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Optical Flow Estimation

Title Date Abstract Comment CodeRepository
FlowIt: Global Matching for Optical Flow with Confidence-Guided Refinement 2026-03-30
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We present FlowIt, a novel architecture for optical flow estimation designed to robustly handle large pixel displacements. At its core, FlowIt leverages a hierarchical transformer architecture that captures extensive global context, enabling the model to effectively model long-range correspondences. To overcome the limitations of localized matching, we formulate the flow initialization as an optimal transport problem. This formulation yields a highly robust initial flow field, alongside explicitly derived occlusion and confidence maps. These cues are then seamlessly integrated into a guided refinement stage, where the network actively propagates reliable motion estimates from high-confidence regions into ambiguous, low-confidence areas. Extensive experiments across the Sintel, KITTI, Spring, and LayeredFlow datasets validate the efficacy of our approach. FlowIt achieves state-of-the-art results on the competitive Sintel and KITTI benchmarks, while simultaneously establishing new state-of-the-art cross-dataset zero-shot generalization performance on Sintel, Spring, and LayeredFlow.

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DA-Flow: Degradation-Aware Optical Flow Estimation with Diffusion Models 2026-03-24
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Optical flow models trained on high-quality data often degrade severely when confronted with real-world corruptions such as blur, noise, and compression artifacts. To overcome this limitation, we formulate Degradation-Aware Optical Flow, a new task targeting accurate dense correspondence estimation from real-world corrupted videos. Our key insight is that the intermediate representations of image restoration diffusion models are inherently corruption-aware but lack temporal awareness. To address this limitation, we lift the model to attend across adjacent frames via full spatio-temporal attention, and empirically demonstrate that the resulting features exhibit zero-shot correspondence capabilities. Based on this finding, we present DA-Flow, a hybrid architecture that fuses these diffusion features with convolutional features within an iterative refinement framework. DA-Flow substantially outperforms existing optical flow methods under severe degradation across multiple benchmarks.

Proje...

Project page: https://cvlab-kaist.github.io/DA-Flow

Code Link
GenOpticalFlow: A Generative Approach to Unsupervised Optical Flow Learning 2026-03-23
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Optical flow estimation is a fundamental problem in computer vision, yet the reliance on expensive ground-truth annotations limits the scalability of supervised approaches. Although unsupervised and semi-supervised methods alleviate this issue, they often suffer from unreliable supervision signals based on brightness constancy and smoothness assumptions, leading to inaccurate motion estimation in complex real-world scenarios. To overcome these limitations, we introduce \textbf{\modelname}, a novel framework that synthesizes large-scale, perfectly aligned frame--flow data pairs for supervised optical flow training without human annotations. Specifically, our method leverages a pre-trained depth estimation network to generate pseudo optical flows, which serve as conditioning inputs for a next-frame generation model trained to produce high-fidelity, pixel-aligned subsequent frames. This process enables the creation of abundant, high-quality synthetic data with precise motion correspondence. Furthermore, we propose an \textit{inconsistent pixel filtering} strategy that identifies and removes unreliable pixels in generated frames, effectively enhancing fine-tuning performance on real-world datasets. Extensive experiments on KITTI2012, KITTI2015, and Sintel demonstrate that \textbf{\modelname} achieves competitive or superior results compared to existing unsupervised and semi-supervised approaches, highlighting its potential as a scalable and annotation-free solution for optical flow learning. We will release our code upon acceptance.

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eStonefish-Scenes: A Sim-to-Real Validated and Robot-Centric Event-based Optical Flow Dataset for Underwater Vehicles 2026-02-20
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Event-based cameras (EBCs) are poised to transform underwater robotics, yet the absence of labelled event-based datasets for underwater environments severely limits progress in tasks such as visual odometry and obstacle avoidance. Real-world event-based optical flow datasets are scarce, resource-intensive to collect, and lack diversity, while no prior benchmarks target underwater applications. To bridge this gap, we introduce eStonefish-Scenes, a synthetic event-based optical flow dataset generated using the Stonefish simulator, together with an open data generation pipeline for creating customizable underwater environments featuring realistic coral reefs and biologically inspired schools of fish with reactive navigation behaviours. We also present eWiz, a comprehensive library for event-based data processing, encompassing data loading, augmentation, visualization, encoding, training utilities, loss functions, and evaluation metrics. To validate sim-to-real transferability, we collected real-world data using a DAVIS346 hybrid event-and-frame camera mounted on a BlueROV2 in an indoor testing pool. Ground-truth optical flow was derived via homography-based frame-to-poster registration, and per-pixel uncertainty was estimated through Monte Carlo perturbation of keypoint correspondences. This uncertainty was incorporated into the evaluation metrics, enabling reliability-aware performance assessment. A ConvGRU-based optical flow network, trained exclusively on synthetic eStonefish-Scenes data, was evaluated on the real-world sequences without fine-tuning, achieving an uncertainty-weighted average endpoint error of 0.79 pixels. These results demonstrate that the proposed synthetic dataset effectively supports sim-to-real transfer for underwater event-based optical flow estimation, substantially reducing the need for costly real-world data collection.

This ...

This revised version extends the original, which lacked real-world validation. We added a real-world data acquisition study using a DAVIS346 camera on a BlueROV2, a homography-based ground-truth optical flow method with per-pixel uncertainty estimation, and a sim-to-real evaluation using a ConvGRU network trained on synthetic data and tested on real underwater sequences. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2412.09209

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MambaVF: State Space Model for Efficient Video Fusion 2026-02-05
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Video fusion is a fundamental technique in various video processing tasks. However, existing video fusion methods heavily rely on optical flow estimation and feature warping, resulting in severe computational overhead and limited scalability. This paper presents MambaVF, an efficient video fusion framework based on state space models (SSMs) that performs temporal modeling without explicit motion estimation. First, by reformulating video fusion as a sequential state update process, MambaVF captures long-range temporal dependencies with linear complexity while significantly reducing computation and memory costs. Second, MambaVF proposes a lightweight SSM-based fusion module that replaces conventional flow-guided alignment via a spatio-temporal bidirectional scanning mechanism. This module enables efficient information aggregation across frames. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that our MambaVF achieves state-of-the-art performance in multi-exposure, multi-focus, infrared-visible, and medical video fusion tasks. We highlight that MambaVF enjoys high efficiency, reducing up to 92.25% of parameters and 88.79% of computational FLOPs and a 2.1x speedup compared to existing methods. Project page: https://mambavf.github.io

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CoWTracker: Tracking by Warping instead of Correlation 2026-02-04
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Dense point tracking is a fundamental problem in computer vision, with applications ranging from video analysis to robotic manipulation. State-of-the-art trackers typically rely on cost volumes to match features across frames, but this approach incurs quadratic complexity in spatial resolution, limiting scalability and efficiency. In this paper, we propose \method, a novel dense point tracker that eschews cost volumes in favor of warping. Inspired by recent advances in optical flow, our approach iteratively refines track estimates by warping features from the target frame to the query frame based on the current estimate. Combined with a transformer architecture that performs joint spatiotemporal reasoning across all tracks, our design establishes long-range correspondences without computing feature correlations. Our model is simple and achieves state-of-the-art performance on standard dense point tracking benchmarks, including TAP-Vid-DAVIS, TAP-Vid-Kinetics, and Robo-TAP. Remarkably, the model also excels at optical flow, sometimes outperforming specialized methods on the Sintel, KITTI, and Spring benchmarks. These results suggest that warping-based architectures can unify dense point tracking and optical flow estimation.

Proje...

Project website: cowtracker.github.io

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SRFlow: A Dataset and Regularization Model for High-Resolution Facial Optical Flow via Splatting Rasterization 2026-01-10
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Facial optical flow supports a wide range of tasks in facial motion analysis. However, the lack of high-resolution facial optical flow datasets has hindered progress in this area. In this paper, we introduce Splatting Rasterization Flow (SRFlow), a high-resolution facial optical flow dataset, and Splatting Rasterization Guided FlowNet (SRFlowNet), a facial optical flow model with tailored regularization losses. These losses constrain flow predictions using masks and gradients computed via difference or Sobel operator. This effectively suppresses high-frequency noise and large-scale errors in texture-less or repetitive-pattern regions, enabling SRFlowNet to be the first model explicitly capable of capturing high-resolution skin motion guided by Gaussian splatting rasterization. Experiments show that training with the SRFlow dataset improves facial optical flow estimation across various optical flow models, reducing end-point error (EPE) by up to 42% (from 0.5081 to 0.2953). Furthermore, when coupled with the SRFlow dataset, SRFlowNet achieves up to a 48% improvement in F1-score (from 0.4733 to 0.6947) on a composite of three micro-expression datasets. These results demonstrate the value of advancing both facial optical flow estimation and micro-expression recognition.

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A Study of Finetuning Video Transformers for Multi-view Geometry Tasks 2025-12-21
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This paper presents an investigation of vision transformer learning for multi-view geometry tasks, such as optical flow estimation, by fine-tuning video foundation models. Unlike previous methods that involve custom architectural designs and task-specific pretraining, our research finds that general-purpose models pretrained on videos can be readily transferred to multi-view problems with minimal adaptation. The core insight is that general-purpose attention between patches learns temporal and spatial information for geometric reasoning. We demonstrate that appending a linear decoder to the Transformer backbone produces satisfactory results, and iterative refinement can further elevate performance to stateof-the-art levels. This conceptually simple approach achieves top cross-dataset generalization results for optical flow estimation with end-point error (EPE) of 0.69, 1.78, and 3.15 on the Sintel clean, Sintel final, and KITTI datasets, respectively. Our method additionally establishes a new record on the online test benchmark with EPE values of 0.79, 1.88, and F1 value of 3.79. Applications to 3D depth estimation and stereo matching also show strong performance, illustrating the versatility of video-pretrained models in addressing geometric vision tasks.

AAAI ...

AAAI 20206, Project website: geovit-aaai26.github.io

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Error-Propagation-Free Learned Video Compression With Dual-Domain Progressive Temporal Alignment 2025-12-11
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Existing frameworks for learned video compression suffer from a dilemma between inaccurate temporal alignment and error propagation for motion estimation and compensation (ME/MC). The separate-transform framework employs distinct transforms for intra-frame and inter-frame compression to yield impressive rate-distortion (R-D) performance but causes evident error propagation, while the unified-transform framework eliminates error propagation via shared transforms but is inferior in ME/MC in shared latent domains. To address this limitation, in this paper, we propose a novel unifiedtransform framework with dual-domain progressive temporal alignment and quality-conditioned mixture-of-expert (QCMoE) to enable quality-consistent and error-propagation-free streaming for learned video compression. Specifically, we propose dualdomain progressive temporal alignment for ME/MC that leverages coarse pixel-domain alignment and refined latent-domain alignment to significantly enhance temporal context modeling in a coarse-to-fine fashion. The coarse pixel-domain alignment efficiently handles simple motion patterns with optical flow estimated from a single reference frame, while the refined latent-domain alignment develops a Flow-Guided Deformable Transformer (FGDT) over latents from multiple reference frames to achieve long-term motion refinement (LTMR) for complex motion patterns. Furthermore, we design a QCMoE module for continuous bit-rate adaptation that dynamically assigns different experts to adjust quantization steps per pixel based on target quality and content rather than relies on a single quantization step. QCMoE allows continuous and consistent rate control with appealing R-D performance. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves competitive R-D performance compared with the state-of-the-arts, while successfully eliminating error propagation.

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MELLM: A Flow-Guided Large Language Model for Micro-Expression Understanding 2025-12-09
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Micro-expressions (MEs), brief and low-intensity facial movements revealing concealed emotions, are crucial for affective computing. Despite notable progress in ME recognition, existing methods are largely confined to discrete emotion classification, lacking the capacity for comprehensive ME Understanding (MEU), particularly in interpreting subtle facial dynamics and underlying emotional cues. While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) offer potential for MEU with their advanced reasoning abilities, they still struggle to perceive such subtle facial affective behaviors. To bridge this gap, we propose a ME Large Language Model (MELLM) that integrates optical flow-based sensitivity to subtle facial motions with the powerful inference ability of LLMs. Specifically, an iterative, warping-based optical-flow estimator, named MEFlowNet, is introduced to precisely capture facial micro-movements. For its training and evaluation, we construct MEFlowDataset, a large-scale optical-flow dataset with 54,611 onset-apex image pairs spanning diverse identities and subtle facial motions. Subsequently, we design a Flow-Guided Micro-Expression Understanding paradigm. Under this framework, the optical flow signals extracted by MEFlowNet are leveraged to build MEU-Instruct, an instruction-tuning dataset for MEU. MELLM is then fine-tuned on MEU-Instruct, enabling it to translate subtle motion patterns into human-readable descriptions and generate corresponding emotional inferences. Experiments demonstrate that MEFlowNet significantly outperforms existing optical flow methods in facial and ME-flow estimation, while MELLM achieves state-of-the-art accuracy and generalization across multiple ME benchmarks. To the best of our knowledge, this work presents two key contributions: MEFlowNet as the first dedicated ME flow estimator, and MELLM as the first LLM tailored for MEU.

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Vertical Planetary Landing on Sloped Terrain Using Optical Flow Divergence Estimates 2025-12-04
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Autonomous landing on sloped terrain poses significant challenges for small, lightweight spacecraft, such as rotorcraft and landers. These vehicles have limited processing capability and payload capacity, which makes advanced deep learning methods and heavy sensors impractical. Flying insects, such as bees, achieve remarkable landings with minimal neural and sensory resources, relying heavily on optical flow. By regulating flow divergence, a measure of vertical velocity divided by height, they perform smooth landings in which velocity and height decay exponentially together. However, adapting this bio-inspired strategy for spacecraft landings on sloped terrain presents two key challenges: global flow-divergence estimates obscure terrain inclination, and the nonlinear nature of divergence-based control can lead to instability when using conventional controllers. This paper proposes a nonlinear control strategy that leverages two distinct local flow divergence estimates to regulate both thrust and attitude during vertical landings. The control law is formulated based on Incremental Nonlinear Dynamic Inversion to handle the nonlinear flow divergence. The thrust control ensures a smooth vertical descent by keeping a constant average of the local flow divergence estimates, while the attitude control aligns the vehicle with the inclined surface at touchdown by exploiting their difference. The approach is evaluated in numerical simulations using a simplified 2D spacecraft model across varying slopes and divergence setpoints. Results show that regulating the average divergence yields stable landings with exponential decay of velocity and height, and using the divergence difference enables effective alignment with inclined terrain. Overall, the method offers a robust, low-resource landing strategy that enhances the feasibility of autonomous planetary missions with small spacecraft.

This ...

This paper is accepted at International Astronautical Congress (IAC 2025)

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CircleFlow: Flow-Guided Camera Blur Estimation using a Circle Grid Target 2025-11-30
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The point spread function (PSF) serves as a fundamental descriptor linking the real-world scene to the captured signal, manifesting as camera blur. Accurate PSF estimation is crucial for both optical characterization and computational vision, yet remains challenging due to the inherent ambiguity and the ill-posed nature of intensity-based deconvolution. We introduce CircleFlow, a high-fidelity PSF estimation framework that employs flow-guided edge localization for precise blur characterization. CircleFlow begins with a structured capture that encodes locally anisotropic and spatially varying PSFs by imaging a circle grid target, while leveraging the target's binary luminance prior to decouple image and kernel estimation. The latent sharp image is then reconstructed through subpixel alignment of an initialized binary structure guided by optical flow, whereas the PSF is modeled as an energy-constrained implicit neural representation. Both components are jointly optimized within a demosaicing-aware differentiable framework, ensuring physically consistent and robust PSF estimation enabled by accurate edge localization. Extensive experiments on simulated and real-world data demonstrate that CircleFlow achieves state-of-the-art accuracy and reliability, validating its effectiveness for practical PSF calibration.

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Odometry Without Correspondence from Inertially Constrained Ruled Surfaces 2025-11-29
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Visual odometry techniques typically rely on feature extraction from a sequence of images and subsequent computation of optical flow. This point-to-point correspondence between two consecutive frames can be costly to compute and suffers from varying accuracy, which affects the odometry estimate's quality. Attempts have been made to bypass the difficulties originating from the correspondence problem by adopting line features and fusing other sensors (event camera, IMU) to improve performance, many of which still heavily rely on correspondence. If the camera observes a straight line as it moves, the image of the line sweeps a smooth surface in image-space time. It is a ruled surface and analyzing its shape gives information about odometry. Further, its estimation requires only differentially computed updates from point-to-line associations. Inspired by event cameras' propensity for edge detection, this research presents a novel algorithm to reconstruct 3D scenes and visual odometry from these ruled surfaces. By constraining the surfaces with the inertia measurements from an onboard IMU sensor, the dimensionality of the solution space is greatly reduced.

14 pa...

14 pages, 13 figures, 5 tables

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Conceptual Evaluation of Deep Visual Stereo Odometry for the MARWIN Radiation Monitoring Robot in Accelerator Tunnels 2025-11-25
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The MARWIN robot operates at the European XFEL to perform autonomous radiation monitoring in long, monotonous accelerator tunnels where conventional localization approaches struggle. Its current navigation concept combines lidar-based edge detection, wheel/lidar odometry with periodic QR-code referencing, and fuzzy control of wall distance, rotation, and longitudinal position. While robust in predefined sections, this design lacks flexibility for unknown geometries and obstacles. This paper explores deep visual stereo odometry (DVSO) with 3D-geometric constraints as a focused alternative. DVSO is purely vision-based, leveraging stereo disparity, optical flow, and self-supervised learning to jointly estimate depth and ego-motion without labeled data. For global consistency, DVSO can subsequently be fused with absolute references (e.g., landmarks) or other sensors. We provide a conceptual evaluation for accelerator tunnel environments, using the European XFEL as a case study. Expected benefits include reduced scale drift via stereo, low-cost sensing, and scalable data collection, while challenges remain in low-texture surfaces, lighting variability, computational load, and robustness under radiation. The paper defines a research agenda toward enabling MARWIN to navigate more autonomously in constrained, safety-critical infrastructures.

