Skip to main content

Order-Adaptive Regularisation for Variational Optical Flow: Global, Local and in Between

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNIP,volume 10302))

Abstract

Recent approaches for variational motion estimation typically either rely on first or second order regularisation strategies. While first order strategies are more appropriate for scenes with fronto-parallel motion, second order constraints are superior if it comes to the estimation of affine flow fields. Since using the wrong regularisation order may lead to a significant deterioration of the results, it is surprising that there has not been much effort in the literature so far to determine this order automatically. In our work, we address the aforementioned problem in two ways. (i) First, we discuss two anisotropic smoothness terms of first and second order, respectively, that share important structural properties and that are thus particularly suited for being combined within an order-adaptive variational framework. (ii) Secondly, based on these two smoothness terms, we develop four different variational methods and with it four different strategies for adaptively selecting the regularisation order: a global and a local strategy based on half-quadratic regularisation, a non-local approach that relies on neighbourhood information, and a region based method using level sets. Experiments on recent benchmarks show the benefits of each of the strategies. Moreover, they demonstrate that adaptively combining different regularisation orders not only allows to outperform single-order strategies but also to obtain advantages beyond the ones of a frame-wise selection.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.

Buying options

Chapter
USD   29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD   39.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD   54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Learn about institutional subscriptions

References

  1. Amiaz, T., Kiryati, N.: Piecewise-smooth dense optical flow via level sets. Int. J. Comput. Vis. 68(2), 111–124 (2006)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  2. Baker, S., Scharstein, D., Lewis, J.P., Roth, S., Black, M.J., Szeliski, R.: A database and evaluation methodology for optical flow. Int. J. Comput. Vis. 92(1), 1–31 (2011)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  3. Black, M.J., Anandan, P.: The robust estimation of multiple motions: parametric and piecewise-smooth flow fields. Comput. Vis. Image Underst. 63(1), 75–104 (1996)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  4. Blake, A., Zisserman, A.: Visual Reconstruction. MIT Press, Cambridge (1987)

    Google Scholar 

  5. Braux-Zin, J., Dupont, R., Bartoli, A.: A general dense image matching framework combining direct and feature-based costs. In: Proceedings of the International Conference on Computer Vision, pp. 185–192 (2013)

    Google Scholar 

  6. Bredies, K., Kunisch, K., Pock, T.: Total generalized variation. SIAM J. Imaging Sci. 3(3), 492–526 (2010)

    Article  MathSciNet  MATH  Google Scholar 

  7. Brox, T., Bruhn, A., Papenberg, N., Weickert, J.: High accuracy optical flow estimation based on a theory for warping. In: Pajdla, T., Matas, J. (eds.) ECCV 2004. LNCS, vol. 3024, pp. 25–36. Springer, Heidelberg (2004). doi:10.1007/978-3-540-24673-2_3

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  8. Butler, D.J., Wulff, J., Stanley, G.B., Black, M.J.: A naturalistic open source movie for optical flow evaluation. In: Fitzgibbon, A., Lazebnik, S., Perona, P., Sato, Y., Schmid, C. (eds.) ECCV 2012. LNCS, vol. 7577, pp. 611–625. Springer, Heidelberg (2012). doi:10.1007/978-3-642-33783-3_44

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  9. Bruhn, A., Weickert, J.: Towards ultimate motion estimation: combining highest accuracy with real-time performance. In: Proceedings of the International Conference on Computer Vision, pp. 749–755 (2005)

    Google Scholar 

  10. Charbonnier, P., Blanc-Féraud, L., Aubert, G., Barlaud, M.: Deterministic edge-preserving regularization in computed imaging. IEEE Trans. Image Process. 6(2), 298–311 (1997)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  11. Cremers, D., Soatto, S.: Motion competition: a variational approach to piecewise parametric motion segmentation. Int. J. Comput. Vis. 62(3), 249–265 (2005)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  12. Demetz, O., Stoll, M., Volz, S., Weickert, J., Bruhn, A.: Learning brightness transfer functions for the joint recovery of illumination changes and optical flow. In: Fleet, D., Pajdla, T., Schiele, B., Tuytelaars, T. (eds.) ECCV 2014. LNCS, vol. 8689, pp. 455–471. Springer, Cham (2014). doi:10.1007/978-3-319-10590-1_30

