Complementary optic flow

Abstract

We introduce the concept of complementarity between data and smoothness term in modern variational optic flow methods. First we design a sophisticated data term that incorporates HSV colour representation with higher order constancy assumptions, completely separate robust penalisation, and constraint normalisation. Our anisotropic smoothness term reduces smoothing in the data constraint direction instead of the image edge direction, while enforcing a strong filling-in effect orthogonal to it. This allows optimal complementarity between both terms and avoids undesirable interference. The high quality of our complementary optic flow (COF) approach is demonstrated by the current top ranking result at the Middlebury benchmark.