Abstract: Existing state of the art optical flow approaches, which are evaluated on standard datasets such as Middlebury, not necessarily have a similar performance when evaluated on driving scenarios. This drop on performance is due to several challenges arising on real scenarios during driving. Towards this direction, in this paper, we propose a modification to the regularization term in a variational optical flow formulation, that notably improves the results, specially in driving scenarios. The proposed modification consists on using the Laplacian derivatives of flow components in the regularization term instead of gradients of flow components. We show the improvements in results on a standard real image sequences dataset (KITTI).

Abstract: Optical flow has got a major role in making advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) a reality. ADAS applications are expected to perform efficiently in all kinds of environments, those are highly probable, that one can drive the vehicle in different kinds of roads, times and seasons. In this work, we study the relationship of optical flow with different roads, that is by analyzing optical flow accuracy on different road textures. Texture measures such as TeX , TeX and TeX are evaluated for this purpose. Further, the relation of regularization weight to the flow accuracy in the presence of different textures is also analyzed. Additionally, we present a framework to generate synthetic sequences of different textures in ADAS scenarios with ground-truth optical flow.

Abstract: This paper presents a comparative evaluation of classical feature point descriptors when they are used in the long-wave infrared spectral band. Robustness to changes in rotation, scaling, blur, and additive noise are evaluated using a state of the art framework. Statistical results using an outdoor image data set are presented together with a discussion about the differences with respect to the results obtained when images from the visible spectrum are considered.

Abstract: Assessing Optical Flow (OF) quality is essential for its further use in reliable decision support systems. The absence of ground truth in such situations leads to the computation of OF Confidence Measures (CM) obtained from either input or output data. A fair comparison across the capabilities of the different CM for bounding OF error is required in order to choose the best OF-CM pair for discarding points where OF computation is not reliable. This paper presents a statistical probabilistic framework for assessing the quality of a given CM. Our quality measure is given in terms of the percentage of pixels whose OF error bound can not be determined by CM values. We also provide statistical tools for the computation of CM values that ensures a given accuracy of the flow field.

Abstract: Optical Flow (OF) techniques facing the complexity of real sequences have been developed in the last years. Even using the most appropriate technique for our specific problem, at some points the output flow might fail to achieve the minimum error required for the system. Confidence measures computed from either input data or OF output should discard those points where OF is not accurate enough for its further use. It follows that evaluating the capabilities of a confidence measure for bounding OF error is as important as the definition
itself. In this paper we analyze different confidence measures and point out their advantages and limitations for their use in real world settings. We also explore the agreement with current tools for their evaluation of confidence measures performance.