We introduce a self-supervised method for learning visual correspondence from unlabeled video. The main idea is to use cycle-consistency in time as free supervisory signal for learning visual representations from scratch. At training time, our model learns a feature map representation to be useful for performing cycle-consistent tracking. At test time, we use the acquired representation to find nearest neighbors across space and time. We demonstrate the generalizability of the representation -- without finetuning -- across a range of visual correspondence tasks, including video object segmentation, keypoint tracking, and optical flow. Our approach outperforms previous self-supervised methods and performs competitively with strongly supervised methods.
Correspondence at the pixel level -- mapping where each pixel goes in the next frame -- is the optical flow estimation problem. Since the energy minimization framework of Horn and Schunck @cite_3 and coarse-to-fine image warping by Lucas and Kanade @cite_10 , much progress has been made in optical flow estimation @cite_33 @cite_73 @cite_70 @cite_65 @cite_71 @cite_84 @cite_53 . However, these methods still struggle to scale to long-range correspondence in dynamic scenes with partial observability. These issues have driven researchers to study methods for estimating long-range optical flow @cite_72 @cite_32 @cite_83 @cite_64 @cite_92 @cite_81 . For example, Brox and Malik @cite_32 introduced a descriptor that matches region hierarchies and provides dense and subpixel-level estimation of flow. Our work can be viewed as enabling mid-level optical flow estimation.
@cite_64 @cite_33 @cite_70 @cite_92 @cite_53 @cite_65 @cite_32 @cite_3 @cite_84 @cite_72 @cite_83 @cite_81 @cite_71 @cite_73 @cite_10
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We propose a novel approach for optical flow estimation, targeted at large displacements with significant occlusions. It consists of two steps: i) dense matching by edge-preserving interpolation from a sparse set of matches; ii) variational energy minimization initialized with the dense matches. The sparse-to-dense interpolation relies on an appropriate choice of the distance, namely an edge-aware geodesic distance. This distance is tailored to handle occlusions and motion boundaries - two common and difficult issues for optical flow computation. We also propose an approximation scheme for the geodesic distance to allow fast computation without loss of performance. Subsequent to the dense interpolation step, standard one-level variational energy minimization is carried out on the dense matches to obtain the final flow estimation. The proposed approach, called Edge-Preserving Interpolation of Correspondences (EpicFlow) is fast and robust to large displacements. It significantly outperforms the state of the art on MPI-Sintel and performs on par on Kitti and Middlebury. We address the issue of recovering and segmenting the apparent velocity field in sequences of images. As for motion estimation, we minimize an objective function involving two robust terms. The first one cautiously captures the optical flow constraint, while the second (a priori) term incorporates a discontinuity-preserving smoothness constraint. To cope with the nonconvex minimization problem thus defined, we design an efficient deterministic multigrid procedure. It converges fast toward estimates of good quality, while revealing the large discontinuity structures of flow fields. We then propose an extension of the model by attaching to it a flexible object-based segmentation device based on deformable closed curves (different families of curve equipped with different kinds of prior can be easily supported). Experimental results on synthetic and natural sequences are presented, including an analysis of sensitivity to parameter tuning. The accuracy of optical flow estimation algorithms has been improving steadily as evidenced by results on the Middlebury optical flow benchmark. The typical formulation, however, has changed little since the work of Horn and Schunck. We attempt to uncover what has made recent advances possible through a thorough analysis of how the objective function, the optimization method, and modern implementation practices influence accuracy. We discover that “classical” flow formulations perform surprisingly well when combined with modern optimization and implementation techniques. Moreover, we find that while median filtering of intermediate flow fields during optimization is a key to recent performance gains, it leads to higher energy solutions. To understand the principles behind this phenomenon, we derive a new objective that formalizes the median filtering heuristic. This objective includes a nonlocal term that robustly integrates flow estimates over large spatial neighborhoods. By modifying this new term to include information about flow and image boundaries we develop a method that ranks at the top of the Middlebury benchmark. We introduce a novel matching algorithm, called DeepMatching, to compute dense correspondences between images. DeepMatching relies on a hierarchical, multi-layer, correlational architecture designed for matching images and was inspired by deep convolutional approaches. The proposed matching algorithm can handle non-rigid deformations and repetitive textures and efficiently determines dense correspondences