Abstract

We use a simple yet powerful higher-order conditional ran- dom field (CRF) to model optical flow. It consists of a standard photo- consistency cost and a prior on affine motions both modeled in terms of higher-order potential functions. Reasoning jointly over a large set of unknown variables provides more reliable motion estimates and a robust matching criterion. One of the main contributions is that unlike pre- vious region-based methods, we omit the assumption of constant flow. Instead, we consider local affine warps whose likelihood energy can be computed exactly without approximations. This results in a tractable, so-called, higher-order likelihood function. We realize this idea by em- ploying triangulation meshes which immensely reduce the complexity of the problem. Optimization is performed by hierarchical fusion moves and an adaptive mesh refinement strategy. Experiments show that we achieve high-quality motion fields on several data sets including the Middlebury optical flow database.