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Vision-Guided Optic Flow Navigation for Small Lunar Missions 2025-11-21
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Private lunar missions are faced with the challenge of robust autonomous navigation while operating under stringent constraints on mass, power, and computational resources. This work proposes a motion-field inversion framework that uses optical flow and rangefinder-based depth estimation as a lightweight CPU-based solution for egomotion estimation during lunar descent. We extend classical optical flow formulations by integrating them with depth modeling strategies tailored to the geometry for lunar/planetary approach, descent, and landing, specifically, planar and spherical terrain approximations parameterized by a laser rangefinder. Motion field inversion is performed through a least-squares framework, using sparse optical flow features extracted via the pyramidal Lucas-Kanade algorithm. We verify our approach using synthetically generated lunar images over the challenging terrain of the lunar south pole, using CPU budgets compatible with small lunar landers. The results demonstrate accurate velocity estimation from approach to landing, with sub-10% error for complex terrain and on the order of 1% for more typical terrain, as well as performances suitable for real-time applications. This framework shows promise for enabling robust, lightweight on-board navigation for small lunar missions.

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SpotFormer: Multi-Scale Spatio-Temporal Transformer for Facial Expression Spotting 2025-11-21
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Facial expression spotting, identifying periods where facial expressions occur in a video, is a significant yet challenging task in facial expression analysis. The issues of irrelevant facial movements and the challenge of detecting subtle motions in micro-expressions remain unresolved, hindering accurate expression spotting. In this paper, we propose an efficient framework for facial expression spotting. First, we propose a Sliding Window-based multi-temporal-resolution Optical flow (SW-MRO) feature, which calculates multi-temporal-resolution optical flow of the input image sequence within compact sliding windows. The window length is tailored to perceive complete micro-expressions and distinguish between general macro- and micro-expressions. SW-MRO can effectively reveal subtle motions while avoiding the optical flow being dominated by head movements. Second, we propose SpotFormer, a multi-scale spatio-temporal Transformer that simultaneously encodes spatio-temporal relationships of the SW-MRO features for accurate frame-level probability estimation. In SpotFormer, we use the proposed Facial Local Graph Pooling (FLGP) operation and convolutional layers to extract multi-scale spatio-temporal features. We show the validity of the architecture of SpotFormer by comparing it with several model variants. Third, we introduce supervised contrastive learning into SpotFormer to enhance the discriminability between different types of expressions. Extensive experiments on SAMM-LV, CAS(ME)^2, and CAS(ME)^3 show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art models, particularly in micro-expression spotting.

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Flow-Guided Implicit Neural Representation for Motion-Aware Dynamic MRI Reconstruction 2025-11-21
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Dynamic magnetic resonance imaging (dMRI) captures temporally-resolved anatomy but is often challenged by limited sampling and motion-induced artifacts. Conventional motion-compensated reconstructions typically rely on pre-estimated optical flow, which is inaccurate under undersampling and degrades reconstruction quality. In this work, we propose a novel implicit neural representation (INR) framework that jointly models both the dynamic image sequence and its underlying motion field. Specifically, one INR is employed to parameterize the spatiotemporal image content, while another INR represents the optical flow. The two are coupled via the optical flow equation, which serves as a physics-inspired regularization, in addition to a data consistency loss that enforces agreement with k-space measurements. This joint optimization enables simultaneous recovery of temporally coherent images and motion fields without requiring prior flow estimation. Experiments on dynamic cardiac MRI datasets demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art motion-compensated and deep learning approaches, achieving superior reconstruction quality, accurate motion estimation, and improved temporal fidelity. These results highlight the potential of implicit joint modeling with flow-regularized constraints for advancing dMRI reconstruction.

10 pages, 7 figures None
EOGS++: Earth Observation Gaussian Splatting with Internal Camera Refinement and Direct Panchromatic Rendering 2025-11-20
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Recently, 3D Gaussian Splatting has been introduced as a compelling alternative to NeRF for Earth observation, offering com- petitive reconstruction quality with significantly reduced training times. In this work, we extend the Earth Observation Gaussian Splatting (EOGS) framework to propose EOGS++, a novel method tailored for satellite imagery that directly operates on raw high-resolution panchromatic data without requiring external preprocessing. Furthermore, leveraging optical flow techniques we embed bundle adjustment directly within the training process, avoiding reliance on external optimization tools while improving camera pose estimation. We also introduce several improvements to the original implementation, including early stopping and TSDF post-processing, all contributing to sharper reconstructions and better geometric accuracy. Experiments on the IARPA 2016 and DFC2019 datasets demonstrate that EOGS++ achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of reconstruction quality and effi- ciency, outperforming the original EOGS method and other NeRF-based methods while maintaining the computational advantages of Gaussian Splatting. Our model demonstrates an improvement from 1.33 to 1.19 mean MAE errors on buildings compared to the original EOGS models

8 pages, ISPRS None
Investigating Optical Flow Computation: From Local Methods to a Multiresolution Horn-Schunck Implementation with Bilinear Interpolation 2025-11-20
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This paper presents an applied analysis of local and global methods, with a focus on the Horn-Schunck algorithm for optical flow computation. We explore the theoretical and practical aspects of local approaches, such as the Lucas-Kanade method, and global techniques such as Horn-Schunck. Additionally, we implement a multiresolution version of the Horn-Schunck algorithm, using bilinear interpolation and prolongation to improve accuracy and convergence. The study investigates the effectiveness of these combined strategies in estimating motion between frames, particularly under varying image conditions.

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FlowRoI A Fast Optical Flow Driven Region of Interest Extraction Framework for High-Throughput Image Compression in Immune Cell Migration Analysis 2025-11-18
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Autonomous migration is essential for the function of immune cells such as neutrophils and plays a pivotal role in diverse diseases. Recently, we introduced ComplexEye, a multi-lens array microscope comprising 16 independent aberration-corrected glass lenses arranged at the pitch of a 96-well plate, capable of capturing high-resolution movies of migrating cells. This architecture enables high-throughput live-cell video microscopy for migration analysis, supporting routine quantification of autonomous motility with strong potential for clinical translation. However, ComplexEye and similar high-throughput imaging platforms generate data at an exponential rate, imposing substantial burdens on storage and transmission. To address this challenge, we present FlowRoI, a fast optical-flow-based region of interest (RoI) extraction framework designed for high-throughput image compression in immune cell migration studies. FlowRoI estimates optical flow between consecutive frames and derives RoI masks that reliably cover nearly all migrating cells. The raw image and its corresponding RoI mask are then jointly encoded using JPEG2000 to enable RoI-aware compression. FlowRoI operates with high computational efficiency, achieving runtimes comparable to standard JPEG2000 and reaching an average throughput of about 30 frames per second on a modern laptop equipped with an Intel i7-1255U CPU. In terms of image quality, FlowRoI yields higher peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) in cellular regions and achieves 2.0-2.2x higher compression rates at matched PSNR compared to standard JPEG2000.

12 pa...

12 pages, 9 figures, 2 tables

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Inertia-Informed Orientation Priors for Event-Based Optical Flow Estimation 2025-11-17
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Event cameras, by virtue of their working principle, directly encode motion within a scene. Many learning-based and model-based methods exist that estimate event-based optical flow, however the temporally dense yet spatially sparse nature of events poses significant challenges. To address these issues, contrast maximization (CM) is a prominent model-based optimization methodology that estimates the motion trajectories of events within an event volume by optimally warping them. Since its introduction, the CM framework has undergone a series of refinements by the computer vision community. Nonetheless, it remains a highly non-convex optimization problem. In this paper, we introduce a novel biologically-inspired hybrid CM method for event-based optical flow estimation that couples visual and inertial motion cues. Concretely, we propose the use of orientation maps, derived from camera 3D velocities, as priors to guide the CM process. The orientation maps provide directional guidance and constrain the space of estimated motion trajectories. We show that this orientation-guided formulation leads to improved robustness and convergence in event-based optical flow estimation. The evaluation of our approach on the MVSEC, DSEC, and ECD datasets yields superior accuracy scores over the state of the art.

13 pa...

13 pages, 9 figures, and 3 tables

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DensePercept-NCSSD: Vision Mamba towards Real-time Dense Visual Perception with Non-Causal State Space Duality 2025-11-16
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In this work, we propose an accurate and real-time optical flow and disparity estimation model by fusing pairwise input images in the proposed non-causal selective state space for dense perception tasks. We propose a non-causal Mamba block-based model that is fast and efficient and aptly manages the constraints present in a real-time applications. Our proposed model reduces inference times while maintaining high accuracy and low GPU usage for optical flow and disparity map generation. The results and analysis, and validation in real-life scenario justify that our proposed model can be used for unified real-time and accurate 3D dense perception estimation tasks. The code, along with the models, can be found at https://github.com/vimstereo/DensePerceptNCSSD

Code Link
RadarMP: Motion Perception for 4D mmWave Radar in Autonomous Driving 2025-11-15
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Accurate 3D scene motion perception significantly enhances the safety and reliability of an autonomous driving system. Benefiting from its all-weather operational capability and unique perceptual properties, 4D mmWave radar has emerged as an essential component in advanced autonomous driving. However, sparse and noisy radar points often lead to imprecise motion perception, leaving autonomous vehicles with limited sensing capabilities when optical sensors degrade under adverse weather conditions. In this paper, we propose RadarMP, a novel method for precise 3D scene motion perception using low-level radar echo signals from two consecutive frames. Unlike existing methods that separate radar target detection and motion estimation, RadarMP jointly models both tasks in a unified architecture, enabling consistent radar point cloud generation and pointwise 3D scene flow prediction. Tailored to radar characteristics, we design specialized self-supervised loss functions guided by Doppler shifts and echo intensity, effectively supervising spatial and motion consistency without explicit annotations. Extensive experiments on the public dataset demonstrate that RadarMP achieves reliable motion perception across diverse weather and illumination conditions, outperforming radar-based decoupled motion perception pipelines and enhancing perception capabilities for full-scenario autonomous driving systems.

12 pa...

12 pages, 6 figures. Accepted by AAAI 2026

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STATIC : Surface Temporal Affine for TIme Consistency in Video Monocular Depth Estimation 2025-11-13
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Video monocular depth estimation is essential for applications such as autonomous driving, AR/VR, and robotics. Recent transformer-based single-image monocular depth estimation models perform well on single images but struggle with depth consistency across video frames. Traditional methods aim to improve temporal consistency using multi-frame temporal modules or prior information like optical flow and camera parameters. However, these approaches face issues such as high memory use, reduced performance with dynamic or irregular motion, and limited motion understanding. We propose STATIC, a novel model that independently learns temporal consistency in static and dynamic area without additional information. A difference mask from surface normals identifies static and dynamic area by measuring directional variance. For static area, the Masked Static (MS) module enhances temporal consistency by focusing on stable regions. For dynamic area, the Surface Normal Similarity (SNS) module aligns areas and enhances temporal consistency by measuring feature similarity between frames. A final refinement integrates the independently learned static and dynamic area, enabling STATIC to achieve temporal consistency across the entire sequence. Our method achieves state-of-the-art video depth estimation on the KITTI and NYUv2 datasets without additional information.

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Density Estimation and Crowd Counting 2025-11-12
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This study enhances a crowd density estimation algorithm originally designed for image-based analysis by adapting it for video-based scenarios. The proposed method integrates a denoising probabilistic model that utilizes diffusion processes to generate high-quality crowd density maps. To improve accuracy, narrow Gaussian kernels are employed, and multiple density map outputs are generated. A regression branch is incorporated into the model for precise feature extraction, while a consolidation mechanism combines these maps based on similarity scores to produce a robust final result. An event-driven sampling technique, utilizing the Farneback optical flow algorithm, is introduced to selectively capture frames showing significant crowd movements, reducing computational load and storage by focusing on critical crowd dynamics. Through qualitative and quantitative evaluations, including overlay plots and Mean Absolute Error (MAE), the model demonstrates its ability to effectively capture crowd dynamics in both dense and sparse settings. The efficiency of the sampling method is further assessed, showcasing its capability to decrease frame counts while maintaining essential crowd events. By addressing the temporal challenges unique to video analysis, this work offers a scalable and efficient framework for real-time crowd monitoring in applications such as public safety, disaster response, and event management.

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SMF-VO: Direct Ego-Motion Estimation via Sparse Motion Fields 2025-11-12
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Traditional Visual Odometry (VO) and Visual Inertial Odometry (VIO) methods rely on a 'pose-centric' paradigm, which computes absolute camera poses from the local map thus requires large-scale landmark maintenance and continuous map optimization. This approach is computationally expensive, limiting their real-time performance on resource-constrained devices. To overcome these limitations, we introduce Sparse Motion Field Visual Odometry (SMF-VO), a lightweight, 'motion-centric' framework. Our approach directly estimates instantaneous linear and angular velocity from sparse optical flow, bypassing the need for explicit pose estimation or expensive landmark tracking. We also employed a generalized 3D ray-based motion field formulation that works accurately with various camera models, including wide-field-of-view lenses. SMF-VO demonstrates superior efficiency and competitive accuracy on benchmark datasets, achieving over 100 FPS on a Raspberry Pi 5 using only a CPU. Our work establishes a scalable and efficient alternative to conventional methods, making it highly suitable for mobile robotics and wearable devices.

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Visual Bridge: Universal Visual Perception Representations Generating 2025-11-11
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Recent advances in diffusion models have achieved remarkable success in isolated computer vision tasks such as text-to-image generation, depth estimation, and optical flow. However, these models are often restricted by a ``single-task-single-model'' paradigm, severely limiting their generalizability and scalability in multi-task scenarios. Motivated by the cross-domain generalization ability of large language models, we propose a universal visual perception framework based on flow matching that can generate diverse visual representations across multiple tasks. Our approach formulates the process as a universal flow-matching problem from image patch tokens to task-specific representations rather than an independent generation or regression problem. By leveraging a strong self-supervised foundation model as the anchor and introducing a multi-scale, circular task embedding mechanism, our method learns a universal velocity field to bridge the gap between heterogeneous tasks, supporting efficient and flexible representation transfer. Extensive experiments on classification, detection, segmentation, depth estimation, and image-text retrieval demonstrate that our model achieves competitive performance in both zero-shot and fine-tuned settings, outperforming prior generalist and several specialist models. Ablation studies further validate the robustness, scalability, and generalization of our framework. Our work marks a significant step towards general-purpose visual perception, providing a solid foundation for future research in universal vision modeling.

Accepted by AAAI2026 None
FlowFeat: Pixel-Dense Embedding of Motion Profiles 2025-11-10
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Dense and versatile image representations underpin the success of virtually all computer vision applications. However, state-of-the-art networks, such as transformers, produce low-resolution feature grids, which are suboptimal for dense prediction tasks. To address this limitation, we present FlowFeat, a high-resolution and multi-task feature representation. The key ingredient behind FlowFeat is a novel distillation technique that embeds a distribution of plausible apparent motions, or motion profiles. By leveraging optical flow networks and diverse video data, we develop an effective self-supervised training framework that statistically approximates the apparent motion. With its remarkable level of spatial detail, FlowFeat encodes a compelling degree of geometric and semantic cues while exhibiting high temporal consistency. Empirically, FlowFeat significantly enhances the representational power of five state-of-the-art encoders and alternative upsampling strategies across three dense tasks: video object segmentation, monocular depth estimation and semantic segmentation. Training FlowFeat is computationally inexpensive and robust to inaccurate flow estimation, remaining highly effective even when using unsupervised flow networks. Our work takes a step forward towards reliable and versatile dense image representations.

Proje...

Project website: https://tum-vision.github.io/flowfeat

Code Link
MiVID: Multi-Strategic Self-Supervision for Video Frame Interpolation using Diffusion Model 2025-11-08
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Video Frame Interpolation (VFI) remains a cornerstone in video enhancement, enabling temporal upscaling for tasks like slow-motion rendering, frame rate conversion, and video restoration. While classical methods rely on optical flow and learning-based models assume access to dense ground-truth, both struggle with occlusions, domain shifts, and ambiguous motion. This article introduces MiVID, a lightweight, self-supervised, diffusion-based framework for video interpolation. Our model eliminates the need for explicit motion estimation by combining a 3D U-Net backbone with transformer-style temporal attention, trained under a hybrid masking regime that simulates occlusions and motion uncertainty. The use of cosine-based progressive masking and adaptive loss scheduling allows our network to learn robust spatiotemporal representations without any high-frame-rate supervision. Our framework is evaluated on UCF101-7 and DAVIS-7 datasets. MiVID is trained entirely on CPU using the datasets and 9-frame video segments, making it a low-resource yet highly effective pipeline. Despite these constraints, our model achieves optimal results at just 50 epochs, competitive with several supervised baselines.This work demonstrates the power of self-supervised diffusion priors for temporally coherent frame synthesis and provides a scalable path toward accessible and generalizable VFI systems.

None
Rethinking Video Super-Resolution: Towards Diffusion-Based Methods without Motion Alignment 2025-11-04
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In this work, we rethink the approach to video super-resolution by introducing a method based on the Diffusion Posterior Sampling framework, combined with an unconditional video diffusion transformer operating in latent space. The video generation model, a diffusion transformer, functions as a space-time model. We argue that a powerful model, which learns the physics of the real world, can easily handle various kinds of motion patterns as prior knowledge, thus eliminating the need for explicit estimation of optical flows or motion parameters for pixel alignment. Furthermore, a single instance of the proposed video diffusion transformer model can adapt to different sampling conditions without re-training. Empirical results on synthetic and real-world datasets illustrate the feasibility of diffusion-based, alignment-free video super-resolution.

