The aim of this project is to investigate on new methods for the calculation of the optical flow. The optical flow is an important issue in the field of computer vision, and consists in detecting the movement of the objects in a sequence of images. During the past few years our research group has dedicated an important effort in the resolution of this problem using variational methods and partial differential equations. Variational techniques have demonstrated to be among the most precise and reliable techniques that are known for the calculation of the optical flow. Recently, several researchers have begun to investigate on new methods that solve the problem using spatio-temporal regularizing terms. Although these methods have a restricted applicability, due to the fact that they are based on the temporal derivative of the flow, they have demonstrated that the precision can be increased if temporal information is included. With this project we try to obtain a better understanding of the behaviour of the optical flow in a sequence of images. We will try to propose more general temporal models that include a wide range of possible displacements. We will develop variational methods including these models, with the aim of increasing the reliability and precision of the results.