The estimation of the optical flow between two images is one of the key problems in low-level vision. According the optical flow evaluation site at http://vision.middlebury.edu/flow/, discontinuity preserving variational models based on Total Variation (TV) regularization and L 1 data terms are among the most accurate flow estimation techniques, but there is still room for improvements.

Fig. 1. Optical flow for the backyard and mini cooper scene of the Middlebury optical flow benchmark. Optical flow captures the dynamics of a scene by estimating the motion of every pixel between two frames of an image sequence. The displacement of every pixel is shown as displacement vectors on top of the commonly used flow color scheme (see Figure 5). Abstract.A look at the Middlebury optical flow benchmark [5] reveals that nowadays variational methods yield the most accurate optical flow fields between two image frames. In this work we propose an improvement variant of the original duality based TV-L 1 optical flow algorithm in [31] and provide implementation details. This formulation can preserve discontinuities in the flow field by employing total variation (TV) regularization. Furthermore, it offers robustness against outliers by applying the robust L 1 norm in the data fidelity term.Our contributions are as follows. First, we propose to perform a structure-texture decomposition of the input images to get rid of violations in the optical flow constraint due to illumination changes. Second, we propose to integrate a median filter into the numerical scheme to further increase the robustness to sampling artefacts in the image data. We experimentally show that very precise and robust estimation of optical flow can be achieved with a variational approach in realtime. The numerical scheme and the implementation are described in a detailed way, which enables reimplementation of this high-end method.

This paper presents a technique for estimating the threedimensional velocity vector field that describes the motion of each visible scene point (scene flow). The technique presented uses two consecutive image pairs from a stereo sequence. The main contribution is to decouple the position and velocity estimation steps, and to estimate dense velocities using a variational approach. We enforce the scene flow to yield consistent displacement vectors in the left and right images. The decoupling strategy has two main advantages: Firstly, we are independent in choosing a disparity estimation technique, which can yield either sparse or dense correspondences, and secondly, we can achieve frame rates of 5 fps on standard consumer hardware. The approach provides dense velocity estimates with accurate results at distances up to 50 meters.