Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have recently been very successful in a variety of computer vision tasks, especially on those linked to recognition. Optical flow estimation has not been among the tasks where CNNs were successful. In this paper we construct appropriate CNNs which are capable of solving the optical flow estimation problem as a supervised learning task. We propose and compare two architectures: a generic architecture and another one including a layer that correlates feature vectors at different image locations. Since existing ground truth data sets are not sufficiently large to train a CNN, we generate a synthetic Flying Chairs dataset. We show that networks trained on this unrealistic data still generalize very well to existing datasets such as Sintel and KITTI, achieving competitive accuracy at frame rates of 5 to 10 fps.
@cite_27: We present a model for the joint estimation of disparity and motion. The model is based on learning about the interrelations between images from multiple cameras, multiple frames in a video, or the combination of both. We show that learning depth and motion cues, as well as their combinations, from data is possible within a single type of architecture and a single type of learning algorithm, by using biologically inspired "complex cell" like units, which encode correlations between the pixels across image pairs. Our experimental results show that the learning of depth and motion makes it possible to achieve state-of-the-art performance in 3-D activity analysis, and to outperform existing hand-engineered 3-D motion features by a very large margin.
@cite_1: We address the problem of learning good features for understanding video data. We introduce a model that learns latent representations of image sequences from pairs of successive images. The convolutional architecture of our model allows it to scale to realistic image sizes whilst using a compact parametrization. In experiments on the NORB dataset, we show our model extracts latent "flow fields" which correspond to the transformation between the pair of input frames. We also use our model to extract low-level motion features in a multi-stage architecture for action recognition, demonstrating competitive performance on both the KTH and Hollywood2 datasets.
There has been work on unsupervised learning of disparity or motion between frames of videos using neural network models. These methods typically use multiplicative interactions to model relations between a pair of images. Disparities and optical flow can then be inferred from the latent variables. Taylor al @cite_1 approach the task with factored gated restricted Boltzmann machines. Konda and Memisevic @cite_27 use a special autoencoder called synchrony autoencoder'. While these approaches work well in a controlled setup and learn features useful for activity recognition in videos, they are not competitive with classical methods on realistic videos.