Learning Optical Flow via Dilated Networks and Occlusion Reasoning

Despite the significant progress that has been made on estimating optical flow recently, most estimation methods, including classical and deep learning approaches, still have difficulty with multi-scale estimation, real-time computation, and/or occlusion reasoning. In this paper, we introduce dilated convolution and occlusion reasoning into unsupervised optical flow estimation to address these issues. The dilated convolution allows our network to avoid upsampling via deconvolution and the resulting gridding artifacts. Dilated convolution also results in a smaller memory footprint which speeds up interference. The occlusion reasoning prevents our network from learning incorrect deformations due to occluded image regions during training. Our proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art unsupervised approaches on the KITTI benchmark. We also demonstrate its generalization capability by applying it to action recognition in video.