A decoupled approach to illumination-robust optical flow estimation

Despite continuous improvements in optical flow in the last three decades, the ability for optical flow algorithms to handle illumination variation is still an unsolved challenge. To improve the ability to interpret apparent object motion in video containing illumination variation, an illumination-robust optical flow method has been designed. This method decouples brightness into reflectance and illumination components using a stochastic technique; reflectance is given higher weight to ensure robustness against illumination, which is suppressed. Illumination experiments using the Middlebury and University of Oulu databases demonstrate the decoupled method’s improvement when compared to state-of-the-art. In addition, a novel technique has been implemented to visualize optical flow output, which is especially useful to compare different optical flow methods in the absence of the ground truth.