ICSPS 2025 None
Estimation of Segmental Longitudinal Strain in Transesophageal Echocardiography by Deep Learning 2025-11-04
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Segmental longitudinal strain (SLS) of the left ventricle (LV) is an important prognostic indicator for evaluating regional LV dysfunction, in particular for diagnosing and managing myocardial ischemia. Current techniques for strain estimation require significant manual intervention and expertise, limiting their efficiency and making them too resource-intensive for monitoring purposes. This study introduces the first automated pipeline, autoStrain, for SLS estimation in transesophageal echocardiography (TEE) using deep learning (DL) methods for motion estimation. We present a comparative analysis of two DL approaches: TeeFlow, based on the RAFT optical flow model for dense frame-to-frame predictions, and TeeTracker, based on the CoTracker point trajectory model for sparse long-sequence predictions. As ground truth motion data from real echocardiographic sequences are hardly accessible, we took advantage of a unique simulation pipeline (SIMUS) to generate a highly realistic synthetic TEE (synTEE) dataset of 80 patients with ground truth myocardial motion to train and evaluate both models. Our evaluation shows that TeeTracker outperforms TeeFlow in accuracy, achieving a mean distance error in motion estimation of 0.65 mm on a synTEE test dataset. Clinical validation on 16 patients further demonstrated that SLS estimation with our autoStrain pipeline aligned with clinical references, achieving a mean difference (95% limits of agreement) of 1.09% (-8.90% to 11.09%). Incorporation of simulated ischemia in the synTEE data improved the accuracy of the models in quantifying abnormal deformation. Our findings indicate that integrating AI-driven motion estimation with TEE can significantly enhance the precision and efficiency of cardiac function assessment in clinical settings.

13 pa...

13 pages, IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics

None
Discriminately Treating Motion Components Evolves Joint Depth and Ego-Motion Learning 2025-11-03
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Unsupervised learning of depth and ego-motion, two fundamental 3D perception tasks, has made significant strides in recent years. However, most methods treat ego-motion as an auxiliary task, either mixing all motion types or excluding depth-independent rotational motions in supervision. Such designs limit the incorporation of strong geometric constraints, reducing reliability and robustness under diverse conditions. This study introduces a discriminative treatment of motion components, leveraging the geometric regularities of their respective rigid flows to benefit both depth and ego-motion estimation. Given consecutive video frames, network outputs first align the optical axes and imaging planes of the source and target cameras. Optical flows between frames are transformed through these alignments, and deviations are quantified to impose geometric constraints individually on each ego-motion component, enabling more targeted refinement. These alignments further reformulate the joint learning process into coaxial and coplanar forms, where depth and each translation component can be mutually derived through closed-form geometric relationships, introducing complementary constraints that improve depth robustness. DiMoDE, a general depth and ego-motion joint learning framework incorporating these designs, achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple public datasets and a newly collected diverse real-world dataset, particularly under challenging conditions. Our source code will be publicly available at mias.group/DiMoDE upon publication.

18 pages, 14 figures None
CaRLi-V: Camera-RADAR-LiDAR Point-Wise 3D Velocity Estimation 2025-11-03
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Accurate point-wise velocity estimation in 3D is crucial for robot interaction with non-rigid, dynamic agents, such as humans, enabling robust performance in path planning, collision avoidance, and object manipulation in dynamic environments. To this end, this paper proposes a novel RADAR, LiDAR, and camera fusion pipeline for point-wise 3D velocity estimation named CaRLi-V. This pipeline leverages raw RADAR measurements to create a novel RADAR representation, the velocity cube, which densely represents radial velocities within the RADAR's field-of-view. By combining the velocity cube for radial velocity extraction, optical flow for tangential velocity estimation, and LiDAR for point-wise range measurements through a closed-form solution, our approach can produce 3D velocity estimates for a dense array of points. Developed as an open-source ROS2 package, CaRLi-V has been field-tested against a custom dataset and proven to produce low velocity error metrics relative to ground truth, enabling point-wise velocity estimation for robotic applications.

None
GDROS: A Geometry-Guided Dense Registration Framework for Optical-SAR Images under Large Geometric Transformations 2025-11-01
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Registration of optical and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) remote sensing images serves as a critical foundation for image fusion and visual navigation tasks. This task is particularly challenging because of their modal discrepancy, primarily manifested as severe nonlinear radiometric differences (NRD), geometric distortions, and noise variations. Under large geometric transformations, existing classical template-based and sparse keypoint-based strategies struggle to achieve reliable registration results for optical-SAR image pairs. To address these limitations, we propose GDROS, a geometry-guided dense registration framework leveraging global cross-modal image interactions. First, we extract cross-modal deep features from optical and SAR images through a CNN-Transformer hybrid feature extraction module, upon which a multi-scale 4D correlation volume is constructed and iteratively refined to establish pixel-wise dense correspondences. Subsequently, we implement a least squares regression (LSR) module to geometrically constrain the predicted dense optical flow field. Such geometry guidance mitigates prediction divergence by directly imposing an estimated affine transformation on the final flow predictions. Extensive experiments have been conducted on three representative datasets WHU-Opt-SAR dataset, OS dataset, and UBCv2 dataset with different spatial resolutions, demonstrating robust performance of our proposed method across different imaging resolutions. Qualitative and quantitative results show that GDROS significantly outperforms current state-of-the-art methods in all metrics. Our source code will be released at: https://github.com/Zi-Xuan-Sun/GDROS.

To be...

To be published in IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing (T-GRS) 2025

Code Link
Towards Reliable Sea Ice Drift Estimation in the Arctic Deep Learning Optical Flow on RADARSAT-2 2025-10-31
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Accurate estimation of sea ice drift is critical for Arctic navigation, climate research, and operational forecasting. While optical flow, a computer vision technique for estimating pixel wise motion between consecutive images, has advanced rapidly in computer vision, its applicability to geophysical problems and to satellite SAR imagery remains underexplored. Classical optical flow methods rely on mathematical models and strong assumptions about motion, which limit their accuracy in complex scenarios. Recent deep learning based approaches have substantially improved performance and are now the standard in computer vision, motivating their application to sea ice drift estimation. We present the first large scale benchmark of 48 deep learning optical flow models on RADARSAT 2 ScanSAR sea ice imagery, evaluated with endpoint error (EPE) and Fl all metrics against GNSS tracked buoys. Several models achieve sub kilometer accuracy (EPE 6 to 8 pixels, 300 to 400 m), a small error relative to the spatial scales of sea ice motion and typical navigation requirements in the Arctic. Our results demonstrate that the models are capable of capturing consistent regional drift patterns and that recent deep learning based optical flow methods, which have substantially improved motion estimation accuracy compared to classical methods, can be effectively transferred to polar remote sensing. Optical flow produces spatially continuous drift fields, providing motion estimates for every image pixel rather than at sparse buoy locations, offering new opportunities for navigation and climate modeling.

None
MoTDiff: High-resolution Motion Trajectory estimation from a single blurred image using Diffusion models 2025-10-30
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Accurate estimation of motion information is crucial in diverse computational imaging and computer vision applications. Researchers have investigated various methods to extract motion information from a single blurred image, including blur kernels and optical flow. However, existing motion representations are often of low quality, i.e., coarse-grained and inaccurate. In this paper, we propose the first high-resolution (HR) Motion Trajectory estimation framework using Diffusion models (MoTDiff). Different from existing motion representations, we aim to estimate an HR motion trajectory with high-quality from a single motion-blurred image. The proposed MoTDiff consists of two key components: 1) a new conditional diffusion framework that uses multi-scale feature maps extracted from a single blurred image as a condition, and 2) a new training method that can promote precise identification of a fine-grained motion trajectory, consistent estimation of overall shape and position of a motion path, and pixel connectivity along a motion trajectory. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed MoTDiff can outperform state-of-the-art methods in both blind image deblurring and coded exposure photography applications.

10 pages, 6 figures None
JOGS: Joint Optimization of Pose Estimation and 3D Gaussian Splatting 2025-10-30
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Traditional novel view synthesis methods heavily rely on external camera pose estimation tools such as COLMAP, which often introduce computational bottlenecks and propagate errors. To address these challenges, we propose a unified framework that jointly optimizes 3D Gaussian points and camera poses without requiring pre-calibrated inputs. Our approach iteratively refines 3D Gaussian parameters and updates camera poses through a novel co-optimization strategy, ensuring simultaneous improvements in scene reconstruction fidelity and pose accuracy. The key innovation lies in decoupling the joint optimization into two interleaved phases: first, updating 3D Gaussian parameters via differentiable rendering with fixed poses, and second, refining camera poses using a customized 3D optical flow algorithm that incorporates geometric and photometric constraints. This formulation progressively reduces projection errors, particularly in challenging scenarios with large viewpoint variations and sparse feature distributions, where traditional methods struggle. Extensive evaluations on multiple datasets demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms existing COLMAP-free techniques in reconstruction quality, and also surpasses the standard COLMAP-based baseline in general.

None
3D Dynamic Fluid Assets from Single-View Videos with Generative Gaussian Splatting 2025-10-30
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While the generation of 3D content from single-view images has been extensively studied, the creation of physically consistent 3D dynamic scenes from videos remains in its early stages. We propose a novel framework leveraging generative 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) models to extract and re-simulate 3D dynamic fluid objects from single-view videos using simulation methods. The fluid geometry represented by 3DGS is initially generated and optimized from single-view images, then denoised, densified, and aligned across frames. We estimate the fluid surface velocity using optical flow, propose a mainstream extraction algorithm to refine it. The 3D volumetric velocity field is then derived from the velocity of the fluid's enclosed surface. The velocity field is therewith converted into a divergence-free, grid-based representation, enabling the optimization of simulation parameters through its differentiability across frames. This process outputs simulation-ready fluid assets with physical dynamics closely matching those observed in the source video. Our approach is applicable to various liquid fluids, including inviscid and viscous types, and allows users to edit the output geometry or extend movement durations seamlessly. This automatic method for creating 3D dynamic fluid assets from single-view videos, easily obtainable from the internet, shows great potential for generating large-scale 3D fluid assets at a low cost.

None
OnlyFlow: Optical Flow based Motion Conditioning for Video Diffusion Models 2025-10-29
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We consider the problem of text-to-video generation tasks with precise control for various applications such as camera movement control and video-to-video editing. Most methods tacking this problem rely on providing user-defined controls, such as binary masks or camera movement embeddings. In our approach we propose OnlyFlow, an approach leveraging the optical flow firstly extracted from an input video to condition the motion of generated videos. Using a text prompt and an input video, OnlyFlow allows the user to generate videos that respect the motion of the input video as well as the text prompt. This is implemented through an optical flow estimation model applied on the input video, which is then fed to a trainable optical flow encoder. The output feature maps are then injected into the text-to-video backbone model. We perform quantitative, qualitative and user preference studies to show that OnlyFlow positively compares to state-of-the-art methods on a wide range of tasks, even though OnlyFlow was not specifically trained for such tasks. OnlyFlow thus constitutes a versatile, lightweight yet efficient method for controlling motion in text-to-video generation. Models and code will be made available on GitHub and HuggingFace.

8 pag...

8 pages, 1 supplementary page, 9 figures

None
Yesnt: Are Diffusion Relighting Models Ready for Capture Stage Compositing? A Hybrid Alternative to Bridge the Gap 2025-10-27
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Volumetric video relighting is essential for bringing captured performances into virtual worlds, but current approaches struggle to deliver temporally stable, production-ready results. Diffusion-based intrinsic decomposition methods show promise for single frames, yet suffer from stochastic noise and instability when extended to sequences, while video diffusion models remain constrained by memory and scale. We propose a hybrid relighting framework that combines diffusion-derived material priors with temporal regularization and physically motivated rendering. Our method aggregates multiple stochastic estimates of per-frame material properties into temporally consistent shading components, using optical-flow-guided regularization. For indirect effects such as shadows and reflections, we extract a mesh proxy from Gaussian Opacity Fields and render it within a standard graphics pipeline. Experiments on real and synthetic captures show that this hybrid strategy achieves substantially more stable relighting across sequences than diffusion-only baselines, while scaling beyond the clip lengths feasible for video diffusion. These results indicate that hybrid approaches, which balance learned priors with physically grounded constraints, are a practical step toward production-ready volumetric video relighting.

None
MELLM: Exploring LLM-Powered Micro-Expression Understanding Enhanced by Subtle Motion Perception 2025-10-23
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Micro-expressions (MEs), brief and low-intensity facial movements revealing concealed emotions, are crucial for affective computing. Despite notable progress in ME recognition, existing methods are largely confined to discrete emotion classification, lacking the capacity for comprehensive ME Understanding (MEU), particularly in interpreting subtle facial dynamics and underlying emotional cues. While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) offer potential for MEU with their advanced reasoning abilities, they still struggle to perceive such subtle facial affective behaviors. To bridge this gap, we propose a ME Large Language Model (MELLM) that integrates optical flow-based sensitivity to subtle facial motions with the powerful inference ability of LLMs. Specifically, an iterative, warping-based optical-flow estimator, named MEFlowNet, is introduced to precisely capture facial micro-movements. For its training and evaluation, we construct MEFlowDataset, a large-scale optical-flow dataset with 54,611 onset-apex image pairs spanning diverse identities and subtle facial motions. Subsequently, we design a Flow-Guided Micro-Expression Understanding paradigm. Under this framework, the optical flow signals extracted by MEFlowNet are leveraged to build MEU-Instruct, an instruction-tuning dataset for MEU. MELLM is then fine-tuned on MEU-Instruct, enabling it to translate subtle motion patterns into human-readable descriptions and generate corresponding emotional inferences. Experiments demonstrate that MEFlowNet significantly outperforms existing optical flow methods in facial and ME-flow estimation, while MELLM achieves state-of-the-art accuracy and generalization across multiple ME benchmarks. To the best of our knowledge, this work presents two key contributions: MEFlowNet as the first dedicated ME flow estimator, and MELLM as the first LLM tailored for MEU.

None
DIPLI: Deep Image Prior Lucky Imaging for Blind Astronomical Image Restoration 2025-10-22
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Modern image restoration and super-resolution methods utilize deep learning due to its superior performance compared to traditional algorithms. However, deep learning typically requires large training datasets, which are rarely available in astrophotography. Deep Image Prior (DIP) bypasses this constraint by performing blind training on a single image. Although effective in some cases, DIP often suffers from overfitting, artifact generation, and instability. To overcome these issues and improve general performance, this work proposes DIPLI - a framework that shifts from single-frame to multi-frame training using the Back Projection technique, combined with optical flow estimation via the TVNet model, and replaces deterministic predictions with unbiased Monte Carlo estimation obtained through Langevin dynamics. A comprehensive evaluation compares the method against Lucky Imaging, a classical computer vision technique still widely used in astronomical image reconstruction, DIP, the transformer-based model RVRT, and the diffusion-based model DiffIR2VR-Zero. Experiments on synthetic datasets demonstrate consistent improvements, with the method outperforming baselines for SSIM, PSNR, LPIPS, and DISTS metrics in the majority of cases. In addition to superior reconstruction quality, the model also requires far fewer input images than Lucky Imaging and is less prone to overfitting or artifact generation. Evaluation on real-world astronomical data, where domain shifts typically hinder generalization, shows that the method maintains high reconstruction quality, confirming practical robustness.

10 pa...

10 pages, 7 figures, 2 tables

None
Moving Object Detection from Moving Camera Using Focus of Expansion Likelihood and Segmentation 2025-10-20
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Separating moving and static objects from a moving camera viewpoint is essential for 3D reconstruction, autonomous navigation, and scene understanding in robotics. Existing approaches often rely primarily on optical flow, which struggles to detect moving objects in complex, structured scenes involving camera motion. To address this limitation, we propose Focus of Expansion Likelihood and Segmentation (FoELS), a method based on the core idea of integrating both optical flow and texture information. FoELS computes the focus of expansion (FoE) from optical flow and derives an initial motion likelihood from the outliers of the FoE computation. This likelihood is then fused with a segmentation-based prior to estimate the final moving probability. The method effectively handles challenges including complex structured scenes, rotational camera motion, and parallel motion. Comprehensive evaluations on the DAVIS 2016 dataset and real-world traffic videos demonstrate its effectiveness and state-of-the-art performance.

8 pag...

8 pages, 15 figures, RA-L submission

None
AV1 Motion Vector Fidelity and Application for Efficient Optical Flow 2025-10-20
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This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of motion vectors extracted from AV1-encoded video streams and their application in accelerating optical flow estimation. We demonstrate that motion vectors from AV1 video codec can serve as a high-quality and computationally efficient substitute for traditional optical flow, a critical but often resource-intensive component in many computer vision pipelines. Our primary contributions are twofold. First, we provide a detailed comparison of motion vectors from both AV1 and HEVC against ground-truth optical flow, establishing their fidelity. In particular we show the impact of encoder settings on motion estimation fidelity and make recommendations about the optimal settings. Second, we show that using these extracted AV1 motion vectors as a "warm-start" for a state-of-the-art deep learning-based optical flow method, RAFT, significantly reduces the time to convergence while achieving comparable accuracy. Specifically, we observe a four-fold speedup in computation time with only a minor trade- off in end-point error. These findings underscore the potential of reusing motion vectors from compressed video as a practical and efficient method for a wide range of motion-aware computer vision applications.

Accep...

