It has been recently shown that a convolutional neural network can learn optical flow estimation with unsupervised learning. However, the performance of the unsupervised methods still has a relatively large gap compared to its supervised counterpart. Occlusion and large motion are some of the major factors that limit the current unsupervised learning of optical flow methods. In this work we introduce a new method which models occlusion explicitly and a new warping way that facilitates the learning of large motion. Our method shows promising results on Flying Chairs, MPI-Sintel and KITTI benchmark datasets. Especially on KITTI dataset where abundant unlabeled samples exist, our unsupervised method outperforms its counterpart trained with supervised learning.
@cite_46 first introduces an end-to-end differentiable neural architecture that allows unsupervised learning for video motion prediction and reports preliminary results on a weakly-supervised semantic segmentation task. Later, @cite_44 @cite_26 @cite_48 adopt a similar unsupervised learning architecture with a more detailed performance study on multiple optical flow benchmark datasets. A common philosophy behind these methods is that instead of directly supervising with ground-truth flow, these methods utilize the Spatial Transformer Networks @cite_51 to warp the current images to produce a target image prediction and use photometric loss to guide back-propagation @cite_54 . The whole framework can be further extended to estimate the depth, camera motion and optical flow simultaneously in an end-to-end manner @cite_13 . This overcomes the flow annotation problem, but the flow estimation accuracy in previous works still lags behind the supervised learning methods. In this paper, we show that unsupervised learning can obtain competitive results to supervised learning models. After the initial submission of this paper, we became aware of a concurrent work @cite_56 which tries to solve the occlusion problem in unsupervised optical flow learning with a symmetric-based approach.
@cite_13 @cite_26 @cite_48 @cite_54 @cite_56 @cite_44 @cite_46 @cite_51
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Learning optical flow with neural networks is hampered by the need for obtaining training data with associated ground truth. Unsupervised learning is a promising direction, yet the performance of current unsupervised methods is still limited. In particular, the lack of proper occlusion handling in commonly used data terms constitutes a major source of error. While most optical flow methods process pairs of consecutive frames, more advanced occlusion reasoning can be realized when considering multiple frames. In this paper, we propose a framework for unsupervised learning of optical flow and occlusions over multiple frames. More specifically, we exploit the minimal configuration of three frames to strengthen the photometric loss and explicitly reason about occlusions. We demonstrate that our multi-frame, occlusion-sensitive formulation outperforms existing unsupervised two-frame methods and even produces results on par with some fully supervised methods. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have recently been applied to the optical flow estimation problem. As training the CNNs requires sufficiently large ground truth training data, existing approaches resort to synthetic, unrealistic datasets. On the other hand, unsupervised methods are capable of leveraging real-world videos for training where the ground truth flow fields are not available. These methods, however, rely on the fundamental assumptions of brightness constancy and spatial smoothness priors which do not hold near motion boundaries. In this paper, we propose to exploit unlabeled videos for semi-supervised learning of optical flow with a Generative Adversarial Network. Our key insight is that the adversarial loss can capture the structural patterns of flow warp errors without making explicit assumptions. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed semi-supervised algorithm performs favorably against purely supervised and semi-supervised learning schemes. It has been recently shown that a convolutional neural network can learn optical flow estimation with unsupervised learning. However, the performance of the unsupervised methods still has a relatively large gap compared to its supervised counterpart. Occlusion and large motion are some of the major factors that limit the current unsupervised learning of optical flow methods. In this work we introduce a new method which models occlusion explicitly and a new warping way that facilitates the learning of large motion. Our method shows promising results on Flying Chairs, MPI-Sintel and KITTI benchmark datasets. Especially on KITTI dataset where abundant unlabeled samples exist, our unsupervised method outperforms its counterpart trained with supervised learning. It has been recently shown that a convolutional neural network can learn optical flow estimation with unsupervised learning. However, the performance of the unsupervised methods still has a relatively large gap compared to its supervised counterpart. Occlusion and large motion are some of the major factors that limit the current unsupervised learning of optical flow methods. In this work we introduce a new method which models occlusion explicitly and a new warping way that facilitates the learning of large motion. Our method shows promising results on Flying