Drift Robust Non-rigid Optical Flow Enhancement for Long Sequences

Abstract

It is hard to densely track a nonrigid object in long term, which is a fundamental research issue in the computer vision community. This task often relies on estimating pairwise correspondences between images over time where the error is accumulated and leads to a drift issue. In this paper, we introduce a novel optimization framework with an Anchor Patch constraint. It is supposed to significantly reduce overall errors given long sequences containing non-rigidly deformable objects. Our framework can be applied to any dense tracking algorithm, e.g. optical flow. We demonstrate the success of our approach by showing significant error reduction on 6 popular optical flow algorithms applied to a range of real-world nonrigid benchmarks. We also provide quantitative analysis of our approach given synthetic occlusions and image noise.

Preprint version of our paper accepted by Journal of Intelligent and Fuzzy Systems