Accepted PCS 2025, camera-ready version

None
Iterative Motion Compensation for Canonical 3D Reconstruction from UAV Plant Images Captured in Windy Conditions 2025-10-17
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3D phenotyping of plants plays a crucial role for understanding plant growth, yield prediction, and disease control. We present a pipeline capable of generating high-quality 3D reconstructions of individual agricultural plants. To acquire data, a small commercially available UAV captures images of a selected plant. Apart from placing ArUco markers, the entire image acquisition process is fully autonomous, controlled by a self-developed Android application running on the drone's controller. The reconstruction task is particularly challenging due to environmental wind and downwash of the UAV. Our proposed pipeline supports the integration of arbitrary state-of-the-art 3D reconstruction methods. To mitigate errors caused by leaf motion during image capture, we use an iterative method that gradually adjusts the input images through deformation. Motion is estimated using optical flow between the original input images and intermediate 3D reconstructions rendered from the corresponding viewpoints. This alignment gradually reduces scene motion, resulting in a canonical representation. After a few iterations, our pipeline improves the reconstruction of state-of-the-art methods and enables the extraction of high-resolution 3D meshes. We will publicly release the source code of our reconstruction pipeline. Additionally, we provide a dataset consisting of multiple plants from various crops, captured across different points in time.

None
C4D: 4D Made from 3D through Dual Correspondences 2025-10-16
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Recovering 4D from monocular video, which jointly estimates dynamic geometry and camera poses, is an inevitably challenging problem. While recent pointmap-based 3D reconstruction methods (e.g., DUSt3R) have made great progress in reconstructing static scenes, directly applying them to dynamic scenes leads to inaccurate results. This discrepancy arises because moving objects violate multi-view geometric constraints, disrupting the reconstruction. To address this, we introduce C4D, a framework that leverages temporal Correspondences to extend existing 3D reconstruction formulation to 4D. Specifically, apart from predicting pointmaps, C4D captures two types of correspondences: short-term optical flow and long-term point tracking. We train a dynamic-aware point tracker that provides additional mobility information, facilitating the estimation of motion masks to separate moving elements from the static background, thus offering more reliable guidance for dynamic scenes. Furthermore, we introduce a set of dynamic scene optimization objectives to recover per-frame 3D geometry and camera parameters. Simultaneously, the correspondences lift 2D trajectories into smooth 3D trajectories, enabling fully integrated 4D reconstruction. Experiments show that our framework achieves complete 4D recovery and demonstrates strong performance across multiple downstream tasks, including depth estimation, camera pose estimation, and point tracking. Project Page: https://littlepure2333.github.io/C4D

Accep...

Accepted to ICCV 2025

Code Link
Removing Cost Volumes from Optical Flow Estimators 2025-10-15
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Cost volumes are used in every modern optical flow estimator, but due to their computational and space complexity, they are often a limiting factor regarding both processing speed and the resolution of input frames. Motivated by our empirical observation that cost volumes lose their importance once all other network parts of, e.g., a RAFT-based pipeline have been sufficiently trained, we introduce a training strategy that allows removing the cost volume from optical flow estimators throughout training. This leads to significantly improved inference speed and reduced memory requirements. Using our training strategy, we create three different models covering different compute budgets. Our most accurate model reaches state-of-the-art accuracy while being $1.2\times$ faster and having a $6\times$ lower memory footprint than comparable models; our fastest model is capable of processing Full HD frames at $20,\mathrm{FPS}$ using only $500,\mathrm{MB}$ of GPU memory.

ICCV 2025 None
SPORTS: Simultaneous Panoptic Odometry, Rendering, Tracking and Segmentation for Urban Scenes Understanding 2025-10-14
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The scene perception, understanding, and simulation are fundamental techniques for embodied-AI agents, while existing solutions are still prone to segmentation deficiency, dynamic objects' interference, sensor data sparsity, and view-limitation problems. This paper proposes a novel framework, named SPORTS, for holistic scene understanding via tightly integrating Video Panoptic Segmentation (VPS), Visual Odometry (VO), and Scene Rendering (SR) tasks into an iterative and unified perspective. Firstly, VPS designs an adaptive attention-based geometric fusion mechanism to align cross-frame features via enrolling the pose, depth, and optical flow modality, which automatically adjust feature maps for different decoding stages. And a post-matching strategy is integrated to improve identities tracking. In VO, panoptic segmentation results from VPS are combined with the optical flow map to improve the confidence estimation of dynamic objects, which enhances the accuracy of the camera pose estimation and completeness of the depth map generation via the learning-based paradigm. Furthermore, the point-based rendering of SR is beneficial from VO, transforming sparse point clouds into neural fields to synthesize high-fidelity RGB views and twin panoptic views. Extensive experiments on three public datasets demonstrate that our attention-based feature fusion outperforms most existing state-of-the-art methods on the odometry, tracking, segmentation, and novel view synthesis tasks.

Accep...

Accepted by IEEE Transactions on Multimedia

None
E-MoFlow: Learning Egomotion and Optical Flow from Event Data via Implicit Regularization 2025-10-14
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The estimation of optical flow and 6-DoF ego-motion, two fundamental tasks in 3D vision, has typically been addressed independently. For neuromorphic vision (e.g., event cameras), however, the lack of robust data association makes solving the two problems separately an ill-posed challenge, especially in the absence of supervision via ground truth. Existing works mitigate this ill-posedness by either enforcing the smoothness of the flow field via an explicit variational regularizer or leveraging explicit structure-and-motion priors in the parametrization to improve event alignment. The former notably introduces bias in results and computational overhead, while the latter, which parametrizes the optical flow in terms of the scene depth and the camera motion, often converges to suboptimal local minima. To address these issues, we propose an unsupervised framework that jointly optimizes egomotion and optical flow via implicit spatial-temporal and geometric regularization. First, by modeling camera's egomotion as a continuous spline and optical flow as an implicit neural representation, our method inherently embeds spatial-temporal coherence through inductive biases. Second, we incorporate structure-and-motion priors through differential geometric constraints, bypassing explicit depth estimation while maintaining rigorous geometric consistency. As a result, our framework (called E-MoFlow) unifies egomotion and optical flow estimation via implicit regularization under a fully unsupervised paradigm. Experiments demonstrate its versatility to general 6-DoF motion scenarios, achieving state-of-the-art performance among unsupervised methods and competitive even with supervised approaches.

The T...

The Thirty-Ninth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems(NeurIPS 2025)

None
Motion-Enhanced Nonlocal Similarity Implicit Neural Representation for Infrared Dim and Small Target Detection 2025-10-12
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Infrared dim and small target detection presents a significant challenge due to dynamic multi-frame scenarios and weak target signatures in the infrared modality. Traditional low-rank plus sparse models often fail to capture dynamic backgrounds and global spatial-temporal correlations, which results in background leakage or target loss. In this paper, we propose a novel motion-enhanced nonlocal similarity implicit neural representation (INR) framework to address these challenges. We first integrate motion estimation via optical flow to capture subtle target movements, and propose multi-frame fusion to enhance motion saliency. Second, we leverage nonlocal similarity to construct patch tensors with strong low-rank properties, and propose an innovative tensor decomposition-based INR model to represent the nonlocal patch tensor, effectively encoding both the nonlocal low-rankness and spatial-temporal correlations of background through continuous neural representations. An alternating direction method of multipliers is developed for the nonlocal INR model, which enjoys theoretical fixed-point convergence. Experimental results show that our approach robustly separates dim targets from complex infrared backgrounds, outperforming state-of-the-art methods in detection accuracy and robustness.

None
Injecting Frame-Event Complementary Fusion into Diffusion for Optical Flow in Challenging Scenes 2025-10-12
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Optical flow estimation has achieved promising results in conventional scenes but faces challenges in high-speed and low-light scenes, which suffer from motion blur and insufficient illumination. These conditions lead to weakened texture and amplified noise and deteriorate the appearance saturation and boundary completeness of frame cameras, which are necessary for motion feature matching. In degraded scenes, the frame camera provides dense appearance saturation but sparse boundary completeness due to its long imaging time and low dynamic range. In contrast, the event camera offers sparse appearance saturation, while its short imaging time and high dynamic range gives rise to dense boundary completeness. Traditionally, existing methods utilize feature fusion or domain adaptation to introduce event to improve boundary completeness. However, the appearance features are still deteriorated, which severely affects the mostly adopted discriminative models that learn the mapping from visual features to motion fields and generative models that generate motion fields based on given visual features. So we introduce diffusion models that learn the mapping from noising flow to clear flow, which is not affected by the deteriorated visual features. Therefore, we propose a novel optical flow estimation framework Diff-ABFlow based on diffusion models with frame-event appearance-boundary fusion.

None
Ortho-Fuse: Orthomosaic Generation for Sparse High-Resolution Crop Health Maps Through Intermediate Optical Flow Estimation 2025-10-11
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AI-driven crop health mapping systems offer substantial advantages over conventional monitoring approaches through accelerated data acquisition and cost reduction. However, widespread farmer adoption remains constrained by technical limitations in orthomosaic generation from sparse aerial imagery datasets. Traditional photogrammetric reconstruction requires 70-80% inter-image overlap to establish sufficient feature correspondences for accurate geometric registration. AI-driven systems operating under resource-constrained conditions cannot consistently achieve these overlap thresholds, resulting in degraded reconstruction quality that undermines user confidence in autonomous monitoring technologies. In this paper, we present Ortho-Fuse, an optical flow-based framework that enables the generation of a reliable orthomosaic with reduced overlap requirements. Our approach employs intermediate flow estimation to synthesize transitional imagery between consecutive aerial frames, artificially augmenting feature correspondences for improved geometric reconstruction. Experimental validation demonstrates a 20% reduction in minimum overlap requirements. We further analyze adoption barriers in precision agriculture to identify pathways for enhanced integration of AI-driven monitoring systems.

6 Figures, 9 pages None
Learning Efficient Meshflow and Optical Flow from Event Cameras 2025-10-05
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In this paper, we explore the problem of event-based meshflow estimation, a novel task that involves predicting a spatially smooth sparse motion field from event cameras. To start, we review the state-of-the-art in event-based flow estimation, highlighting two key areas for further research: i) the lack of meshflow-specific event datasets and methods, and ii) the underexplored challenge of event data density. First, we generate a large-scale High-Resolution Event Meshflow (HREM) dataset, which showcases its superiority by encompassing the merits of high resolution at 1280x720, handling dynamic objects and complex motion patterns, and offering both optical flow and meshflow labels. These aspects have not been fully explored in previous works. Besides, we propose Efficient Event-based MeshFlow (EEMFlow) network, a lightweight model featuring a specially crafted encoder-decoder architecture to facilitate swift and accurate meshflow estimation. Furthermore, we upgrade EEMFlow network to support dense event optical flow, in which a Confidence-induced Detail Completion (CDC) module is proposed to preserve sharp motion boundaries. We conduct comprehensive experiments to show the exceptional performance and runtime efficiency (30x faster) of our EEMFlow model compared to the recent state-of-the-art flow method. As an extension, we expand HREM into HREM+, a multi-density event dataset contributing to a thorough study of the robustness of existing methods across data with varying densities, and propose an Adaptive Density Module (ADM) to adjust the density of input event data to a more optimal range, enhancing the model's generalization ability. We empirically demonstrate that ADM helps to significantly improve the performance of EEMFlow and EEMFlow+ by 8% and 10%, respectively. Code and dataset are released at https://github.com/boomluo02/EEMFlowPlus.

Accep...

Accepted by TPAMI 2025

Code Link
L4P: Towards Unified Low-Level 4D Vision Perception 2025-10-02
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The spatio-temporal relationship between the pixels of a video carries critical information for low-level 4D perception tasks. A single model that reasons about it should be able to solve several such tasks well. Yet, most state-of-the-art methods rely on architectures specialized for the task at hand. We present L4P, a feedforward, general-purpose architecture that solves low-level 4D perception tasks in a unified framework. L4P leverages a pre-trained ViT-based video encoder and combines it with per-task heads that are lightweight and therefore do not require extensive training. Despite its general and feedforward formulation, our method is competitive with existing specialized methods on both dense tasks, such as depth or optical flow estimation, and sparse tasks, such as 2D/3D tracking. Moreover, it solves all tasks at once in a time comparable to that of single-task methods.

None
Easi3R: Estimating Disentangled Motion from DUSt3R Without Training 2025-10-01
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Recent advances in DUSt3R have enabled robust estimation of dense point clouds and camera parameters of static scenes, leveraging Transformer network architectures and direct supervision on large-scale 3D datasets. In contrast, the limited scale and diversity of available 4D datasets present a major bottleneck for training a highly generalizable 4D model. This constraint has driven conventional 4D methods to fine-tune 3D models on scalable dynamic video data with additional geometric priors such as optical flow and depths. In this work, we take an opposite path and introduce Easi3R, a simple yet efficient training-free method for 4D reconstruction. Our approach applies attention adaptation during inference, eliminating the need for from-scratch pre-training or network fine-tuning. We find that the attention layers in DUSt3R inherently encode rich information about camera and object motion. By carefully disentangling these attention maps, we achieve accurate dynamic region segmentation, camera pose estimation, and 4D dense point map reconstruction. Extensive experiments on real-world dynamic videos demonstrate that our lightweight attention adaptation significantly outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods that are trained or finetuned on extensive dynamic datasets. Our code is publicly available for research purpose at https://easi3r.github.io/

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Page: https://easi3r.github.io/ Code: https://github.com/Inception3D/Easi3R

Code Link
Fast Feature Field ($\text{F}^3$): A Predictive Representation of Events 2025-09-29
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This paper develops a mathematical argument and algorithms for building representations of data from event-based cameras, that we call Fast Feature Field ($\text{F}^3$). We learn this representation by predicting future events from past events and show that it preserves scene structure and motion information. $\text{F}^3$ exploits the sparsity of event data and is robust to noise and variations in event rates. It can be computed efficiently using ideas from multi-resolution hash encoding and deep sets - achieving 120 Hz at HD and 440 Hz at VGA resolutions. $\text{F}^3$ represents events within a contiguous spatiotemporal volume as a multi-channel image, enabling a range of downstream tasks. We obtain state-of-the-art performance on optical flow estimation, semantic segmentation, and monocular metric depth estimation, on data from three robotic platforms (a car, a quadruped robot and a flying platform), across different lighting conditions (daytime, nighttime), environments (indoors, outdoors, urban, as well as off-road) and dynamic vision sensors (resolutions and event rates). Our implementations can predict these tasks at 25-75 Hz at HD resolution.

39 pages, 9 figures None
DeLiVR: Differential Spatiotemporal Lie Bias for Efficient Video Deraining 2025-09-26
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Videos captured in the wild often suffer from rain streaks, blur, and noise. In addition, even slight changes in camera pose can amplify cross-frame mismatches and temporal artifacts. Existing methods rely on optical flow or heuristic alignment, which are computationally expensive and less robust. To address these challenges, Lie groups provide a principled way to represent continuous geometric transformations, making them well-suited for enforcing spatial and temporal consistency in video modeling. Building on this insight, we propose DeLiVR, an efficient video deraining method that injects spatiotemporal Lie-group differential biases directly into attention scores of the network. Specifically, the method introduces two complementary components. First, a rotation-bounded Lie relative bias predicts the in-plane angle of each frame using a compact prediction module, where normalized coordinates are rotated and compared with base coordinates to achieve geometry-consistent alignment before feature aggregation. Second, a differential group displacement computes angular differences between adjacent frames to estimate a velocity. This bias computation combines temporal decay and attention masks to focus on inter-frame relationships while precisely matching the direction of rain streaks. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on publicly available benchmarks.

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Learning Flow-Guided Registration for RGB-Event Semantic Segmentation 2025-09-25
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Event cameras capture microsecond-level motion cues that complement RGB sensors. However, the prevailing paradigm of treating RGB-Event perception as a fusion problem is ill-posed, as it ignores the intrinsic (i) Spatiotemporal and (ii) Modal Misalignment, unlike other RGB-X sensing domains. To tackle these limitations, we recast RGB-Event segmentation from fusion to registration. We propose BRENet, a novel flow-guided bidirectional framework that adaptively matches correspondence between the asymmetric modalities. Specifically, it leverages temporally aligned optical flows as a coarse-grained guide, along with fine-grained event temporal features, to generate precise forward and backward pixel pairings for registration. This pairing mechanism converts the inherent motion lag into terms governed by flow estimation error, bridging modality gaps. Moreover, we introduce Motion-Enhanced Event Tensor (MET), a new representation that transforms sparse event streams into a dense, temporally coherent form. Extensive experiments on four large-scale datasets validate our approach, establishing flow-guided registration as a promising direction for RGB-Event segmentation. Our code is available at: https://github.com/zyaocoder/BRENet.

20 pages, 14 figures Code Link
Surgical Video Understanding with Label Interpolation 2025-09-23
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Robot-assisted surgery (RAS) has become a critical paradigm in modern surgery, promoting patient recovery and reducing the burden on surgeons through minimally invasive approaches. To fully realize its potential, however, a precise understanding of the visual data generated during surgical procedures is essential. Previous studies have predominantly focused on single-task approaches, but real surgical scenes involve complex temporal dynamics and diverse instrument interactions that limit comprehensive understanding. Moreover, the effective application of multi-task learning (MTL) requires sufficient pixel-level segmentation data, which are difficult to obtain due to the high cost and expertise required for annotation. In particular, long-term annotations such as phases and steps are available for every frame, whereas short-term annotations such as surgical instrument segmentation and action detection are provided only for key frames, resulting in a significant temporal-spatial imbalance. To address these challenges, we propose a novel framework that combines optical flow-based segmentation label interpolation with multi-task learning. optical flow estimated from annotated key frames is used to propagate labels to adjacent unlabeled frames, thereby enriching sparse spatial supervision and balancing temporal and spatial information for training. This integration improves both the accuracy and efficiency of surgical scene understanding and, in turn, enhances the utility of RAS.

