Evaluating the performance of optical flow algorithms has been difficult because of the lack of ground-truth data sets for complex scenes. We describe a simple modification to a ray tracer that allows us to generate ground-truth motion fields for scenes of arbitrary complexity. The resulting flow maps are used to assist in the comparison of eight optical flow algorithms using three complex, synthetic scenes. Our study found that a modified version of Lucas and Kanade's algorithm has superior performance but produces sparse flow maps. Proesmans et al.'s algorithm performs slightly worse, on average, but produces a very dense depth map.

Evaluating the performance of optical flow algorithms has been difficult because of the lack of ground truth data sets for complex scenes. We present a new method for generating motion fields from real sequences containing polyhedral objects and present a test suite for benchmarking optical flow algorithms consisting of complex synthetic sequences and real scenes with ground truth. We provide a preliminary quantitative evaluation of seven optical flow algorithms using these synthetic and real sequences. Ultimately, we feel that researchers should benchmark their own algorithms using a standard suite. To that end, we offer our Web site as a repository for standard sequences and results. c 2001 Elsevier Science (USA)

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