Conditional Prior Networks for Optical Flow

Yanchao Yang, Stefano Soatto; Proceedings of the European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2018, pp. 271-287

Classical computation of optical flow involves generic priors (regularizers) that capture rudimentary statistics of images, but not long-range correlations or semantics. On the other hand, fully supervised methods learn the regularity in the annotated data, without explicit regularization and with the risk of overfitting. We seek to learn richer priors on the set of possible flows that are statistically compatible with an image. Once the prior is learned in a supervised fashion, one can easily learn the full map to infer optical flow directly from two or more images, without any need for (additional) supervision. We introduce a novel architecture, called Conditional Prior Network (CPN), and show how to train it to yield a conditional prior. When used in conjunction with a simple optical flow architecture, the CPN beats all variational method and all unsupervised learning-based ones. It performs comparably to fully supervised ones, that however are fine-tuned to a particular dataset. Our method, on the other hand, performs well even when transferred between datasets.