Locally Affine Sparse-to-Dense Matching for Motion and Occlusion Estimation

Marius Leordeanu, Andrei Zanfir, Cristian Sminchisescu; Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2013, pp. 1721-1728

Estimating a dense correspondence field between successive video frames, under large displacement, is important in many visual learning and recognition tasks. We propose a novel sparse-to-dense matching method for motion field estimation and occlusion detection. As an alternative to the current coarse-to-fine approaches from the optical flow literature, we start from the higher level of sparse matching with rich appearance and geometric constraints collected over extended neighborhoods, using an occlusion aware, locally affine model. Then, we move towards the simpler, but denser classic flow field model, with an interpolation procedure that offers a natural transition between the sparse and the dense correspondence fields. We experimentally demonstrate that our appearance features and our complex geometric constraints permit the correct motion estimation even in difficult cases of large displacements and significant appearance changes. We also propose a novel classification method for occlusion detection that works in conjunction with the sparse-to-dense matching model. We validate our approach on the newly released Sintel dataset and obtain state-of-the-art results.