Abstract

This paper proposes a simple method for estimatingdense and accurate optical flow field. It revitalizes an earlyidea of piecewise parametric flow model. A key innovation is that, we fit a flow field piecewise to a variety of para-metric models, where the domain of each piece (i.e., eachpiece’s shape, position and size) is determined adaptively,while at the same time maintaining a global inter-piece flowcontinuity constraint. We achieve this by a multi-model fitting scheme via energy minimization. Our energy takesinto account both the piecewise constant model assumptionand the flow field continuity constraint, enabling the pro-posed method to effectively handle both homogeneous mo-tions and complex motions. The experiments on three public optical flow benchmarks (KITTI, MPI Sintel, and Middlebury) show the superiority of our method compared with the state of the art: it achieves top-tier performances on all the three benchmarks.