8 pages, 10 figures None
UM-Depth : Uncertainty Masked Self-Supervised Monocular Depth Estimation with Visual Odometry 2025-09-17
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Monocular depth estimation has been increasingly adopted in robotics and autonomous driving for its ability to infer scene geometry from a single camera. In self-supervised monocular depth estimation frameworks, the network jointly generates and exploits depth and pose estimates during training, thereby eliminating the need for depth labels. However, these methods remain challenged by uncertainty in the input data, such as low-texture or dynamic regions, which can cause reduced depth accuracy. To address this, we introduce UM-Depth, a framework that combines motion- and uncertainty-aware refinement to enhance depth accuracy at dynamic object boundaries and in textureless regions. Specifically, we develop a teacherstudent training strategy that embeds uncertainty estimation into both the training pipeline and network architecture, thereby strengthening supervision where photometric signals are weak. Unlike prior motion-aware approaches that incur inference-time overhead and rely on additional labels or auxiliary networks for real-time generation, our method uses optical flow exclusively within the teacher network during training, which eliminating extra labeling demands and any runtime cost. Extensive experiments on the KITTI and Cityscapes datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our uncertainty-aware refinement. Overall, UM-Depth achieves state-of-the-art results in both self-supervised depth and pose estimation on the KITTI datasets.

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ROOM: A Physics-Based Continuum Robot Simulator for Photorealistic Medical Datasets Generation 2025-09-16
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Continuum robots are advancing bronchoscopy procedures by accessing complex lung airways and enabling targeted interventions. However, their development is limited by the lack of realistic training and test environments: Real data is difficult to collect due to ethical constraints and patient safety concerns, and developing autonomy algorithms requires realistic imaging and physical feedback. We present ROOM (Realistic Optical Observation in Medicine), a comprehensive simulation framework designed for generating photorealistic bronchoscopy training data. By leveraging patient CT scans, our pipeline renders multi-modal sensor data including RGB images with realistic noise and light specularities, metric depth maps, surface normals, optical flow and point clouds at medically relevant scales. We validate the data generated by ROOM in two canonical tasks for medical robotics -- multi-view pose estimation and monocular depth estimation, demonstrating diverse challenges that state-of-the-art methods must overcome to transfer to these medical settings. Furthermore, we show that the data produced by ROOM can be used to fine-tune existing depth estimation models to overcome these challenges, also enabling other downstream applications such as navigation. We expect that ROOM will enable large-scale data generation across diverse patient anatomies and procedural scenarios that are challenging to capture in clinical settings. Code and data: https://github.com/iamsalvatore/room.

Code Link
4DRadar-GS: Self-Supervised Dynamic Driving Scene Reconstruction with 4D Radar 2025-09-16
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3D reconstruction and novel view synthesis are critical for validating autonomous driving systems and training advanced perception models. Recent self-supervised methods have gained significant attention due to their cost-effectiveness and enhanced generalization in scenarios where annotated bounding boxes are unavailable. However, existing approaches, which often rely on frequency-domain decoupling or optical flow, struggle to accurately reconstruct dynamic objects due to imprecise motion estimation and weak temporal consistency, resulting in incomplete or distorted representations of dynamic scene elements. To address these challenges, we propose 4DRadar-GS, a 4D Radar-augmented self-supervised 3D reconstruction framework tailored for dynamic driving scenes. Specifically, we first present a 4D Radar-assisted Gaussian initialization scheme that leverages 4D Radar's velocity and spatial information to segment dynamic objects and recover monocular depth scale, generating accurate Gaussian point representations. In addition, we propose a Velocity-guided PointTrack (VGPT) model, which is jointly trained with the reconstruction pipeline under scene flow supervision, to track fine-grained dynamic trajectories and construct temporally consistent representations. Evaluated on the OmniHD-Scenes dataset, 4DRadar-GS achieves state-of-the-art performance in dynamic driving scene 3D reconstruction.

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Computational Imaging for Enhanced Computer Vision 2025-09-10
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This paper presents a comprehensive survey of computational imaging (CI) techniques and their transformative impact on computer vision (CV) applications. Conventional imaging methods often fail to deliver high-fidelity visual data in challenging conditions, such as low light, motion blur, or high dynamic range scenes, thereby limiting the performance of state-of-the-art CV systems. Computational imaging techniques, including light field imaging, high dynamic range (HDR) imaging, deblurring, high-speed imaging, and glare mitigation, address these limitations by enhancing image acquisition and reconstruction processes. This survey systematically explores the synergies between CI techniques and core CV tasks, including object detection, depth estimation, optical flow, face recognition, and keypoint detection. By analyzing the relationships between CI methods and their practical contributions to CV applications, this work highlights emerging opportunities, challenges, and future research directions. We emphasize the potential for task-specific, adaptive imaging pipelines that improve robustness, accuracy, and efficiency in real-world scenarios, such as autonomous navigation, surveillance, augmented reality, and robotics.

Inter...

International Journal of Engineering Research & Technology, 2025

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FractalPINN-Flow: A Fractal-Inspired Network for Unsupervised Optical Flow Estimation with Total Variation Regularization 2025-09-10
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We present FractalPINN-Flow, an unsupervised deep learning framework for dense optical flow estimation that learns directly from consecutive grayscale frames without requiring ground truth. The architecture centers on the Fractal Deformation Network (FDN) - a recursive encoder-decoder inspired by fractal geometry and self-similarity. Unlike traditional CNNs with sequential downsampling, FDN uses repeated encoder-decoder nesting with skip connections to capture both fine-grained details and long-range motion patterns. The training objective is based on a classical variational formulation using total variation (TV) regularization. Specifically, we minimize an energy functional that combines $L^1$ and $L^2$ data fidelity terms to enforce brightness constancy, along with a TV term that promotes spatial smoothness and coherent flow fields. Experiments on synthetic and benchmark datasets show that FractalPINN-Flow produces accurate, smooth, and edge-preserving optical flow fields. The model is especially effective for high-resolution data and scenarios with limited annotations.

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Deep Visual Odometry for Stereo Event Cameras 2025-09-10
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Event-based cameras are bio-inspired sensors with pixels that independently and asynchronously respond to brightness changes at microsecond resolution, offering the potential to handle state estimation tasks involving motion blur and high dynamic range (HDR) illumination conditions. However, the versatility of event-based visual odometry (VO) relying on handcrafted data association (either direct or indirect methods) is still unreliable, especially in field robot applications under low-light HDR conditions, where the dynamic range can be enormous and the signal-to-noise ratio is spatially-and-temporally varying. Leveraging deep neural networks offers new possibilities for overcoming these challenges. In this paper, we propose a learning-based stereo event visual odometry. Building upon Deep Event Visual Odometry (DEVO), our system (called Stereo-DEVO) introduces a novel and efficient static-stereo association strategy for sparse depth estimation with almost no additional computational burden. By integrating it into a tightly coupled bundle adjustment (BA) optimization scheme, and benefiting from the recurrent network's ability to perform accurate optical flow estimation through voxel-based event representations to establish reliable patch associations, our system achieves high-precision pose estimation in metric scale. In contrast to the offline performance of DEVO, our system can process event data of \zs{Video Graphics Array} (VGA) resolution in real time. Extensive evaluations on multiple public real-world datasets and self-collected data justify our system's versatility, demonstrating superior performance compared to state-of-the-art event-based VO methods. More importantly, our system achieves stable pose estimation even in large-scale nighttime HDR scenarios.

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MIORe & VAR-MIORe: Benchmarks to Push the Boundaries of Restoration 2025-09-08
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We introduce MIORe and VAR-MIORe, two novel multi-task datasets that address critical limitations in current motion restoration benchmarks. Designed with high-frame-rate (1000 FPS) acquisition and professional-grade optics, our datasets capture a broad spectrum of motion scenarios, which include complex ego-camera movements, dynamic multi-subject interactions, and depth-dependent blur effects. By adaptively averaging frames based on computed optical flow metrics, MIORe generates consistent motion blur, and preserves sharp inputs for video frame interpolation and optical flow estimation. VAR-MIORe further extends by spanning a variable range of motion magnitudes, from minimal to extreme, establishing the first benchmark to offer explicit control over motion amplitude. We provide high-resolution, scalable ground truths that challenge existing algorithms under both controlled and adverse conditions, paving the way for next-generation research of various image and video restoration tasks.

ICCV 2025 Oral None
Motion Aware ViT-based Framework for Monocular 6-DoF Spacecraft Pose Estimation 2025-09-07
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Monocular 6-DoF pose estimation plays an important role in multiple spacecraft missions. Most existing pose estimation approaches rely on single images with static keypoint localisation, failing to exploit valuable temporal information inherent to space operations. In this work, we adapt a deep learning framework from human pose estimation to the spacecraft pose estimation domain that integrates motion-aware heatmaps and optical flow to capture motion dynamics. Our approach combines image features from a Vision Transformer (ViT) encoder with motion cues from a pre-trained optical flow model to localise 2D keypoints. Using the estimates, a Perspective-n-Point (PnP) solver recovers 6-DoF poses from known 2D-3D correspondences. We train and evaluate our method on the SPADES-RGB dataset and further assess its generalisation on real and synthetic data from the SPARK-2024 dataset. Overall, our approach demonstrates improved performance over single-image baselines in both 2D keypoint localisation and 6-DoF pose estimation. Furthermore, it shows promising generalisation capabilities when testing on different data distributions.

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A biologically inspired separable learning vision model for real-time traffic object perception in Dark 2025-09-05
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Fast and accurate object perception in low-light traffic scenes has attracted increasing attention. However, due to severe illumination degradation and the lack of reliable visual cues, existing perception models and methods struggle to quickly adapt to and accurately predict in low-light environments. Moreover, there is the absence of available large-scale benchmark specifically focused on low-light traffic scenes. To bridge this gap, we introduce a physically grounded illumination degradation method tailored to real-world low-light settings and construct Dark-traffic, the largest densely annotated dataset to date for low-light traffic scenes, supporting object detection, instance segmentation, and optical flow estimation. We further propose the Separable Learning Vision Model (SLVM), a biologically inspired framework designed to enhance perception under adverse lighting. SLVM integrates four key components: a light-adaptive pupillary mechanism for illumination-sensitive feature extraction, a feature-level separable learning strategy for efficient representation, task-specific decoupled branches for multi-task separable learning, and a spatial misalignment-aware fusion module for precise multi-feature alignment. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SLVM achieves state-of-the-art performance with reduced computational overhead. Notably, it outperforms RT-DETR by 11.2 percentage points in detection, YOLOv12 by 6.1 percentage points in instance segmentation, and reduces endpoint error (EPE) of baseline by 12.37% on Dark-traffic. On the LIS benchmark, the end-to-end trained SLVM surpasses Swin Transformer+EnlightenGAN and ConvNeXt-T+EnlightenGAN by an average of 11 percentage points across key metrics, and exceeds Mask RCNN (with light enhancement) by 3.1 percentage points. The Dark-traffic dataset and complete code is released at https://github.com/alanli1997/slvm.

Code Link
Encoder-Only Image Registration 2025-09-04
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Learning-based techniques have significantly improved the accuracy and speed of deformable image registration. However, challenges such as reducing computational complexity and handling large deformations persist. To address these challenges, we analyze how convolutional neural networks (ConvNets) influence registration performance using the Horn-Schunck optical flow equation. Supported by prior studies and our empirical experiments, we observe that ConvNets play two key roles in registration: linearizing local intensities and harmonizing global contrast variations. Based on these insights, we propose the Encoder-Only Image Registration (EOIR) framework, designed to achieve a better accuracy-efficiency trade-off. EOIR separates feature learning from flow estimation, employing only a 3-layer ConvNet for feature extraction and a set of 3-layer flow estimators to construct a Laplacian feature pyramid, progressively composing diffeomorphic deformations under a large-deformation model. Results on five datasets across different modalities and anatomical regions demonstrate EOIR's effectiveness, achieving superior accuracy-efficiency and accuracy-smoothness trade-offs. With comparable accuracy, EOIR provides better efficiency and smoothness, and vice versa. The source code of EOIR is publicly available on https://github.com/XiangChen1994/EOIR.

Code Link
Observer Design for Optical Flow-Based Visual-Inertial Odometry with Almost-Global Convergence 2025-08-28
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This paper presents a novel cascaded observer architecture that combines optical flow and IMU measurements to perform continuous monocular visual-inertial odometry (VIO). The proposed solution estimates body-frame velocity and gravity direction simultaneously by fusing velocity direction information from optical flow measurements with gyro and accelerometer data. This fusion is achieved using a globally exponentially stable Riccati observer, which operates under persistently exciting translational motion conditions. The estimated gravity direction in the body frame is then employed, along with an optional magnetometer measurement, to design a complementary observer on $\mathbf{SO}(3)$ for attitude estimation. The resulting interconnected observer architecture is shown to be almost globally asymptotically stable. To extract the velocity direction from sparse optical flow data, a gradient descent algorithm is developed to solve a constrained minimization problem on the unit sphere. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithms is validated through simulation results.

8 pag...

8 pages, 6 figures. To appear in IEEE CDC 2025

None
Conditional Normalizing Flow Surrogate for Monte Carlo Prediction of Radiative Properties in Nanoparticle-Embedded Layers 2025-08-27
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We present a probabilistic, data-driven surrogate model for predicting the radiative properties of nanoparticle embedded scattering media. The model uses conditional normalizing flows, which learn the conditional distribution of optical outputs, including reflectance, absorbance, and transmittance, given input parameters such as the absorption coefficient, scattering coefficient, anisotropy factor, and particle size distribution. We generate training data using Monte Carlo radiative transfer simulations, with optical properties derived from Mie theory. Unlike conventional neural networks, the conditional normalizing flow model yields full posterior predictive distributions, enabling both accurate forecasts and principled uncertainty quantification. Our results demonstrate that this model achieves high predictive accuracy and reliable uncertainty estimates, establishing it as a powerful and efficient surrogate for radiative transfer simulations.

Versi...

Version of record (publishers PDF) from META 2025 (CC BY). Please cite the proceedings

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Context-aware Sparse Spatiotemporal Learning for Event-based Vision 2025-08-27
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Event-based camera has emerged as a promising paradigm for robot perception, offering advantages with high temporal resolution, high dynamic range, and robustness to motion blur. However, existing deep learning-based event processing methods often fail to fully leverage the sparse nature of event data, complicating their integration into resource-constrained edge applications. While neuromorphic computing provides an energy-efficient alternative, spiking neural networks struggle to match of performance of state-of-the-art models in complex event-based vision tasks, like object detection and optical flow. Moreover, achieving high activation sparsity in neural networks is still difficult and often demands careful manual tuning of sparsity-inducing loss terms. Here, we propose Context-aware Sparse Spatiotemporal Learning (CSSL), a novel framework that introduces context-aware thresholding to dynamically regulate neuron activations based on the input distribution, naturally reducing activation density without explicit sparsity constraints. Applied to event-based object detection and optical flow estimation, CSSL achieves comparable or superior performance to state-of-the-art methods while maintaining extremely high neuronal sparsity. Our experimental results highlight CSSL's crucial role in enabling efficient event-based vision for neuromorphic processing.

Accep...

Accepted at IROS 2025

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Periodic Vibration Gaussian: Dynamic Urban Scene Reconstruction and Real-time Rendering 2025-08-23
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Modeling dynamic, large-scale urban scenes is challenging due to their highly intricate geometric structures and unconstrained dynamics in both space and time. Prior methods often employ high-level architectural priors, separating static and dynamic elements, resulting in suboptimal capture of their synergistic interactions. To address this challenge, we present a unified representation model, called Periodic Vibration Gaussian (PVG). PVG builds upon the efficient 3D Gaussian splatting technique, originally designed for static scene representation, by introducing periodic vibration-based temporal dynamics. This innovation enables PVG to elegantly and uniformly represent the characteristics of various objects and elements in dynamic urban scenes. To enhance temporally coherent and large scene representation learning with sparse training data, we introduce a novel temporal smoothing mechanism and a position-aware adaptive control strategy respectively. Extensive experiments on Waymo Open Dataset and KITTI benchmarks demonstrate that PVG surpasses state-of-the-art alternatives in both reconstruction and novel view synthesis for both dynamic and static scenes. Notably, PVG achieves this without relying on manually labeled object bounding boxes or expensive optical flow estimation. Moreover, PVG exhibits 900-fold acceleration in rendering over the best alternative.

Proje...

Project page: https://fudan-zvg.github.io/PVG/

Code Link
6-DoF Object Tracking with Event-based Optical Flow and Frames 2025-08-20
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Tracking the position and orientation of objects in space (i.e., in 6-DoF) in real time is a fundamental problem in robotics for environment interaction. It becomes more challenging when objects move at high-speed due to frame rate limitations in conventional cameras and motion blur. Event cameras are characterized by high temporal resolution, low latency and high dynamic range, that can potentially overcome the impacts of motion blur. Traditional RGB cameras provide rich visual information that is more suitable for the challenging task of single-shot object pose estimation. In this work, we propose using event-based optical flow combined with an RGB based global object pose estimator for 6-DoF pose tracking of objects at high-speed, exploiting the core advantages of both types of vision sensors. Specifically, we propose an event-based optical flow algorithm for object motion measurement to implement an object 6-DoF velocity tracker. By integrating the tracked object 6-DoF velocity with low frequency estimated pose from the global pose estimator, the method can track pose when objects move at high-speed. The proposed algorithm is tested and validated on both synthetic and real world data, demonstrating its effectiveness, especially in high-speed motion scenarios.

