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.