Chairs, MPI-Sintel and KITTI benchmark datasets. Especially on KITTI dataset where abundant unlabeled samples exist, our unsupervised method outperforms its counterpart trained with supervised learning. This paper shows how to extract dense optical flow from videos with a convolutional neural network (CNN). The proposed model constitutes a potential building block for deeper architectures to allow using motion without resorting to an external algorithm, for recognition in videos. We derive our network architecture from signal processing principles to provide desired invariances to image contrast, phase and texture. We constrain weights within the network to enforce strict rotation invariance and substantially reduce the number of parameters to learn. We demonstrate end-to-end training on only 8 sequences of the Middlebury dataset, orders of magnitude less than competing CNN-based motion estimation methods, and obtain comparable performance to classical methods on the Middlebury benchmark. Importantly, our method outputs a distributed representation of motion that allows representing multiple, transparent motions, and dynamic textures. Our contributions on network design and rotation invariance offer insights nonspecific to motion estimation. We present a novel approach for unsupervised learning of depth and ego-motion from monocular video. Unsupervised learning removes the need for separate supervisory signals (depth or ego-motion ground truth, or multi-view video). Prior work in unsupervised depth learning uses pixel-wise or gradient-based losses, which only consider pixels in small local neighborhoods. Our main contribution is to explicitly consider the inferred 3D geometry of the scene, enforcing consistency of the estimated 3D point clouds and ego-motion across consecutive frames. This is a challenging task and is solved by a novel (approximate) backpropagation algorithm for aligning 3D structures. We combine this novel 3D-based loss with 2D losses based on photometric quality of frame reconstructions using estimated depth and ego-motion from adjacent frames. We also incorporate validity masks to avoid penalizing areas in which no useful information exists. We test our algorithm on the KITTI dataset and on a video dataset captured on an uncalibrated mobile phone camera. Our proposed approach consistently improves depth estimates on both datasets, and outperforms the state-of-the-art for both depth and ego-motion. Because we only require a simple video, learning depth and ego-motion on large and varied datasets becomes possible. We demonstrate this by training on the low quality uncalibrated video dataset and evaluating on KITTI, ranking among top performing prior methods which are trained on KITTI itself. We present a novel approach for unsupervised learning of depth and ego-motion from monocular video. Unsupervised learning removes the need for separate supervisory signals (depth or ego-motion ground truth, or multi-view video). Prior work in unsupervised depth learning uses pixel-wise or gradient-based losses, which only consider pixels in small local neighborhoods. Our main contribution is to explicitly consider the inferred 3D geometry of the whole scene, and enforce consistency of the estimated 3D point clouds and ego-motion across consecutive frames. This is a challenging task and is solved by a novel (approximate) backpropagation algorithm for aligning 3D structures. We combine this novel 3D-based loss with 2D losses based on photometric quality of frame reconstructions using estimated depth and ego-motion from adjacent frames. We also incorporate validity masks to avoid penalizing areas in which no useful information exists. We test our algorithm on the KITTI dataset and on a video dataset captured on an uncalibrated mobile phone camera. Our proposed approach consistently improves depth estimates on both datasets, and outperforms the state-of-the-art for both depth and ego-motion. Because we only require a simple video, learning depth and ego-motion on large and varied datasets becomes possible. We demonstrate this by training on the low quality uncalibrated video dataset and evaluating on KITTI, ranking among top performing prior methods which are trained on KITTI itself.1 Over the last years, deep convolutional neural networks (ConvNets) have transformed the field of computer vision thanks to their unparalleled capacity to learn high level semantic image features. However, in order to successfully learn those features, they usually require massive amounts of manually labeled data, which is both expensive and impractical to scale. Therefore, unsupervised semantic feature learning, i.e., learning without requiring manual annotation effort, is of crucial importance in order to successfully harvest the vast amount of visual data that are available today. In our work we propose to learn image features by training ConvNets to recognize the 2d rotation that is applied to the image that it gets as input. We demonstrate both qualitatively and quantitatively that this apparently simple task actually provides a very powerful supervisory signal for semantic feature learning. We exhaustively evaluate our method in various unsupervised feature learning benchmarks and we exhibit in all of them state-of-the-art performance. Specifically, our results on those benchmarks demonstrate dramatic improvements w.r.t. prior state-of-the-art approaches in unsupervised representation learning and thus significantly