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ResFlow: Fine-tuning Residual Optical Flow for Event-based High Temporal Resolution Motion Estimation 2025-08-20
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Event cameras hold significant promise for high-temporal-resolution (HTR) motion estimation. However, estimating event-based HTR optical flow faces two key challenges: the absence of HTR ground-truth data and the intrinsic sparsity of event data. Most existing approaches rely on the flow accumulation paradigms to indirectly supervise intermediate flows, often resulting in accumulation errors and optimization difficulties. To address these challenges, we propose a residual-based paradigm for estimating HTR optical flow with event data. Our approach separates HTR flow estimation into two stages: global linear motion estimation and HTR residual flow refinement. The residual paradigm effectively mitigates the impacts of event sparsity on optimization and is compatible with any LTR algorithm. Next, to address the challenge posed by the absence of HTR ground truth, we incorporate novel learning strategies. Specifically, we initially employ a shared refiner to estimate the residual flows, enabling both LTR supervision and HTR inference. Subsequently, we introduce regional noise to simulate the residual patterns of intermediate flows, facilitating the adaptation from LTR supervision to HTR inference. Additionally, we show that the noise-based strategy supports in-domain self-supervised training. Comprehensive experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art accuracy in both LTR and HTR metrics, highlighting its effectiveness and superiority.

12 pages, 9 figures None
Reliable Smoke Detection via Optical Flow-Guided Feature Fusion and Transformer-Based Uncertainty Modeling 2025-08-20
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Fire outbreaks pose critical threats to human life and infrastructure, necessitating high-fidelity early-warning systems that detect combustion precursors such as smoke. However, smoke plumes exhibit complex spatiotemporal dynamics influenced by illumination variability, flow kinematics, and environmental noise, undermining the reliability of traditional detectors. To address these challenges without the logistical complexity of multi-sensor arrays, we propose an information-fusion framework by integrating smoke feature representations extracted from monocular imagery. Specifically, a Two-Phase Uncertainty-Aware Shifted Windows Transformer for robust and reliable smoke detection, leveraging a novel smoke segmentation dataset, constructed via optical flow-based motion encoding, is proposed. The optical flow estimation is performed with a four-color-theorem-inspired dual-phase level-set fractional-order variational model, which preserves motion discontinuities. The resulting color-encoded optical flow maps are fused with appearance cues via a Gaussian Mixture Model to generate binary segmentation masks of the smoke regions. These fused representations are fed into the novel Shifted-Windows Transformer, which is augmented with a multi-scale uncertainty estimation head and trained under a two-phase learning regimen. First learning phase optimizes smoke detection accuracy, while during the second phase, the model learns to estimate plausibility confidence in its predictions by jointly modeling aleatoric and epistemic uncertainties. Extensive experiments using multiple evaluation metrics and comparative analysis with state-of-the-art approaches demonstrate superior generalization and robustness, offering a reliable solution for early fire detection in surveillance, industrial safety, and autonomous monitoring applications.

None
MF-LPR$^2$: Multi-Frame License Plate Image Restoration and Recognition using Optical Flow 2025-08-19
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License plate recognition (LPR) is important for traffic law enforcement, crime investigation, and surveillance. However, license plate areas in dash cam images often suffer from low resolution, motion blur, and glare, which make accurate recognition challenging. Existing generative models that rely on pretrained priors cannot reliably restore such poor-quality images, frequently introducing severe artifacts and distortions. To address this issue, we propose a novel multi-frame license plate restoration and recognition framework, MF-LPR$^2$, which addresses ambiguities in poor-quality images by aligning and aggregating neighboring frames instead of relying on pretrained knowledge. To achieve accurate frame alignment, we employ a state-of-the-art optical flow estimator in conjunction with carefully designed algorithms that detect and correct erroneous optical flow estimations by leveraging the spatio-temporal consistency inherent in license plate image sequences. Our approach enhances both image quality and recognition accuracy while preserving the evidential content of the input images. In addition, we constructed a novel Realistic LPR (RLPR) dataset to evaluate MF-LPR$^2$. The RLPR dataset contains 200 pairs of low-quality license plate image sequences and high-quality pseudo ground-truth images, reflecting the complexities of real-world scenarios. In experiments, MF-LPR$^2$ outperformed eight recent restoration models in terms of PSNR, SSIM, and LPIPS by significant margins. In recognition, MF-LPR$^2$ achieved an accuracy of 86.44%, outperforming both the best single-frame LPR (14.04%) and the multi-frame LPR (82.55%) among the eleven baseline models. The results of ablation studies confirm that our filtering and refinement algorithms significantly contribute to these improvements.

Accep...

Accepted for publication in Computer Vision and Image Understanding (CVIU), 2025

None
Cooperative Face Liveness Detection from Optical Flow 2025-08-14
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In this work, we proposed a novel cooperative video-based face liveness detection method based on a new user interaction scenario where participants are instructed to slowly move their frontal-oriented face closer to the camera. This controlled approaching face protocol, combined with optical flow analysis, represents the core innovation of our approach. By designing a system where users follow this specific movement pattern, we enable robust extraction of facial volume information through neural optical flow estimation, significantly improving discrimination between genuine faces and various presentation attacks (including printed photos, screen displays, masks, and video replays). Our method processes both the predicted optical flows and RGB frames through a neural classifier, effectively leveraging spatial-temporal features for more reliable liveness detection compared to passive methods.

None
Un-EVIMO: Unsupervised Event-Based Independent Motion Segmentation 2025-08-12
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Event cameras are a novel type of biologically inspired vision sensor known for their high temporal resolution, high dynamic range, and low power consumption. Because of these properties, they are well-suited for processing fast motions that require rapid reactions. Although event cameras have recently shown competitive performance in unsupervised optical flow estimation, performance in detecting independently moving objects (IMOs) is lacking behind, although event-based methods would be suited for this task based on their low latency and HDR properties. Previous approaches to event-based IMO segmentation have been heavily dependent on labeled data. However, biological vision systems have developed the ability to avoid moving objects through daily tasks without being given explicit labels. In this work, we propose the first event framework that generates IMO pseudo-labels using geometric constraints. Due to its unsupervised nature, our method can handle an arbitrary number of not predetermined objects and is easily scalable to datasets where expensive IMO labels are not readily available. We evaluate our approach on the EVIMO dataset and show that it performs competitively with supervised methods, both quantitatively and qualitatively.

None
Inference-Time Gaze Refinement for Micro-Expression Recognition: Enhancing Event-Based Eye Tracking with Motion-Aware Post-Processing 2025-08-11
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Event-based eye tracking holds significant promise for fine-grained cognitive state inference, offering high temporal resolution and robustness to motion artifacts, critical features for decoding subtle mental states such as attention, confusion, or fatigue. In this work, we introduce a model-agnostic, inference-time refinement framework designed to enhance the output of existing event-based gaze estimation models without modifying their architecture or requiring retraining. Our method comprises two key post-processing modules: (i) Motion-Aware Median Filtering, which suppresses blink-induced spikes while preserving natural gaze dynamics, and (ii) Optical Flow-Based Local Refinement, which aligns gaze predictions with cumulative event motion to reduce spatial jitter and temporal discontinuities. To complement traditional spatial accuracy metrics, we propose a novel Jitter Metric that captures the temporal smoothness of predicted gaze trajectories based on velocity regularity and local signal complexity. Together, these contributions significantly improve the consistency of event-based gaze signals, making them better suited for downstream tasks such as micro-expression analysis and mind-state decoding. Our results demonstrate consistent improvements across multiple baseline models on controlled datasets, laying the groundwork for future integration with multimodal affect recognition systems in real-world environments. Our code implementations can be found at https://github.com/eye-tracking-for-physiological-sensing/EyeLoRiN.

Accep...

Accepted at 4DMR@IJCAI25: International IJCAI Workshop on 1st Challenge and Workshop for 4D Micro-Expression Recognition for Mind Reading, August 29, 2025, Guangzhou, China

Code Link
Revealing Latent Information: A Physics-inspired Self-supervised Pre-training Framework for Noisy and Sparse Events 2025-08-07
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Event camera, a novel neuromorphic vision sensor, records data with high temporal resolution and wide dynamic range, offering new possibilities for accurate visual representation in challenging scenarios. However, event data is inherently sparse and noisy, mainly reflecting brightness changes, which complicates effective feature extraction. To address this, we propose a self-supervised pre-training framework to fully reveal latent information in event data, including edge information and texture cues. Our framework consists of three stages: Difference-guided Masked Modeling, inspired by the event physical sampling process, reconstructs temporal intensity difference maps to extract enhanced information from raw event data. Backbone-fixed Feature Transition contrasts event and image features without updating the backbone to preserve representations learned from masked modeling and stabilizing their effect on contrastive learning. Focus-aimed Contrastive Learning updates the entire model to improve semantic discrimination by focusing on high-value regions. Extensive experiments show our framework is robust and consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods on various downstream tasks, including object recognition, semantic segmentation, and optical flow estimation. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/BIT-Vision/EventPretrain.

Code Link
Pseudo Depth Meets Gaussian: A Feed-forward RGB SLAM Baseline 2025-08-06
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Incrementally recovering real-sized 3D geometry from a pose-free RGB stream is a challenging task in 3D reconstruction, requiring minimal assumptions on input data. Existing methods can be broadly categorized into end-to-end and visual SLAM-based approaches, both of which either struggle with long sequences or depend on slow test-time optimization and depth sensors. To address this, we first integrate a depth estimator into an RGB-D SLAM system, but this approach is hindered by inaccurate geometric details in predicted depth. Through further investigation, we find that 3D Gaussian mapping can effectively solve this problem. Building on this, we propose an online 3D reconstruction method using 3D Gaussian-based SLAM, combined with a feed-forward recurrent prediction module to directly infer camera pose from optical flow. This approach replaces slow test-time optimization with fast network inference, significantly improving tracking speed. Additionally, we introduce a local graph rendering technique to enhance robustness in feed-forward pose prediction. Experimental results on the Replica and TUM-RGBD datasets, along with a real-world deployment demonstration, show that our method achieves performance on par with the state-of-the-art SplaTAM, while reducing tracking time by more than 90%.

IROS 2025 None
ActionSink: Toward Precise Robot Manipulation with Dynamic Integration of Action Flow 2025-08-05
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Language-instructed robot manipulation has garnered significant interest due to the potential of learning from collected data. While the challenges in high-level perception and planning are continually addressed along the progress of general large pre-trained models, the low precision of low-level action estimation has emerged as the key limiting factor in manipulation performance. To this end, this paper introduces a novel robot manipulation framework, i.e., ActionSink, to pave the way toward precise action estimations in the field of learning-based robot manipulation. As the name suggests, ActionSink reformulates the actions of robots as action-caused optical flows from videos, called "action flow", in a self-supervised manner, which are then used to be retrieved and integrated to enhance the action estimation. Specifically, ActionSink incorporates two primary modules. The first module is a coarse-to-fine action flow matcher, which continuously refines the accuracy of action flow via iterative retrieval and denoising process. The second module is a dynamic action flow integrator, which employs a working memory pool that dynamically and efficiently manages the historical action flows that should be used to integrate to enhance the current action estimation. In this module, a multi-layer fusion module is proposed to integrate direct estimation and action flows from both the current and the working memory, achieving highly accurate action estimation through a series of estimation-integration processes. Our ActionSink framework outperformed prior SOTA on the LIBERO benchmark by a 7.9% success rate, and obtained nearly an 8% accuracy gain on the challenging long-horizon visual task LIBERO-Long.

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NeuFlow v2: Push High-Efficiency Optical Flow To the Limit 2025-08-03
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Real-time high-accuracy optical flow estimation is critical for a variety of real-world robotic applications. However, current learning-based methods often struggle to balance accuracy and computational efficiency: methods that achieve high accuracy typically demand substantial processing power, while faster approaches tend to sacrifice precision. These fast approaches specifically falter in their generalization capabilities and do not perform well across diverse real-world scenarios. In this work, we revisit the limitations of the SOTA methods and present NeuFlow-V2, a novel method that offers both - high accuracy in real-world datasets coupled with low computational overhead. In particular, we introduce a novel light-weight backbone and a fast refinement module to keep computational demands tractable while delivering accurate optical flow. Experimental results on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that NeuFlow-V2 provides similar accuracy to SOTA methods while achieving 10x-70x speedups. It is capable of running at over 20 FPS on 512x384 resolution images on a Jetson Orin Nano. The full training and evaluation code is available at https://github.com/neufieldrobotics/NeuFlow_v2.

Code Link
AllTracker: Efficient Dense Point Tracking at High Resolution 2025-08-01
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We introduce AllTracker: a model that estimates long-range point tracks by way of estimating the flow field between a query frame and every other frame of a video. Unlike existing point tracking methods, our approach delivers high-resolution and dense (all-pixel) correspondence fields, which can be visualized as flow maps. Unlike existing optical flow methods, our approach corresponds one frame to hundreds of subsequent frames, rather than just the next frame. We develop a new architecture for this task, blending techniques from existing work in optical flow and point tracking: the model performs iterative inference on low-resolution grids of correspondence estimates, propagating information spatially via 2D convolution layers, and propagating information temporally via pixel-aligned attention layers. The model is fast and parameter-efficient (16 million parameters), and delivers state-of-the-art point tracking accuracy at high resolution (i.e., tracking 768x1024 pixels, on a 40G GPU). A benefit of our design is that we can train jointly on optical flow datasets and point tracking datasets, and we find that doing so is crucial for top performance. We provide an extensive ablation study on our architecture details and training recipe, making it clear which details matter most. Our code and model weights are available at https://alltracker.github.io

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Simultaneous Motion And Noise Estimation with Event Cameras 2025-08-01
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Event cameras are emerging vision sensors whose noise is challenging to characterize. Existing denoising methods for event cameras are often designed in isolation and thus consider other tasks, such as motion estimation, separately (i.e., sequentially after denoising). However, motion is an intrinsic part of event data, since scene edges cannot be sensed without motion. We propose, to the best of our knowledge, the first method that simultaneously estimates motion in its various forms (e.g., ego-motion, optical flow) and noise. The method is flexible, as it allows replacing the one-step motion estimation of the widely-used Contrast Maximization framework with any other motion estimator, such as deep neural networks. The experiments show that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art results on the E-MLB denoising benchmark and competitive results on the DND21 benchmark, while demonstrating effectiveness across motion estimation and intensity reconstruction tasks. Our approach advances event-data denoising theory and expands practical denoising use-cases via open-source code. Project page: https://github.com/tub-rip/ESMD

13 pa...

13 pages, 13 figures, 6 tables, Project page https://github.com/tub-rip/ESMD

Code Link
Estimating 2D Camera Motion with Hybrid Motion Basis 2025-07-30
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Estimating 2D camera motion is a fundamental computer vision task that models the projection of 3D camera movements onto the 2D image plane. Current methods rely on either homography-based approaches, limited to planar scenes, or meshflow techniques that use grid-based local homographies but struggle with complex non-linear transformations. A key insight of our work is that combining flow fields from different homographies creates motion patterns that cannot be represented by any single homography. We introduce CamFlow, a novel framework that represents camera motion using hybrid motion bases: physical bases derived from camera geometry and stochastic bases for complex scenarios. Our approach includes a hybrid probabilistic loss function based on the Laplace distribution that enhances training robustness. For evaluation, we create a new benchmark by masking dynamic objects in existing optical flow datasets to isolate pure camera motion. Experiments show CamFlow outperforms state-of-the-art methods across diverse scenarios, demonstrating superior robustness and generalization in zero-shot settings. Code and datasets are available at our project page: https://lhaippp.github.io/CamFlow/.

ICCV 2025 Code Link
DepthFlow: Exploiting Depth-Flow Structural Correlations for Unsupervised Video Object Segmentation 2025-07-26
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Unsupervised video object segmentation (VOS) aims to detect the most prominent object in a video. Recently, two-stream approaches that leverage both RGB images and optical flow have gained significant attention, but their performance is fundamentally constrained by the scarcity of training data. To address this, we propose DepthFlow, a novel data generation method that synthesizes optical flow from single images. Our approach is driven by the key insight that VOS models depend more on structural information embedded in flow maps than on their geometric accuracy, and that this structure is highly correlated with depth. We first estimate a depth map from a source image and then convert it into a synthetic flow field that preserves essential structural cues. This process enables the transformation of large-scale image-mask pairs into image-flow-mask training pairs, dramatically expanding the data available for network training. By training a simple encoder-decoder architecture with our synthesized data, we achieve new state-of-the-art performance on all public VOS benchmarks, demonstrating a scalable and effective solution to the data scarcity problem.

ICCVW 2025 None
Event-Based De-Snowing for Autonomous Driving 2025-07-25
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Adverse weather conditions, particularly heavy snowfall, pose significant challenges to both human drivers and autonomous vehicles. Traditional image-based de-snowing methods often introduce hallucination artifacts as they rely solely on spatial information, while video-based approaches require high frame rates and suffer from alignment artifacts at lower frame rates. Camera parameters, such as exposure time, also influence the appearance of snowflakes, making the problem difficult to solve and heavily dependent on network generalization. In this paper, we propose to address the challenge of desnowing by using event cameras, which offer compressed visual information with submillisecond latency, making them ideal for de-snowing images, even in the presence of ego-motion. Our method leverages the fact that snowflake occlusions appear with a very distinctive streak signature in the spatio-temporal representation of event data. We design an attention-based module that focuses on events along these streaks to determine when a background point was occluded and use this information to recover its original intensity. We benchmark our method on DSEC-Snow, a new dataset created using a green-screen technique that overlays pre-recorded snowfall data onto the existing DSEC driving dataset, resulting in precise ground truth and synchronized image and event streams. Our approach outperforms state-of-the-art de-snowing methods by 3 dB in PSNR for image reconstruction. Moreover, we show that off-the-shelf computer vision algorithms can be applied to our reconstructions for tasks such as depth estimation and optical flow, achieving a $20%$ performance improvement over other de-snowing methods. Our work represents a crucial step towards enhancing the reliability and safety of vision systems in challenging winter conditions, paving the way for more robust, all-weather-capable applications.

