Variational Optical Flow: Warping and Interpolation Revisited

Abstract

One of the fundamental problems in computer vision is to attain the apparent motion in image sequences, the optical flow. As evaluations at hand of recent benchmarks show, this field is highly competitive. High ranking variational methods often consist of a combination of techniques, where frequently the presentation in the literature focuses on novel contributions in modelling. In this paper we investigate the warping technique and related algorithmic design choices that are fundamental for practical implementation. At hand of a detailed yet straightforward derivation we discuss different warping variations. These are evaluated in numerical experiments, and furthermore we investigate the impact of a variety of interpolation methods that can be used.