Variational optical flow computation assisted by robust point matching

Lots of optical flow methods are based on coarse-to-fine strategy. However, most of coarse-to-fine optical flow techniques face two important problems: namely (1) large displacements of small structures are usually estimated in an incorrect manner and (2) large affine motions of non-rigid objects cannot be computed accurately. In this paper, we present an optical flow computation methodology that integrates robust point matching into a variational optical flow model to deal with the above-mentioned difficulties. Experimental results are demonstrated for a variety of image sequences to validate the effectiveness.