Ghost-removal image warping for optical flow estimation

¹ Institute of Intelligent Machines, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Hefei 230031, Anhui, China
² University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei 230026, Anhui, China

^* Corresponding author: zfwang@ustc.edu.cn

Abstract

Traditional image warping methods used in optical flow estimation usually adopt simple interpolation strategies to obtain the warped images. But without considering the characteristic of occluded regions, the traditional methods may result in undesirable ghosting artifacts. To tackle this problem, in this paper we propose a novel image warping method to effectively remove ghosting artifacts. To be Specific, when given a warped image, the ghost regions are firstly discriminated using the optical flow information. Then, we use a new image compensation technique to eliminate the ghosting artifacts. The proposed method can avoid serious distortion in the warped images, therefore can prevent error propagation in the coarse-to-fine optical flow estimation schemes. Meanwhile, our approach can be easily integrated into various optical flow estimation methods. Experimental results on some popular datasets such as Flying Chairs and MPI-Sintel demonstrate that the proposed method can improve the performance of current optical flow estimation methods.