On Benchmarking Optical Flow

Evaluating the performance of optical flow algorithms has been difficult because of the lack of ground truth data sets for complex scenes. We present a new method for generating motion fields from real sequences containing polyhedral objects and present a test suite for benchmarking optical flow algorithms consisting of complex synthetic sequences and real scenes with ground truth. We provide a preliminary quantitative evaluation of seven optical flow algorithms using these synthetic and real sequences. Ultimately, we feel that researchers should benchmark their own algorithms using a standard suite. To that end, we offer our Web site as a repository for standard sequences and results. c © 2001 Elsevier Science (USA)