FlowNet 2.0: Evolution of Optical Flow Estimation with Deep Networks

The FlowNet demonstrated that optical flow estimation can be cast as a learning problem. However, the state of the art with regard to the quality of the flow has still been defined by traditional methods. Particularly on small displacements and real-world data, FlowNet cannot compete with variational methods. In this paper, we advance the concept of end-to-end learning of optical flow and make it work really well. The large improvements in quality and speed are caused by three major contributions: first, we focus on the training data and show that the schedule of presenting data during training is very important. Second, we develop a stacked architecture that includes warping of the second image with intermediate optical flow. Third, we elaborate on small displacements by introducing a sub-network specializing on small motions. FlowNet 2.0 is only marginally slower than the original FlowNet but decreases the estimation error by more than 50%. It performs on par with state-of-the-art methods, while running at interactive frame rates. Moreover, we present faster variants that allow optical flow computation at up to 140fps with accuracy matching the original FlowNet.

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Task Dataset Model Metric Name Metric Value Global Rank Result Benchmark
Dense Pixel Correspondence Estimation HPatches FlowNet2 Viewpoint I AEPE 5.99 # 5
Viewpoint II AEPE 15.55 # 5
Viewpoint III AEPE 17.09 # 5
Viewpoint IV AEPE 22.13 # 5
Viewpoint V AEPE 30.68 # 5
Skeleton Based Action Recognition JHMDB Pose Tracking FlowNet2 PCK@0.1 45.2 # 2
PCK@0.2 62.9 # 3
PCK@0.3 73.5 # 3
PCK@0.4 80.6 # 3
PCK@0.5 85.5 # 3
Optical Flow Estimation KITTI 2015 (train) FlowNet2 F1-all 30.0 # 15
EPE 10.08 # 13
Optical Flow Estimation Sintel-clean FlowNet2 Average End-Point Error 3.96 # 23
Optical Flow Estimation Spring FlowNet2 1px total 6.710 # 5

Methods