Robust Optical Flow Estimation

Abstract

In this work, we describe an implementation of the variational method proposed by Brox et al. in 2004, which yields accurate optical flows with low running times. It has several benefits with respect to the method of Horn and Schunck: it is more robust to the presence of outliers, produces piecewise-smooth flow fields and can cope with constant brightness changes. This method relies on the brightness and gradient constancy assumptions, using the information of the image intensities and the image gradients to find correspondences. It also generalizes the use of continuous L 1 functionals, which help mitigate the effect of outliers and create a Total Variation (TV) regularization. Additionally, it introduces a simple temporal regularization scheme that enforces a continuous temporal coherence of the flow fields. Source Code The source code, the code documentation, and the online demo are accessible at the IPOL web page of this article 1. In this page an implementation is available for download. This file contains two directories: one for the spatial method and another for the temporal method. The spatial method is suitable for general image sequences, while the temporal method should be used when the flow fields are known to be very continuous.