We consider the numerical treatment of the optical flow problem by evaluating the performance of the trust region method versus the line search method. To the best of our knowledge, the trust region method is studied here for the first time for variational optical flow computation. Four different optical flow models are used to test the performance of the proposed algorithm combining linear and nonlinear data terms with quadratic and TV regularization. We show that trust region often performs better than line search; especially in the presence of non-linearity and non-convexity in the model.