in the presence of significant changes between images. We evaluate the performance of DeepMatching, in comparison with state-of-the-art matching algorithms, on the Mikolajczyk ( A comparison of affine region detectors, 2005), the MPI-Sintel ( A naturalistic open source movie for optical flow evaluation, 2012) and the Kitti ( Vision meets robotics: The KITTI dataset, 2013) datasets. DeepMatching outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithms and shows excellent results in particular for repetitive textures. We also apply DeepMatching to the computation of optical flow, called DeepFlow, by integrating it in the large displacement optical flow (LDOF) approach of Brox and Malik (Large displacement optical flow: descriptor matching in variational motion estimation, 2011). Additional robustness to large displacements and complex motion is obtained thanks to our matching approach. DeepFlow obtains competitive performance on public benchmarks for optical flow estimation. We present a compact but effective CNN model for optical flow, called PWC-Net. PWC-Net has been designed according to simple and well-established principles: pyramidal processing, warping, and the use of a cost volume. Cast in a learnable feature pyramid, PWC-Net uses the current optical flow estimate to warp the CNN features of the second image. It then uses the warped features and features of the first image to construct a cost volume, which is processed by a CNN to estimate the optical flow. PWC-Net is 17 times smaller in size and easier to train than the recent FlowNet2 model. Moreover, it outperforms all published optical flow methods on the MPI Sintel final pass and KITTI 2015 benchmarks, running at about 35 fps on Sintel resolution (1024 A— 436) images. Our models are available on our project website. 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 literature currently provides two ways to establish point correspondences between images with moving objects. On one side, there are energy minimization methods that yield very accurate, dense flow fields, but fail as displacements get too large. On the other side, there is descriptor matching that allows for large displacements, but correspondences are very sparse, have limited accuracy, and due to missing regularity constraints there are many outliers. In this paper we propose a method that can combine the advantages of both matching strategies. A region hierarchy is established for both images. Descriptor matching on these regions provides a sparse set of hypotheses for correspondences. These are integrated into a variational approach and guide the local optimization to large displacement solutions. The variational optimization selects among the hypotheses and provides dense and subpixel accurate estimates, making use of geometric constraints and all available image information. Optical flow cannot be computed locally, since only one independent measurement is available from the image sequence at a point, while the flow velocity has two components. A second constraint is needed. A method for finding the optical flow pattern is presented which assumes that the apparent velocity of the brightness pattern varies smoothly almost everywhere in the image. An iterative implementation is shown which successfully computes the optical flow for a number of synthetic image sequences. The algorithm is robust in that it can handle image sequences that are quantified rather coarsely in space and time. It is also insensitive to quantization of brightness levels and additive noise. Examples are included where the assumption of smoothness is violated at singular points or along lines in the image. We learn to compute optical flow by combining a classical spatial-pyramid formulation with deep learning. This estimates large motions in a coarse-to-fine approach by warping one image of a pair at each pyramid level by the current flow estimate and computing an update to the flow. Instead of the standard minimization of an objective function at each pyramid level, we train one deep network per level to compute the flow update. Unlike the recent FlowNet approach, the networks do not need to deal with large motions, these are dealt with by the pyramid. This has several advantages. First, our Spatial Pyramid Network (SPyNet) is much simpler and 96 smaller than FlowNet in terms of model parameters. This makes it more efficient and appropriate for embedded applications. Second, since the flow at each pyramid level is small ( This paper describes a new approach to motion estimation in video. We represent video motion using a set of particles. Each particle is an image point sample with a longduration trajectory and other properties. To optimize these particles, we measure point-based matching along the particle trajectories and distortion between the particles. The resulting motion representation is useful for a variety of applications and cannot be directly obtained using existing methods such as optical flow or feature tracking. We demonstrate the algorithm on challenging real-world videos that include complex scene geometry, multiple types of occlusion, regions with low texture, and non-rigid deformations. Although dense, long-rage, motion trajectories are a prominent representation of motion in videos, there is still no good solution for constructing dense motion tracks in a truly long-rage