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Secrets of optical flow estimation and their principles

Sun, Deqing, Roth, Stefan, Black, Michael J.·2010·2010 IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

Abstract

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.

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Show all 5 references

Research works printed but not linked: 35

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Metadata

Authors
Sun, D., Roth, S., & Black, M. J.
Venue
2010 IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Publisher
IEEE
Published
2010-06
Pages
2432-2439
ISSN
1063-6919 (ISSN-L)
OpenAlex
W2033959528
Cited by
1,389
References
5
FWCI
73.95
Type
conference paper
Language
en
Open access
closed

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Secrets of optical flow estimation and their principles. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1109/cvpr.2010.5539939
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Sun, D., Roth, S., & Black, M. J. (2010). Secrets of optical flow estimation and their principles. 2010 IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition. https://doi.org/10.1109/cvpr.2010.5539939

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