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Unsupervised Joint Learning of Optical Flow and Intensity with Event Cameras 2025-07-22
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Event cameras rely on motion to obtain information about scene appearance. This means that appearance and motion are inherently linked: either both are present and recorded in the event data, or neither is captured. Previous works treat the recovery of these two visual quantities as separate tasks, which does not fit with the above-mentioned nature of event cameras and overlooks the inherent relations between them. We propose an unsupervised learning framework that jointly estimates optical flow (motion) and image intensity (appearance) using a single network. From the data generation model, we newly derive the event-based photometric error as a function of optical flow and image intensity. This error is further combined with the contrast maximization framework to form a comprehensive loss function that provides proper constraints for both flow and intensity estimation. Exhaustive experiments show our method's state-of-the-art performance: in optical flow estimation, it reduces EPE by 20% and AE by 25% compared to unsupervised approaches, while delivering competitive intensity estimation results, particularly in high dynamic range scenarios. Our method also achieves shorter inference time than all other optical flow methods and many of the image reconstruction methods, while they output only one quantity. Project page: https://github.com/tub-rip/E2FAI

13 pa...

13 pages, 8 figures, 9 tables. Project page: https://github.com/tub-rip/E2FAI . IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2025

Code Link
TSkips: Efficiency Through Explicit Temporal Delay Connections in Spiking Neural Networks 2025-07-21
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Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) with their bio-inspired Leaky Integrate-and-Fire (LIF) neurons inherently capture temporal information. This makes them well-suited for sequential tasks like processing event-based data from Dynamic Vision Sensors (DVS) and event-based speech tasks. Harnessing the temporal capabilities of SNNs requires mitigating vanishing spikes during training, capturing spatio-temporal patterns and enhancing precise spike timing. To address these challenges, we propose TSkips, augmenting SNN architectures with forward and backward skip connections that incorporate explicit temporal delays. These connections capture long-term spatio-temporal dependencies and facilitate better spike flow over long sequences. The introduction of TSkips creates a vast search space of possible configurations, encompassing skip positions and time delay values. To efficiently navigate this search space, this work leverages training-free Neural Architecture Search (NAS) to identify optimal network structures and corresponding delays. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on four event-based datasets: DSEC-flow for optical flow estimation, DVS128 Gesture for hand gesture recognition and Spiking Heidelberg Digits (SHD) and Spiking Speech Commands (SSC) for speech recognition. Our method achieves significant improvements across these datasets: up to 18% reduction in Average Endpoint Error (AEE) on DSEC-flow, 8% increase in classification accuracy on DVS128 Gesture, and up to 8% and 16% higher classification accuracy on SHD and SSC, respectively.

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Stereo Any Video: Temporally Consistent Stereo Matching 2025-07-21
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This paper introduces Stereo Any Video, a powerful framework for video stereo matching. It can estimate spatially accurate and temporally consistent disparities without relying on auxiliary information such as camera poses or optical flow. The strong capability is driven by rich priors from monocular video depth models, which are integrated with convolutional features to produce stable representations. To further enhance performance, key architectural innovations are introduced: all-to-all-pairs correlation, which constructs smooth and robust matching cost volumes, and temporal convex upsampling, which improves temporal coherence. These components collectively ensure robustness, accuracy, and temporal consistency, setting a new standard in video stereo matching. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple datasets both qualitatively and quantitatively in zero-shot settings, as well as strong generalization to real-world indoor and outdoor scenarios.

ICCV2025 None
Systole-Conditioned Generative Cardiac Motion 2025-07-20
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Accurate motion estimation in cardiac computed tomography (CT) imaging is critical for assessing cardiac function and surgical planning. Data-driven methods have become the standard approach for dense motion estimation, but they rely on vast amounts of labeled data with dense ground-truth (GT) motion annotations, which are often unfeasible to obtain. To address this limitation, we present a novel approach that synthesizes realistically looking pairs of cardiac CT frames enriched with dense 3D flow field annotations. Our method leverages a conditional Variational Autoencoder (CVAE), which incorporates a novel multi-scale feature conditioning mechanism and is trained to generate 3D flow fields conditioned on a single CT frame. By applying the generated flow field to warp the given frame, we create pairs of frames that simulate realistic myocardium deformations across the cardiac cycle. These pairs serve as fully annotated data samples, providing optical flow GT annotations. Our data generation pipeline could enable the training and validation of more complex and accurate myocardium motion models, allowing for substantially reducing reliance on manual annotations. Our code, along with animated generated samples and additional material, is available on our project page: https://shaharzuler.github.io/GenerativeCardiacMotion_Page.

Code Link
Motion Segmentation and Egomotion Estimation from Event-Based Normal Flow 2025-07-19
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This paper introduces a robust framework for motion segmentation and egomotion estimation using event-based normal flow, tailored specifically for neuromorphic vision sensors. In contrast to traditional methods that rely heavily on optical flow or explicit depth estimation, our approach exploits the sparse, high-temporal-resolution event data and incorporates geometric constraints between normal flow, scene structure, and inertial measurements. The proposed optimization-based pipeline iteratively performs event over-segmentation, isolates independently moving objects via residual analysis, and refines segmentations using hierarchical clustering informed by motion similarity and temporal consistency. Experimental results on the EVIMO2v2 dataset validate that our method achieves accurate segmentation and translational motion estimation without requiring full optical flow computation. This approach demonstrates significant advantages at object boundaries and offers considerable potential for scalable, real-time robotic and navigation applications.

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Channel-wise Motion Features for Efficient Motion Segmentation 2025-07-17
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For safety-critical robotics applications such as autonomous driving, it is important to detect all required objects accurately in real-time. Motion segmentation offers a solution by identifying dynamic objects from the scene in a class-agnostic manner. Recently, various motion segmentation models have been proposed, most of which jointly use subnetworks to estimate Depth, Pose, Optical Flow, and Scene Flow. As a result, the overall computational cost of the model increases, hindering real-time performance. In this paper, we propose a novel cost-volume-based motion feature representation, Channel-wise Motion Features. By extracting depth features of each instance in the feature map and capturing the scene's 3D motion information, it offers enhanced efficiency. The only subnetwork used to build Channel-wise Motion Features is the Pose Network, and no others are required. Our method not only achieves about 4 times the FPS of state-of-the-art models in the KITTI Dataset and Cityscapes of the VCAS-Motion Dataset, but also demonstrates equivalent accuracy while reducing the parameters to about 25$%$.

This ...

This paper has been accepted to IROS 2024 (Abu Dhabi, UAE), October 14-18, 2024

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Taming Modern Point Tracking for Speckle Tracking Echocardiography via Impartial Motion 2025-07-14
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Accurate motion estimation for tracking deformable tissues in echocardiography is essential for precise cardiac function measurements. While traditional methods like block matching or optical flow struggle with intricate cardiac motion, modern point tracking approaches remain largely underexplored in this domain. This work investigates the potential of state-of-the-art (SOTA) point tracking methods for ultrasound, with a focus on echocardiography. Although these novel approaches demonstrate strong performance in general videos, their effectiveness and generalizability in echocardiography remain limited. By analyzing cardiac motion throughout the heart cycle in real B-mode ultrasound videos, we identify that a directional motion bias across different views is affecting the existing training strategies. To mitigate this, we refine the training procedure and incorporate a set of tailored augmentations to reduce the bias and enhance tracking robustness and generalization through impartial cardiac motion. We also propose a lightweight network leveraging multi-scale cost volumes from spatial context alone to challenge the advanced spatiotemporal point tracking models. Experiments demonstrate that fine-tuning with our strategies significantly improves models' performances over their baselines, even for out-of-distribution (OOD) cases. For instance, EchoTracker boosts overall position accuracy by 60.7% and reduces median trajectory error by 61.5% across heart cycle phases. Interestingly, several point tracking models fail to outperform our proposed simple model in terms of tracking accuracy and generalization, reflecting their limitations when applied to echocardiography. Nevertheless, clinical evaluation reveals that these methods improve GLS measurements, aligning more closely with expert-validated, semi-automated tools and thus demonstrating better reproducibility in real-world applications.

Accep...

Accepted to CVAMD workshop at ICCV 2025

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Online Dense Point Tracking with Streaming Memory 2025-07-13
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Dense point tracking is a challenging task requiring the continuous tracking of every point in the initial frame throughout a substantial portion of a video, even in the presence of occlusions. Traditional methods use optical flow models to directly estimate long-range motion, but they often suffer from appearance drifting without considering temporal consistency. Recent point tracking algorithms usually depend on sliding windows for indirect information propagation from the first frame to the current one, which is slow and less effective for long-range tracking. To account for temporal consistency and enable efficient information propagation, we present a lightweight and fast model with \textbf{S}treaming memory for dense \textbf{PO}int \textbf{T}racking and online video processing. The \textbf{SPOT} framework features three core components: a customized memory reading module for feature enhancement, a sensory memory for short-term motion dynamics modeling, and a visibility-guided splatting module for accurate information propagation. This combination enables SPOT to perform dense point tracking with state-of-the-art accuracy on the CVO benchmark, as well as comparable or superior performance to offline models on sparse tracking benchmarks such as TAP-Vid and RoboTAP. Notably, SPOT with 10$\times$ smaller parameter numbers operates at least 2$\times$ faster than previous state-of-the-art models while maintaining the best performance on CVO. We will release the models and codes at: https://dqiaole.github.io/SPOT/.

ICCV 2025 Code Link
An Adaptive Sliding Window Estimator for Positioning of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Using a Single Anchor 2025-07-12
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Localization using a single range anchor combined with onboard optical-inertial odometry offers a lightweight solution that provides multidimensional measurements for the positioning of unmanned aerial vehicles. Unfortunately, the performance of such lightweight sensors varies with the dynamic environment, and the fidelity of the dynamic model is also severely affected by environmental aerial flow. To address this challenge, we propose an adaptive sliding window estimator equipped with an estimation reliability evaluator, where the states, noise covariance matrices and aerial drag are estimated simultaneously. The aerial drag effects are first evaluated based on posterior states and covariance. Then, an augmented Kalman filter is designed to pre-process multidimensional measurements and inherit historical information. Subsequently, an inverse-Wishart smoother is employed to estimate posterior states and covariance matrices. To further suppress potential divergence, a reliability evaluator is devised to infer estimation errors. We further determine the fidelity of each sensor based on the error propagation. Extensive experiments are conducted in both standard and harsh environments, demonstrating the adaptability and robustness of the proposed method. The root mean square error reaches 0.15 m, outperforming the state-of-the-art approach. Real-world close-loop control experiments are additionally performed to verify the estimator's competence in practical application.

This ...

This work has been accepted by the IEEE Sensors Journal

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MonoMobility: Zero-Shot 3D Mobility Analysis from Monocular Videos 2025-07-11
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Accurately analyzing the motion parts and their motion attributes in dynamic environments is crucial for advancing key areas such as embodied intelligence. Addressing the limitations of existing methods that rely on dense multi-view images or detailed part-level annotations, we propose an innovative framework that can analyze 3D mobility from monocular videos in a zero-shot manner. This framework can precisely parse motion parts and motion attributes only using a monocular video, completely eliminating the need for annotated training data. Specifically, our method first constructs the scene geometry and roughly analyzes the motion parts and their initial motion attributes combining depth estimation, optical flow analysis and point cloud registration method, then employs 2D Gaussian splatting for scene representation. Building on this, we introduce an end-to-end dynamic scene optimization algorithm specifically designed for articulated objects, refining the initial analysis results to ensure the system can handle 'rotation', 'translation', and even complex movements ('rotation+translation'), demonstrating high flexibility and versatility. To validate the robustness and wide applicability of our method, we created a comprehensive dataset comprising both simulated and real-world scenarios. Experimental results show that our framework can effectively analyze articulated object motions in an annotation-free manner, showcasing its significant potential in future embodied intelligence applications.

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PanMatch: Unleashing the Potential of Large Vision Models for Unified Matching Models 2025-07-11
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This work presents PanMatch, a versatile foundation model for robust correspondence matching. Unlike previous methods that rely on task-specific architectures and domain-specific fine-tuning to support tasks like stereo matching, optical flow or feature matching, our key insight is that any two-frame correspondence matching task can be addressed within a 2D displacement estimation framework using the same model weights. Such a formulation eliminates the need for designing specialized unified architectures or task-specific ensemble models. Instead, it achieves multi-task integration by endowing displacement estimation algorithms with unprecedented generalization capabilities. To this end, we highlight the importance of a robust feature extractor applicable across multiple domains and tasks, and propose the feature transformation pipeline that leverage all-purpose features from Large Vision Models to endow matching baselines with zero-shot cross-view matching capabilities. Furthermore, we assemble a cross-domain dataset with near 1.8 million samples from stereo matching, optical flow, and feature matching domains to pretrain PanMatch. We demonstrate the versatility of PanMatch across a wide range of domains and downstream tasks using the same model weights. Our model outperforms UniMatch and Flow-Anything on cross-task evaluations, and achieves comparable performance to most state-of-the-art task-specific algorithms on task-oriented benchmarks. Additionally, PanMatch presents unprecedented zero-shot performance in abnormal scenarios, such as rainy day and satellite imagery, where most existing robust algorithms fail to yield meaningful results.

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mmFlux: Crowd Flow Analytics with Commodity mmWave MIMO Radar 2025-07-09
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In this paper, we present a novel framework for extracting underlying crowd motion patterns and inferring crowd semantics using mmWave radar. First, our proposed signal processing pipeline combines optical flow estimation concepts from vision with novel statistical and morphological noise filtering to generate high-fidelity mmWave flow fields - compact 2D vector representations of crowd motion. We then introduce a novel approach that transforms these fields into directed geometric graphs, where edges capture dominant flow currents, vertices mark crowd splitting or merging, and flow distribution is quantified across edges. Finally, we show that by analyzing the local Jacobian and computing the corresponding curl and divergence, we can extract key crowd semantics for both structured and diffused crowds. We conduct 21 experiments on crowds of up to (and including) 20 people across 3 areas, using commodity mmWave radar. Our framework achieves high-fidelity graph reconstruction of the underlying flow structure, even for complex crowd patterns, demonstrating strong spatial alignment and precise quantitative characterization of flow split ratios. Finally, our curl and divergence analysis accurately infers key crowd semantics, e.g., abrupt turns, boundaries where flow directions shift, dispersions, and gatherings. Overall, these findings validate our framework, underscoring its potential for various crowd analytics applications.

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VISC: mmWave Radar Scene Flow Estimation using Pervasive Visual-Inertial Supervision 2025-07-05
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This work proposes a mmWave radar's scene flow estimation framework supervised by data from a widespread visual-inertial (VI) sensor suite, allowing crowdsourced training data from smart vehicles. Current scene flow estimation methods for mmWave radar are typically supervised by dense point clouds from 3D LiDARs, which are expensive and not widely available in smart vehicles. While VI data are more accessible, visual images alone cannot capture the 3D motions of moving objects, making it difficult to supervise their scene flow. Moreover, the temporal drift of VI rigid transformation also degenerates the scene flow estimation of static points. To address these challenges, we propose a drift-free rigid transformation estimator that fuses kinematic model-based ego-motions with neural network-learned results. It provides strong supervision signals to radar-based rigid transformation and infers the scene flow of static points. Then, we develop an optical-mmWave supervision extraction module that extracts the supervision signals of radar rigid transformation and scene flow. It strengthens the supervision by learning the scene flow of dynamic points with the joint constraints of optical and mmWave radar measurements. Extensive experiments demonstrate that, in smoke-filled environments, our method even outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) approaches using costly LiDARs.

None
EndoFlow-SLAM: Real-Time Endoscopic SLAM with Flow-Constrained Gaussian Splatting 2025-07-05
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Efficient three-dimensional reconstruction and real-time visualization are critical in surgical scenarios such as endoscopy. In recent years, 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has demonstrated remarkable performance in efficient 3D reconstruction and rendering. Most 3DGS-based Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) methods only rely on the appearance constraints for optimizing both 3DGS and camera poses. However, in endoscopic scenarios, the challenges include photometric inconsistencies caused by non-Lambertian surfaces and dynamic motion from breathing affects the performance of SLAM systems. To address these issues, we additionally introduce optical flow loss as a geometric constraint, which effectively constrains both the 3D structure of the scene and the camera motion. Furthermore, we propose a depth regularisation strategy to mitigate the problem of photometric inconsistencies and ensure the validity of 3DGS depth rendering in endoscopic scenes. In addition, to improve scene representation in the SLAM system, we improve the 3DGS refinement strategy by focusing on viewpoints corresponding to Keyframes with suboptimal rendering quality frames, achieving better rendering results. Extensive experiments on the C3VD static dataset and the StereoMIS dynamic dataset demonstrate that our method outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in novel view synthesis and pose estimation, exhibiting high performance in both static and dynamic surgical scenes.

This ...

This paper has been accepted at MICCAI2025

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Mixtures of Neural Network Experts with Application to Phytoplankton Flow Cytometry Data 2025-07-02
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Flow cytometry is a valuable technique that measures the optical properties of particles at a single-cell resolution. When deployed in the ocean, flow cytometry allows oceanographers to study different types of photosynthetic microbes called phytoplankton. It is of great interest to study how phytoplankton properties change in response to environmental conditions. In our work, we develop a nonlinear mixture of experts model for simultaneous clustering and regression utilizing random-weight neural networks. Our model allows one to flexibly estimate how cell properties and relative abundances depend on environmental covariates, without the computational burden of backpropagation. We show that the proposed model provides superior predictive performance in simulated examples compared to a mixture of linear experts. Also, applying our model to real data, we show that our model has (1) comparable out-of-sample prediction performance, and (2) more realistic estimates of phytoplankton behavior.

35 pa...

