Large displacement optical flow computation withoutwarping

We propose an algorithm for large displacement optical flow estimation which does not require the commonly used coarse-to-fine warping strategy. It is based on a quadratic relaxation of the optical flow functional which decouples data term and regularizer in such a way that the non-linearized variational problem can be solved by an alternation of two globally optimal steps, one imposing optimal data consistency, the other imposing discontinuity-preserving regularity of the flow field. Experimental results confirm that the proposed algorithmic implementation outperforms the traditional warping strategy, in particular for the case of large displacements of small scale structures.