Balanced Optical Flow Refinement by Bidirectional Constraint

Abstract

We present an efficient optical flow refinement approach based on a bidirectional flow consistency. Our method is an add-on component that improves the existing optical flow estimation to be balanced between forward and backward flows. Most of the state-of-the-art optical flow methods only consider unidirectional motion vectors from a source image to a target image, which can make the estimated flow inconsistent with its backward estimation. The inconsistency can be reduced by considering the bidirectional motion when the optical flow is estimated, but it would be very hard for most of the typical optical flow methods and impossible for some of them. To solve this problem, we propose a sampling-based optimization method for efficiently refining the optical flows with a bidirectional constraint. By evaluating on Middlebury benchmark and public large displacement datasets, we validate the effectiveness of our method quantitatively and qualitatively and for accuracy.