close the gap with supervised feature learning. For instance, in PASCAL VOC 2007 detection task our unsupervised pre-trained AlexNet model achieves the state-of-the-art (among unsupervised methods) mAP of 54.4 that is only 2.4 points lower from the supervised case. We get similarly striking results when we transfer our unsupervised learned features on various other tasks, such as ImageNet classification, PASCAL classification, PASCAL segmentation, and CIFAR-10 classification. The code and models of our paper will be published on: this https URL . We present an unsupervised learning framework for the task of monocular depth and camera motion estimation from unstructured video sequences. In common with recent work [10, 14, 16], we use an end-to-end learning approach with view synthesis as the supervisory signal. In contrast to the previous work, our method is completely unsupervised, requiring only monocular video sequences for training. Our method uses single-view depth and multiview pose networks, with a loss based on warping nearby views to the target using the computed depth and pose. The networks are thus coupled by the loss during training, but can be applied independently at test time. Empirical evaluation on the KITTI dataset demonstrates the effectiveness of our approach: 1) monocular depth performs comparably with supervised methods that use either ground-truth pose or depth for training, and 2) pose estimation performs favorably compared to established SLAM systems under comparable input settings. Over the last years, deep convolutional neural networks (ConvNets) have transformed the field of computer vision thanks to their unparalleled capacity to learn high level semantic image features. However, in order to successfully learn those features, they usually require massive amounts of manually labeled data, which is both expensive and impractical to scale. Therefore, unsupervised semantic feature learning, i.e., learning without requiring manual annotation effort, is of crucial importance in order to successfully harvest the vast amount of visual data that are available today. In our work we propose to learn image features by training ConvNets to recognize the 2d rotation that is applied to the image that it gets as input. We demonstrate both qualitatively and quantitatively that this apparently simple task actually provides a very powerful supervisory signal for semantic feature learning. We exhaustively evaluate our method in various unsupervised feature learning benchmarks and we exhibit in all of them state-of-the-art performance. Specifically, our results on those benchmarks demonstrate dramatic improvements w.r.t. prior state-of-the-art approaches in unsupervised representation learning and thus significantly close the gap with supervised feature learning. For instance, in PASCAL VOC 2007 detection task our unsupervised pre-trained AlexNet model achieves the state-of-the-art (among unsupervised methods) mAP of 54.4 that is only 2.4 points lower from the supervised case. We get similar striking results when we transfer our unsupervised learned features on various other tasks, such as ImageNet classification, PASCAL classification, PASCAL segmentation, and CIFAR-10 classification. While great strides have been made in using deep learning algorithms to solve supervised learning tasks, the problem of unsupervised learning - leveraging unlabeled examples to learn about the structure of a domain - remains a difficult unsolved challenge. Here, we explore prediction of future frames in a video sequence as an unsupervised learning rule for learning about the structure of the visual world. We describe a predictive neural network ("PredNet") architecture that is inspired by the concept of "predictive coding" from the neuroscience literature. These networks learn to predict future frames in a video sequence, with each layer in the network making local predictions and only forwarding deviations from those predictions to subsequent network layers. We show that these networks are able to robustly learn to predict the movement of synthetic (rendered) objects, and that in doing so, the networks learn internal representations that are useful for decoding latent object parameters (e.g. pose) that support object recognition with fewer training views. We also show that these networks can scale to complex natural image streams (car-mounted camera videos), capturing key aspects of both egocentric movement and the movement of objects in the visual scene, and the representation learned in this setting is useful for estimating the steering angle. These results suggest that prediction represents a powerful framework for unsupervised learning, allowing for implicit learning of object and scene structure. While great strides have been made in using deep learning algorithms to solve supervised learning tasks, the problem of unsupervised learning - leveraging unlabeled examples to learn about the structure of a domain - remains a difficult unsolved challenge. Here, we explore prediction of future frames in a video sequence as an unsupervised learning rule for learning about the structure of the visual world. We describe a predictive neural network ("PredNet") architecture that is inspired by the concept of "predictive coding" from the neuroscience literature. These networks learn to predict future frames in a video sequence, with each layer in the network making local predictions and only forwarding deviations