Structure- and motion-adaptive regularization for high accuracy optic flow

The accurate estimation of motion in image sequences is of central importance to numerous computer vision applications. Most competitive algorithms compute flow fields by minimizing an energy made of a data and a regularity term. To date, the best performing methods rely on rather simple purely geometric regularizers favoring smooth motion. In this paper, we revisit regularization and show that appropriate adaptive regularization substantially improves the accuracy of estimated motion fields. In particular, we systematically evaluate regularizers which adaptively favor rigid body motion (if supported by the image data) and motion field discontinuities that coincide with discontinuities of the image structure. The proposed algorithm relies on sequential convex optimization, is real-time capable and outperforms all previously published algorithms by more than one average rank on the Middlebury optic flow benchmark.