Confidence based optical flow algorithm for high reliability

Estimation of optical flow is an important topic to provide motion information for motion analysis. This paper addresses an effective confidence based optical flow algorithm. It considers the bidirectional symmetry of forward and backward flow to compute the confidence measure for each flow estimate. According to the confidence, the reliable flow estimates have greater contribution to local averages while unreliable estimates are suppressed. The errors cannot be propagated. Since the image-driven and flow-driven discontinuity preserving methods have complementary advantages and limitations, we propose a region based method combining these two types of methods to preserve motion boundaries. Experiments on typical sequences have successfully demonstrated the validity of the proposed algorithm.