PDTE: Pyramidal deep Taylor expansion for optical flow estimation

Abstract

Optical flow estimation is an important hot research in computer vision. Although existing methods had got a considerable progress in improving their performance, they still have drawbacks, such as heavily computational burden, inaccurate pixel-level offset estimation, and poor interpretability. To address these issues, this letter proposes a pyramidal deep Taylor expansion (PDTE) framework, including: First, we seriously interpreted the relationship between optical flow computation and Taylor expansion. Then, the proposed PDTE is constructed by employing global motion aggregation (GMA) to calculate each derivative part which contributes to the final estimated optical flow. Quantitative and qualitative results on the Sintel and KITTI datasets validate that the proposed PDTE scheme is effective and outperforms the state-of-the-art optical flow estimation methods. The results of extensive experiments in the ablation study demonstrate that PDTE performs well on shape preservation and the accuracy improvement of optical flow estimation, even pixel-level offset calculation.