Optic flow in harmony

Abstract

Most variational optic flow approaches just consist of three constituents: a data term, a smoothness term and a smoothness weight. In this paper, we present an approach that harmonises these three components. We start by developing an advanced data term that is robust under outliers and varying illumination conditions. This is achieved by using constraint normalisation, and an HSV colour representation with higher order constancy assumptions and a separate robust penalisation. Our novel anisotropic smoothness is designed to work complementary to the data term. To this end, it incorporates directional information from the data constraints to enable a filling-in of information solely in the direction where the data term gives no information, yielding an optimal complementary smoothing behaviour. This strategy is applied in the spatial as well as in the spatiotemporal domain. Finally, we propose a simple method for automatically determining the optimal smoothness weight. This method bases on a novel concept that we call "optimal prediction principle" (OPP). It states that the flow field obtained with the optimal smoothness weight allows for the best prediction of the next frames in the image sequence. The benefits of our "optic flow in harmony" (OFH) approach are demonstrated by an extensive experimental validation and by a competitive performance at the widely used Middlebury optic flow benchmark. © 2010 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.