Nonrigid Optical Flow Ground Truth for Real-World Scenes with Time-Varying Shading Effects
This provides a benchmark for researchers in computer vision to test optical flow algorithms on real-world scenes with complex deformations and photometric effects.
The authors tackled the lack of real-world ground truth for nonrigid optical flow by creating a dataset using Near-Infrared markers, enabling quantitative evaluation of RGB-based tracking methods, and they also developed a hybrid RGB-NIR optical flow model that outperformed existing methods in experiments.
In this paper we present a dense ground truth dataset of nonrigidly deforming real-world scenes. Our dataset contains both long and short video sequences, and enables the quantitatively evaluation for RGB based tracking and registration methods. To construct ground truth for the RGB sequences, we simultaneously capture Near-Infrared (NIR) image sequences where dense markers - visible only in NIR - represent ground truth positions. This allows for comparison with automatically tracked RGB positions and the formation of error metrics. Most previous datasets containing nonrigidly deforming sequences are based on synthetic data. Our capture protocol enables us to acquire real-world deforming objects with realistic photometric effects - such as blur and illumination change - as well as occlusion and complex deformations. A public evaluation website is constructed to allow for ranking of RGB image based optical flow and other dense tracking algorithms, with various statistical measures. Furthermore, we present an RGB-NIR multispectral optical flow model allowing for energy optimization by adoptively combining featured information from both the RGB and the complementary NIR channels. In our experiments we evaluate eight existing RGB based optical flow methods on our new dataset. We also evaluate our hybrid optical flow algorithm by comparing to two existing multispectral approaches, as well as varying our input channels across RGB, NIR and RGB-NIR.