text: Current algorithmic approaches for piecewise affine motion estimation are based on alternating motion segmentation and estimation. We propose a new method to estimate piecewise affine motion fields directly without intermediate segmentation. To this end, we reformulate the problem by imposing piecewise constancy of the parameter field, and derive a specific proximal splitting optimization scheme. A key component of our framework is an efficient 1D piecewise-affine estimator for vector-valued signals. The first advantage of our approach over segmentation-based methods is its absence of initialization. The second advantage is its lower computational cost, which is independent of the complexity of the motion field. In addition to these features, we demonstrate competitive accuracy with other piecewise-parametric methods on standard evaluation benchmarks. Our new regularization scheme also outperforms the more standard use of total variation and total generalized variation.
  @cite_36: This paper proposes a simple method for estimating dense and accurate optical flow field. It revitalizes an early idea of piecewise parametric flow model. A key innovation is that, we fit a flow field piecewise to a variety of parametric models, where the domain of each piece (i.e., each piece's shape, position and size) is determined adaptively, while at the same time maintaining a global inter-piece flow continuity constraint. We achieve this by a multi-model fitting scheme via energy minimization. Our energy takes into account both the piecewise constant model assumption and the flow field continuity constraint, enabling the proposed method to effectively handle both homogeneous motions 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.
summary: Most of the computational effort is spent on the image-partitioning problem. The earliest works retain at most five regions to make the problem tractable . More recently, the layered approach handles a larger number of regions but requires several hours of computation, and the primal dual approach can take up to one hour despite a GPU implementation. The method proposed in @cite_36 achieves around fifteen minutes for @math image, with a graph cut minimization approach.