Estimating Piecewise-Smooth Optical Flow with Global Matching and Graduated Optimization

This paper presents a new method for estimating piecewise-smooth optical flow. We propose a global optimization formulation with three-frame matching and local variation and develop an efficient technique to minimize the resultant global energy. This technique takes advantage of local gradient, global gradient and global matching methods and alleviates their limitations. Experiments on various synthetic and real data show that this method achieves highly competitive accuracy.