Variability and stellar populations with deep optical-IR images of the Milky Way disk: matching VVV with VLT/VIMOS data

We have used deep V-band and JHKs-band observations to investigate variability and stellar populations near the Galactic plane in Centaurus, and compared the observations with the Galactic model of Besancon. By applying image subtraction technique to a series of over 580 V-band frames taken with the ESO VLT/VIMOS instrument during two contiguous nights in April 2005, we have detected 333 variables among 84,734 stars in the brightness range 12.7