from those predictions to subsequent network layers. We show that these networks are able to robustly learn to predict the movement of synthetic (rendered) objects, and that in doing so, the networks learn internal representations that are useful for decoding latent object parameters (e.g. pose) that support object recognition with fewer training views. We also show that these networks can scale to complex natural image streams (car-mounted camera videos), capturing key aspects of both egocentric movement and the movement of objects in the visual scene, and the representation learned in this setting is useful for estimating the steering angle. Altogether, these results suggest that prediction represents a powerful framework for unsupervised learning, allowing for implicit learning of object and scene structure. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have recently been very successful in a variety of computer vision tasks, especially on those linked to recognition. Optical flow estimation has not been among the tasks CNNs succeeded at. In this paper we construct CNNs which are capable of solving the optical flow estimation problem as a supervised learning task. We propose and compare two architectures: a generic architecture and another one including a layer that correlates feature vectors at different image locations. Since existing ground truth data sets are not sufficiently large to train a CNN, we generate a large synthetic Flying Chairs dataset. We show that networks trained on this unrealistic data still generalize very well to existing datasets such as Sintel and KITTI, achieving competitive accuracy at frame rates of 5 to 10 fps. Learning rich visual representations often require training on datasets of millions of manually annotated examples. This substantially limits the scalability of learning effective representations as labeled data is expensive or scarce. In this paper, we address the problem of unsupervised visual representation learning from a large, unlabeled collection of images. By representing each image as a node and each nearest-neighbor matching pair as an edge, our key idea is to leverage graph-based analysis to discover positive and negative image pairs (i.e., pairs belonging to the same and different visual categories). Specifically, we propose to use a cycle consistency criterion for mining positive pairs and geodesic distance in the graph for hard negative mining. We show that the mined positive and negative image pairs can provide accurate supervisory signals for learning effective representations using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed unsupervised constraint mining method in two settings: (1) unsupervised feature learning and (2) semi-supervised learning. For unsupervised feature learning, we obtain competitive performance with several state-of-the-art approaches on the PASCAL VOC 2007 dataset. For semi-supervised learning, we show boosted performance by incorporating the mined constraints on three image classification datasets. Using the variational approaches to estimate optical flow between two frames, the flow discontinuities between different motion fields are usually not distinguished even when an anisotropic diffusion operator is applied. In this paper, we propose a multi-cue driven adaptive bilateral filter to regularize the flow computation, which is able to achieve the smoothly varied optical flow field with highly desirable motion discontinuities. First, we separate the traditional one-step variational updating model into a two-step filtering-based updating model. Then, employing our occlusion detector, we reformulate the energy functional of optical flow estimation by explicitly introducing an occlusion term to balance the energy loss due to the occlusion or mismatches. Furthermore, based on the two-step updating framework, a novel multi-cue driven bilateral filter is proposed to substitute the original anisotropic diffusion process, and it is able to adaptively control the diffusion process according to the occlusion detection, image intensity dissimilarity, and motion dissimilarity. After applying our approach on various video sources (movie and TV) in the presence of occlusion, motion blurring, non-rigid deformation, and weak textureness, we generate a spatial-coherent flow field between each pair of input frames and detect more accurate flow discontinuities along the motion boundaries. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have recently been very successful in a variety of computer vision tasks, especially on those linked to recognition. Optical flow estimation has not been among the tasks where CNNs were successful. In this paper we construct appropriate CNNs which are capable of solving the optical flow estimation problem as a supervised learning task. We propose and compare two architectures: a generic architecture and another one including a layer that correlates feature vectors at different image locations. Since existing ground truth data sets are not sufficiently large to train a CNN, we generate a synthetic Flying Chairs dataset. We show that networks trained on this unrealistic data still generalize very well to existing datasets such as Sintel and KITTI, achieving competitive accuracy at frame rates of 5 to 10 fps. The quantitative evaluation of optical flow algorithms by (1994) led to significant advances in performance. The challenges for optical flow algorithms today go beyond the