fashion. Ideally, we would want every scene feature that appears in multiple, not necessarily contiguous, parts of the sequence to be associated with the same motion track. Despite this reasonable and clearly stated objective, there has been surprisingly little work on general-purpose algorithms that can accomplish that task. State-of-the-art dense motion trackers process the sequence incrementally in a frame-by-frame manner, and associate, by design, features that disappear and reappear in the video, with different tracks, thereby losing important information of the long-term motion signal. In this paper, we propose a novel divide and conquer approach to long-range motion estimation. Given a long video or image sequence, we first produce high-accuracy local track estimates, or tracklets, and later propagate them into a global solution, while incorporating information from throughout the video. Tracklets are computed using state-of-the-art motion trackers [2, 3] that have become quite accurate for short sequences as demonstrated by standard evaluations. Our algorithm then constructs the long-range tracks by linking the short tracks in an optimal manner. This induces a combinatorial matching problem that we solve simultaneously for all tracklets in the sequence. The main contributions of this paper are: (a) a novel divide-andconquer style algorithm for constructing dense, long-rage motion tracks from a single monocular video, and (b) Novel criteria for evaluating longrange tracking results with and without ground-truth motion trajectory data. We evaluate our approach on a set of synthetic and natural videos, and explore the utilization of long-range tracks for action recognition. Video provides not only rich visual cues such as motion and appearance, but also much less explored long-range temporal interactions among objects. We aim to capture such interactions and to construct a powerful intermediate-level video representation for subsequent recognition. Motivated by this goal, we seek to obtain spatio-temporal oversegmentation of a video into regions that respect object boundaries and, at the same time, associate object pixels over many video frames. The contributions of this paper are two-fold. First, we develop an efficient spatiotemporal video segmentation algorithm, which naturally incorporates long-range motion cues from the past and future frames in the form of clusters of point tracks with coherent motion. Second, we devise a new track clustering cost function that includes occlusion reasoning, in the form of depth ordering constraints, as well as motion similarity along the tracks. We evaluate the proposed approach on a challenging set of video sequences of office scenes from feature length movies. The FlowNet demonstrated that optical flow estimation can be cast as a learning problem. However, the state of the art with regard to the quality of the flow has still been defined by traditional methods. Particularly on small displacements and real-world data, FlowNet cannot compete with variational methods. In this paper, we advance the concept of end-to-end learning of optical flow and make it work really well. The large improvements in quality and speed are caused by three major contributions: first, we focus on the training data and show that the schedule of presenting data during training is very important. Second, we develop a stacked architecture that includes warping of the second image with intermediate optical flow. Third, we elaborate on small displacements by introducing a subnetwork specializing on small motions. FlowNet 2.0 is only marginally slower than the original FlowNet but decreases the estimation error by more than 50 . It performs on par with state-of-the-art methods, while running at interactive frame rates. Moreover, we present faster variants that allow optical flow computation at up to 140fps with accuracy matching the original FlowNet. We study an energy functional for computing optical flow that combines three assumptions: a brightness constancy assumption, a gradient constancy assumption, and a discontinuity-preserving spatio-temporal smoothness constraint. In order to allow for large displacements, linearisations in the two data terms are strictly avoided. We present a consistent numerical scheme based on two nested fixed point iterations. By proving that this scheme implements a coarse-to-fine warping strategy, we give a theoretical foundation for warping which has been used on a mainly experimental basis so far. Our evaluation demonstrates that the novel method gives significantly smaller angular errors than previous techniques for optical flow estimation. We show that it is fairly insensitive to parameter variations, and we demonstrate its excellent robustness under noise. Image registration finds a variety of applications in computer vision. Unfortunately, traditional image registration techniques tend to be costly. We present a new image registration technique that makes use of the spatial intensity gradient of the images to find a good match using a type of Newton-Raphson iteration. Our technique is taster because it examines far fewer potential matches between the images than existing techniques Furthermore, this registration technique can be generalized to handle rotation, scaling and shearing. We show how our technique can be adapted tor use in a stereo vision system.