Over four decades, the majority addresses the problem of optical flow estimation using variational methods. With the advance of machine learning, some recent works have attempted to address the problem using convolutional neural network (CNN) and have showed promising results. FlowNet2, the state-of-the-art CNN, requires over 160M parameters to achieve accurate flow estimation. Our LiteFlowNet2 outperforms FlowNet2 on Sintel and KITTI benchmarks, while being 25.3 times smaller in the footprint and 3.1 times faster in the running speed. LiteFlowNet2 which is built on the foundation laid by conventional methods has marked a milestone to achieve the corresponding roles as data fidelity and regularization in variational methods. We present an effective flow inference approach at each pyramid level through a novel lightweight cascaded network. It provides high flow estimation accuracy through early correction with seamless incorporation of descriptor matching. A novel flow regularization layer is used to ameliorate the issue of outliers and vague flow boundaries through a novel feature-driven local convolution. Our network also owns an effective structure for pyramidal feature extraction and embraces feature warping rather than image warping as practiced in FlowNet2. Comparing to our earlier work, LiteFlowNet2 improves the optical flow accuracy on Sintel clean pass by 24 , Sintel final pass by 8.9 , KITTI 2012 by 16.8 , and KITTI 2015 by 17.5 . Our network protocol and trained models will be made publicly available on this https URL .
@cite_21: Convolutional Neural Networks define an exceptionally powerful class of models, but are still limited by the lack of ability to be spatially invariant to the input data in a computationally and parameter efficient manner. In this work we introduce a new learnable module, the Spatial Transformer, which explicitly allows the spatial manipulation of data within the network. This differentiable module can be inserted into existing convolutional architectures, giving neural networks the ability to actively spatially transform feature maps, conditional on the feature map itself, without any extra training supervision or modification to the optimisation process. We show that the use of spatial transformers results in models which learn invariance to translation, scale, rotation and more generic warping, resulting in state-of-the-art performance on several benchmarks, and for a number of classes of transformations.
We are inspired by the feature transformation used in Spatial Transformer @cite_21 . Our network uses the proposed f-warp layer to displace each channel We can also use f-warp layer to displace each channel when multiple flow fields are supplied. The usage, however, is beyond the scope of this work. of the given vector-valued feature according to the provided flow field. Unlike Spatial Transformer, f-warp layer is not fully constrained and is a relaxed version of it as the flow field is not parameterized. While transformation in FlowNet2 and SPyNet is limited to images, LiteFlowNet is a more generic warping network that warps high-level CNN features.