FlowFM: Advancing Dark Optical Flow Estimation with Flow Matching

Fengyuan Zuo, Haiyan Jin, Yuanlin Zhang, Zhaolin Xiao, Bin Wang, Yuerong Mu; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2026, pp. 6837-6846

Dark optical flow estimation (DOFE) faces critical challenges: discriminative models are less robust to noise and struggle with weakened motion patterns, while diffusion models suffer from discontinuous flow fields and low efficiency. Flow matching (FM), though efficient, remains underexplored for conditional generation in DOFE. In this paper, we propose FlowFM, the first flow matching model tailored to DOFE tasks. Instead of conventional vector field regression, FlowFM proposes estimating the global transformation path constrained by the ground truth optical flow. It generates noisy flow by mixing Gaussian noise with ground truth, then performs a one-step denoising process conditioned on the initial flow field, cost volume, and contextual features for optimal accuracy and efficiency. FlowFM incorporates an implicit Fourier denoising decoder (IFDD) for reliable motion understanding. By leveraging the Fourier transform, IFDD uses amplitude to characterize motion intensity and phase to encode target spatial relationships within flow fields, then directly enhances amplitude to restore dark-caused motion information loss. Experiments show that FlowFM significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods on the FCDN and VBOF benchmarks, setting a new performance record for DOFE.