cv2.waitKey(0)
```
In this example, we first read two consecutive frames and convert them to grayscale. We then use the `cv2.calcOpticalFlowFarneback` function to calculate the optical flow between the frames. Finally, we visualize the optical flow using green lines and circles on the original image.