    Google Scholar 

  13. Förstner, W. Gülch., E.: A fast operator for detection and precise location of distinct points, corners and centres of circular features. In: Proceedings of the ISPRS Intercommission Conference on Fast Processing of Photogrammetric Data, pp. 281–305 (1987)

    Google Scholar 

  14. Geiger, A., Lenz, P., Urtasun, R.: Are we ready for autonomous driving? The KITTI vision benchmark suite. In: Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, pp. 3354–3361 (2012)

    Google Scholar 

  15. Hafner, D., Schroers, C., Weickert, J.: Introducing maximal anisotropy into second order coupling models. In: Gall, J., Gehler, P., Leibe, B. (eds.) GCPR 2015. LNCS, vol. 9358, pp. 79–90. Springer, Cham (2015). doi:10.1007/978-3-319-24947-6_7

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  16. Horn, B., Schunck, B.: Determining optical flow. Artif. Intell. 17, 185–203 (1981)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  17. Kuschk, G., Cremers, D.: Fast and accurate large-scale stereo reconstruction using variational methods. In: Proceedings of the ICCV Workshops, pp. 1–8 (2013)

    Google Scholar 

  18. Lenzen, F., Becker, F., Lellmann, J.: Adaptive second-order total variation: an approach aware of slope discontinuities. In: Kuijper, A., Bredies, K., Pock, T., Bischof, H. (eds.) SSVM 2013. LNCS, vol. 7893, pp. 61–73. Springer, Heidelberg (2013). doi:10.1007/978-3-642-38267-3_6

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  19. Menze, M., Geiger, A.: Object scene flow for autonomous vehicles. In Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, pp. 3061–3070 (2015)

    Google Scholar 

  20. Nagel, H.-H., Enkelmann, W.: An investigation of smoothness constraints for the estimation of displacement vector fields from image sequences. IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell. 8(5), 565–593 (1986)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  21. Osher, S., Sethian, J.A.: Fronts propagating with curvature-dependent speed: algorithms based on Hamilton-Jacobi formulations. J. Comput. Phys. 79(1), 12–49 (1988)

    Article  MathSciNet  MATH  Google Scholar 

  22. Perona, P., Malik, J.: Scale space and edge detection using anisotropic diffusion. IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell. 2, 629–639 (1990)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  23. Ranftl, R., Bredies, K., Pock, T.: Non-local total generalized variation for optical flow estimation. In: Fleet, D., Pajdla, T., Schiele, B., Tuytelaars, T. (eds.) ECCV 2014. LNCS, vol. 8689, pp. 439–454. Springer, Cham (2014). doi:10.1007/978-3-319-10590-1_29

    Google Scholar 

  24. Vogel, C., Roth, S., Schindler, K.: An evaluation of data costs for optical flow. In: Weickert, J., Hein, M., Schiele, B. (eds.) GCPR 2013. LNCS, vol. 8142, pp. 343–353. Springer, Heidelberg (2013). doi:10.1007/978-3-642-40602-7_37

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  25. Volz, S., Bruhn, A., Valgaerts, L., Zimmer, H.: Modeling temporal coherence for optical flow. In: Proceedings of the International Conference on Computer Vision (2011)

    Google Scholar 

  26. Weickert, J., Schnörr, C.: A theoretical framework for convex regularizers in PDE-based computation of image motion. Int. J. Comput. Vis. 45(3), 245–264 (2001)

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  27. Xu, L., Jia, J., Matsushita, Y.: Motion detail preserving optical flow estimation. IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell. 34, 1744–1757 (2012)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  28. Zimmer, H., Bruhn, A., Weickert, J.: Optic flow in harmony. Int. J. Comput. Vis. 93(3), 368–388 (2011)

    Article  MathSciNet  MATH  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

We thank the German Research Foundation (DFG) for financial support within project B04 of SFB/Transregio 161.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Daniel Maurer .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2017 Springer International Publishing AG

About this paper

Cite this paper

Maurer, D., Stoll, M., Bruhn, A. (2017). Order-Adaptive Regularisation for Variational Optical Flow: Global, Local and in Between. In: Lauze, F., Dong, Y., Dahl, A. (eds) Scale Space and Variational Methods in Computer Vision. SSVM 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10302. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-58771-4_44

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-58771-4_44

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-58770-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-58771-4

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics