High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Optical flow or optic flow is the pattern of apparent motion of objects, surfaces, and edges in a visual scene caused by the relative motion between an observer (an eye or a camera) and the scene. The concept of optical flow was first studied in the 1940s and ultimately published by American psychologist James J. Gibson as part of his theory of affordance. Optical flow techniques such as motion detection, object segmentation, time-to-collision and focus of expansion calculations, motion compensated encoding, and stereo disparity measurement utilize this motion of the objects` surfaces and edges.