datasets and evaluation methods proposed in that paper. Instead, they center on problems associated with complex natural scenes, including nonrigid motion, real sensor noise, and motion discontinuities. We propose a new set of benchmarks and evaluation methods for the next generation of optical flow algorithms. To that end, we contribute four types of data to test different aspects of optical flow algorithms: (1) sequences with nonrigid motion where the ground-truth flow is determined by tracking hidden fluorescent texture, (2) realistic synthetic sequences, (3) high frame-rate video used to study interpolation error, and (4) modified stereo sequences of static scenes. In addition to the average angular error used by , we compute the absolute flow endpoint error, measures for frame interpolation error, improved statistics, and results at motion discontinuities and in textureless regions. In October 2007, we published the performance of several well-known methods on a preliminary version of our data to establish the current state of the art. We also made the data freely available on the web at http: vision.middlebury.edu flow . Subsequently a number of researchers have uploaded their results to our website and published papers using the data. A significant improvement in performance has already been achieved. In this paper we analyze the results obtained to date and draw a large number of conclusions from them. In this paper, we present supervision-by-registration, an unsupervised approach to improve the precision of facial landmark detectors on both images and video. Our key observation is that the detections of the same landmark in adjacent frames should be coherent with registration, i.e., optical flow. Interestingly, coherency of optical flow is a source of supervision that does not require manual labeling, and can be leveraged during detector training. For example, we can enforce in the training loss function that a detected landmark at framet-1 followed by optical flow tracking from framet-1 to framet should coincide with the location of the detection at framet. Essentially, supervision-by-registration augments the training loss function with a registration loss, thus training the detector to have output that is not only close to the annotations in labeled images, but also consistent with registration on large amounts of unlabeled videos. End-to-end training with the registration loss is made possible by a differentiable Lucas-Kanade operation, which computes optical flow registration in the forward pass, and back-propagates gradients that encourage temporal coherency in the detector. The output of our method is a more precise image-based facial landmark detector, which can be applied to single images or video. With supervision-by-registration, we demonstrate (1) improvements in facial landmark detection on both images (300W, ALFW) and video (300VW, Youtube-Celebrities), and (2) significant reduction of jittering in video detections. We describe a new spatio-temporal video autoencoder, based on a classic spatial image autoencoder and a novel nested temporal autoencoder. The temporal encoder is represented by a differentiable visual memory composed of convolutional long short-term memory (LSTM) cells that integrate changes over time. Here we target motion changes and use as temporal decoder a robust optical flow prediction module together with an image sampler serving as built-in feedback loop. The architecture is end-to-end differentiable. At each time step, the system receives as input a video frame, predicts the optical flow based on the current observation and the LSTM memory state as a dense transformation map, and applies it to the current frame to generate the next frame. By minimising the reconstruction error between the predicted next frame and the corresponding ground truth next frame, we train the whole system to extract features useful for motion estimation without any supervision effort. We present one direct application of the proposed framework in weakly-supervised semantic segmentation of videos through label propagation using optical flow. Video frame interpolation algorithms typically estimate optical flow or its variations and then use it to guide the synthesis of an intermediate frame between two consecutive original frames. To handle challenges like occlusion, bidirectional flow between the two input frames is often estimated and used to warp and blend the input frames. However, how to effectively blend the two warped frames still remains a challenging problem. This paper presents a context-aware synthesis approach that warps not only the input frames but also their pixel-wise contextual information and uses them to interpolate a high-quality intermediate frame. Specifically, we first use a pre-trained neural network to extract per-pixel contextual information for input frames. We then employ a state-of-the-art optical flow algorithm to estimate bidirectional flow between them and pre-warp both input frames and their context maps. Finally, unlike common approaches that blend the pre-warped frames, our method feeds them and their context maps to a video frame synthesis neural network to produce the interpolated frame in a context-aware fashion. Our neural network is fully convolutional and is trained end to end. Our experiments show that our method can handle challenging scenarios such as occlusion and large motion and outperforms representative state-of-the-art approaches.