Robust Optical Flow in Rainy Scenes

Ruoteng Li, Robby T. Tan, Loong-Fah Cheong; Proceedings of the European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2018, pp. 288-304

Optical flow estimation in rainy scenes is challenging due to degradation caused by rain streaks and rain accumulation, where the latter refers to the poor visibility of remote scenes due to intense rainfall. To resolve the problem, we introduce a residue channel, a single channel (gray) image that is free from rain, and its colored version, a colored-residue image. We propose to utilize these two rain-free images in computing optical flow. To deal with the loss of contrast and the attendant sensitivity to noise, we decompose each of the input images into a piecewise-smooth structure layer and a high-frequency fine-detail texture layer. We combine the colored-residue images and structure layers in a unified objective function, so that the estimation of optical flow can be more robust. Results on both synthetic and real images show that our algorithm outperforms existing methods on different types of rain sequences. To our knowledge, this is the first optical flow method specifically dealing with rain. We also provide an optical flow dataset consisting of both synthetic and real rain images.