35 pages, 14 figures. Submitted to Environmetrics

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DIJE: Dense Image Jacobian Estimation for Robust Robotic Self-Recognition and Visual Servoing 2025-07-01
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For robots to move in the real world, they must first correctly understand the state of its own body and the tools that it holds. In this research, we propose DIJE, an algorithm to estimate the image Jacobian for every pixel. It is based on an optical flow calculation and a simplified Kalman Filter that can be efficiently run on the whole image in real time. It does not rely on markers nor knowledge of the robotic structure. We use the DIJE in a self-recognition process which can robustly distinguish between movement by the robot and by external entities, even when the motion overlaps. We also propose a visual servoing controller based on DIJE, which can learn to control the robot's body to conduct reaching movements or bimanual tool-tip control. The proposed algorithms were implemented on a physical musculoskeletal robot and its performance was verified. We believe that such global estimation of the visuomotor policy has the potential to be extended into a more general framework for manipulation.

2022 ...

2022 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)

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PriOr-Flow: Enhancing Primitive Panoramic Optical Flow with Orthogonal View 2025-06-30
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Panoramic optical flow enables a comprehensive understanding of temporal dynamics across wide fields of view. However, severe distortions caused by sphere-to-plane projections, such as the equirectangular projection (ERP), significantly degrade the performance of conventional perspective-based optical flow methods, especially in polar regions. To address this challenge, we propose PriOr-Flow, a novel dual-branch framework that leverages the low-distortion nature of the orthogonal view to enhance optical flow estimation in these regions. Specifically, we introduce the Dual-Cost Collaborative Lookup (DCCL) operator, which jointly retrieves correlation information from both the primitive and orthogonal cost volumes, effectively mitigating distortion noise during cost volume construction. Furthermore, our Ortho-Driven Distortion Compensation (ODDC) module iteratively refines motion features from both branches, further suppressing polar distortions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PriOr-Flow is compatible with various perspective-based iterative optical flow methods and consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance on publicly available panoramic optical flow datasets, setting a new benchmark for wide-field motion estimation. The code is publicly available at: https://github.com/longliangLiu/PriOr-Flow.

11 pages Code Link
MEMFOF: High-Resolution Training for Memory-Efficient Multi-Frame Optical Flow Estimation 2025-06-29
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Recent advances in optical flow estimation have prioritized accuracy at the cost of growing GPU memory consumption, particularly for high-resolution (FullHD) inputs. We introduce MEMFOF, a memory-efficient multi-frame optical flow method that identifies a favorable trade-off between multi-frame estimation and GPU memory usage. Notably, MEMFOF requires only 2.09 GB of GPU memory at runtime for 1080p inputs, and 28.5 GB during training, which uniquely positions our method to be trained at native 1080p without the need for cropping or downsampling. We systematically revisit design choices from RAFT-like architectures, integrating reduced correlation volumes and high-resolution training protocols alongside multi-frame estimation, to achieve state-of-the-art performance across multiple benchmarks while substantially reducing memory overhead. Our method outperforms more resource-intensive alternatives in both accuracy and runtime efficiency, validating its robustness for flow estimation at high resolutions. At the time of submission, our method ranks first on the Spring benchmark with a 1-pixel (1px) outlier rate of 3.289, leads Sintel (clean) with an endpoint error (EPE) of 0.963, and achieves the best Fl-all error on KITTI-2015 at 2.94%. The code is available at https://github.com/msu-video-group/memfof.

Accep...

Accepted at ICCV 2025

Code Link
Zero-TIG: Temporal Consistency-Aware Zero-Shot Illumination-Guided Low-light Video Enhancement 2025-06-25
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Low-light and underwater videos suffer from poor visibility, low contrast, and high noise, necessitating enhancements in visual quality. However, existing approaches typically rely on paired ground truth, which limits their practicality and often fails to maintain temporal consistency. To overcome these obstacles, this paper introduces a novel zero-shot learning approach named Zero-TIG, leveraging the Retinex theory and optical flow techniques. The proposed network consists of an enhancement module and a temporal feedback module. The enhancement module comprises three subnetworks: low-light image denoising, illumination estimation, and reflection denoising. The temporal enhancement module ensures temporal consistency by incorporating histogram equalization, optical flow computation, and image warping to align the enhanced previous frame with the current frame, thereby maintaining continuity. Additionally, we address color distortion in underwater data by adaptively balancing RGB channels. The experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves low-light video enhancement without the need for paired training data, making it a promising and applicable method for real-world scenario enhancement.

None
Online camera-pose-free stereo endoscopic tissue deformation recovery with tissue-invariant vision-biomechanics consistency 2025-06-24
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Tissue deformation recovery based on stereo endoscopic images is crucial for tool-tissue interaction analysis and benefits surgical navigation and autonomous soft tissue manipulation. Previous research suffers from the problems raised from camera motion, occlusion, large tissue deformation, lack of tissue-specific biomechanical priors, and reliance on offline processing. Unlike previous studies where the tissue geometry and deformation are represented by 3D points and displacements, the proposed method models tissue geometry as the 3D point and derivative map and tissue deformation as the 3D displacement and local deformation map. For a single surface point, 6 parameters are used to describe its rigid motion and 3 parameters for its local deformation. The method is formulated under the camera-centric setting, where all motions are regarded as the scene motion with respect to the camera. Inter-frame alignment is realized by optimizing the inter-frame deformation, making it unnecessary to estimate camera pose. The concept of the canonical map is introduced to optimize tissue geometry and deformation in an online approach. Quantitative and qualitative experiments were conducted using in vivo and ex vivo laparoscopic datasets. With the inputs of depth and optical flow, the method stably models tissue geometry and deformation even when the tissue is partially occluded or moving outside the field of view. Results show that the 3D reconstruction accuracy in the non-occluded and occluded areas reaches 0.37$\pm$0.27 mm and 0.39$\pm$0.21 mm in terms of surface distance, respectively. The method can also estimate surface strain distribution during various manipulations as an extra modality for mechanical-based analysis.

None
SurgSora: Object-Aware Diffusion Model for Controllable Surgical Video Generation 2025-06-22
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Surgical video generation can enhance medical education and research, but existing methods lack fine-grained motion control and realism. We introduce SurgSora, a framework that generates high-fidelity, motion-controllable surgical videos from a single input frame and user-specified motion cues. Unlike prior approaches that treat objects indiscriminately or rely on ground-truth segmentation masks, SurgSora leverages self-predicted object features and depth information to refine RGB appearance and optical flow for precise video synthesis. It consists of three key modules: (1) the Dual Semantic Injector, which extracts object-specific RGB-D features and segmentation cues to enhance spatial representations; (2) the Decoupled Flow Mapper, which fuses multi-scale optical flow with semantic features for realistic motion dynamics; and (3) the Trajectory Controller, which estimates sparse optical flow and enables user-guided object movement. By conditioning these enriched features within the Stable Video Diffusion, SurgSora achieves state-of-the-art visual authenticity and controllability in advancing surgical video synthesis, as demonstrated by extensive quantitative and qualitative comparisons. Our human evaluation in collaboration with expert surgeons further demonstrates the high realism of SurgSora-generated videos, highlighting the potential of our method for surgical training and education. Our project is available at https://surgsora.github.io/surgsora.github.io.

MICCAI 2025 Code Link
EndoMUST: Monocular Depth Estimation for Robotic Endoscopy via End-to-end Multi-step Self-supervised Training 2025-06-19
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Monocular depth estimation and ego-motion estimation are significant tasks for scene perception and navigation in stable, accurate and efficient robot-assisted endoscopy. To tackle lighting variations and sparse textures in endoscopic scenes, multiple techniques including optical flow, appearance flow and intrinsic image decomposition have been introduced into the existing methods. However, the effective training strategy for multiple modules are still critical to deal with both illumination issues and information interference for self-supervised depth estimation in endoscopy. Therefore, a novel framework with multistep efficient finetuning is proposed in this work. In each epoch of end-to-end training, the process is divided into three steps, including optical flow registration, multiscale image decomposition and multiple transformation alignments. At each step, only the related networks are trained without interference of irrelevant information. Based on parameter-efficient finetuning on the foundation model, the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on self-supervised depth estimation on SCARED dataset and zero-shot depth estimation on Hamlyn dataset, with 4%$\sim$10% lower error. The evaluation code of this work has been published on https://github.com/BaymaxShao/EndoMUST.

Accep...

Accepted by IROS 2025

Code Link
MOL: Joint Estimation of Micro-Expression, Optical Flow, and Landmark via Transformer-Graph-Style Convolution 2025-06-17
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Facial micro-expression recognition (MER) is a challenging problem, due to transient and subtle micro-expression (ME) actions. Most existing methods depend on hand-crafted features, key frames like onset, apex, and offset frames, or deep networks limited by small-scale and low-diversity datasets. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end micro-action-aware deep learning framework with advantages from transformer, graph convolution, and vanilla convolution. In particular, we propose a novel F5C block composed of fully-connected convolution and channel correspondence convolution to directly extract local-global features from a sequence of raw frames, without the prior knowledge of key frames. The transformer-style fully-connected convolution is proposed to extract local features while maintaining global receptive fields, and the graph-style channel correspondence convolution is introduced to model the correlations among feature patterns. Moreover, MER, optical flow estimation, and facial landmark detection are jointly trained by sharing the local-global features. The two latter tasks contribute to capturing facial subtle action information for MER, which can alleviate the impact of insufficient training data. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework (i) outperforms the state-of-the-art MER methods on CASME II, SAMM, and SMIC benchmarks, (ii) works well for optical flow estimation and facial landmark detection, and (iii) can capture facial subtle muscle actions in local regions associated with MEs. The code is available at https://github.com/CYF-cuber/MOL.

This ...

This paper has been accepted by IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence

Code Link
Video Depth Anything: Consistent Depth Estimation for Super-Long Videos 2025-06-15
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Depth Anything has achieved remarkable success in monocular depth estimation with strong generalization ability. However, it suffers from temporal inconsistency in videos, hindering its practical applications. Various methods have been proposed to alleviate this issue by leveraging video generation models or introducing priors from optical flow and camera poses. Nonetheless, these methods are only applicable to short videos (< 10 seconds) and require a trade-off between quality and computational efficiency. We propose Video Depth Anything for high-quality, consistent depth estimation in super-long videos (over several minutes) without sacrificing efficiency. We base our model on Depth Anything V2 and replace its head with an efficient spatial-temporal head. We design a straightforward yet effective temporal consistency loss by constraining the temporal depth gradient, eliminating the need for additional geometric priors. The model is trained on a joint dataset of video depth and unlabeled images, similar to Depth Anything V2. Moreover, a novel key-frame-based strategy is developed for long video inference. Experiments show that our model can be applied to arbitrarily long videos without compromising quality, consistency, or generalization ability. Comprehensive evaluations on multiple video benchmarks demonstrate that our approach sets a new state-of-the-art in zero-shot video depth estimation. We offer models of different scales to support a range of scenarios, with our smallest model capable of real-time performance at 30 FPS.

Proje...

Project page: https://videodepthanything.github.io/

None
Princeton365: A Diverse Dataset with Accurate Camera Pose 2025-06-10
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We introduce Princeton365, a large-scale diverse dataset of 365 videos with accurate camera pose. Our dataset bridges the gap between accuracy and data diversity in current SLAM benchmarks by introducing a novel ground truth collection framework that leverages calibration boards and a 360-camera. We collect indoor, outdoor, and object scanning videos with synchronized monocular and stereo RGB video outputs as well as IMU. We further propose a new scene scale-aware evaluation metric for SLAM based on the the optical flow induced by the camera pose estimation error. In contrast to the current metrics, our new metric allows for comparison between the performance of SLAM methods across scenes as opposed to existing metrics such as Average Trajectory Error (ATE), allowing researchers to analyze the failure modes of their methods. We also propose a challenging Novel View Synthesis benchmark that covers cases not covered by current NVS benchmarks, such as fully non-Lambertian scenes with 360-degree camera trajectories. Please visit https://princeton365.cs.princeton.edu for the dataset, code, videos, and submission.

None
UFM: A Simple Path towards Unified Dense Correspondence with Flow 2025-06-10
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Dense image correspondence is central to many applications, such as visual odometry, 3D reconstruction, object association, and re-identification. Historically, dense correspondence has been tackled separately for wide-baseline scenarios and optical flow estimation, despite the common goal of matching content between two images. In this paper, we develop a Unified Flow & Matching model (UFM), which is trained on unified data for pixels that are co-visible in both source and target images. UFM uses a simple, generic transformer architecture that directly regresses the (u,v) flow. It is easier to train and more accurate for large flows compared to the typical coarse-to-fine cost volumes in prior work. UFM is 28% more accurate than state-of-the-art flow methods (Unimatch), while also having 62% less error and 6.7x faster than dense wide-baseline matchers (RoMa). UFM is the first to demonstrate that unified training can outperform specialized approaches across both domains. This result enables fast, general-purpose correspondence and opens new directions for multi-modal, long-range, and real-time correspondence tasks.

Proje...

Project Page: https://uniflowmatch.github.io/

None
Spatio-Temporal State Space Model For Efficient Event-Based Optical Flow 2025-06-09
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Event cameras unlock new frontiers that were previously unthinkable with standard frame-based cameras. One notable example is low-latency motion estimation (optical flow), which is critical for many real-time applications. In such applications, the computational efficiency of algorithms is paramount. Although recent deep learning paradigms such as CNN, RNN, or ViT have shown remarkable performance, they often lack the desired computational efficiency. Conversely, asynchronous event-based methods including SNNs and GNNs are computationally efficient; however, these approaches fail to capture sufficient spatio-temporal information, a powerful feature required to achieve better performance for optical flow estimation. In this work, we introduce Spatio-Temporal State Space Model (STSSM) module along with a novel network architecture to develop an extremely efficient solution with competitive performance. Our STSSM module leverages state-space models to effectively capture spatio-temporal correlations in event data, offering higher performance with lower complexity compared to ViT, CNN-based architectures in similar settings. Our model achieves 4.5x faster inference and 8x lower computations compared to TMA and 2x lower computations compared to EV-FlowNet with competitive performance on the DSEC benchmark. Our code will be available at https://github.com/AhmedHumais/E-STMFlow

Code Link
Flow-Anything: Learning Real-World Optical Flow Estimation from Large-Scale Single-view Images 2025-06-09
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Optical flow estimation is a crucial subfield of computer vision, serving as a foundation for video tasks. However, the real-world robustness is limited by animated synthetic datasets for training. This introduces domain gaps when applied to real-world applications and limits the benefits of scaling up datasets. To address these challenges, we propose \textbf{Flow-Anything}, a large-scale data generation framework designed to learn optical flow estimation from any single-view images in the real world. We employ two effective steps to make data scaling-up promising. First, we convert a single-view image into a 3D representation using advanced monocular depth estimation networks. This allows us to render optical flow and novel view images under a virtual camera. Second, we develop an Object-Independent Volume Rendering module and a Depth-Aware Inpainting module to model the dynamic objects in the 3D representation. These two steps allow us to generate realistic datasets for training from large-scale single-view images, namely \textbf{FA-Flow Dataset}. For the first time, we demonstrate the benefits of generating optical flow training data from large-scale real-world images, outperforming the most advanced unsupervised methods and supervised methods on synthetic datasets. Moreover, our models serve as a foundation model and enhance the performance of various downstream video tasks.

None
GoTrack: Generic 6DoF Object Pose Refinement and Tracking 2025-06-08
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We introduce GoTrack, an efficient and accurate CAD-based method for 6DoF object pose refinement and tracking, which can handle diverse objects without any object-specific training. Unlike existing tracking methods that rely solely on an analysis-by-synthesis approach for model-to-frame registration, GoTrack additionally integrates frame-to-frame registration, which saves compute and stabilizes tracking. Both types of registration are realized by optical flow estimation. The model-to-frame registration is noticeably simpler than in existing methods, relying only on standard neural network blocks (a transformer is trained on top of DINOv2) and producing reliable pose confidence scores without a scoring network. For the frame-to-frame registration, which is an easier problem as consecutive video frames are typically nearly identical, we employ a light off-the-shelf optical flow model. We demonstrate that GoTrack can be seamlessly combined with existing coarse pose estimation methods to create a minimal pipeline that reaches state-of-the-art RGB-only results on standard benchmarks for 6DoF object pose estimation and tracking. Our source code and trained models are publicly available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/gotrack

Code Link
Dy3DGS-SLAM: Monocular 3D Gaussian Splatting SLAM for Dynamic Environments 2025-06-06
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Current Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) methods based on Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) or 3D Gaussian Splatting excel in reconstructing static 3D scenes but struggle with tracking and reconstruction in dynamic environments, such as real-world scenes with moving elements. Existing NeRF-based SLAM approaches addressing dynamic challenges typically rely on RGB-D inputs, with few methods accommodating pure RGB input. To overcome these limitations, we propose Dy3DGS-SLAM, the first 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) SLAM method for dynamic scenes using monocular RGB input. To address dynamic interference, we fuse optical flow masks and depth masks through a probabilistic model to obtain a fused dynamic mask. With only a single network iteration, this can constrain tracking scales and refine rendered geometry. Based on the fused dynamic mask, we designed a novel motion loss to constrain the pose estimation network for tracking. In mapping, we use the rendering loss of dynamic pixels, color, and depth to eliminate transient interference and occlusion caused by dynamic objects. Experimental results demonstrate that Dy3DGS-SLAM achieves state-of-the-art tracking and rendering in dynamic environments, outperforming or matching existing RGB-D methods.

None
JointSplat: Probabilistic Joint Flow-Depth Optimization for Sparse-View Gaussian Splatting 2025-06-04
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Reconstructing 3D scenes from sparse viewpoints is a long-standing challenge with wide applications. Recent advances in feed-forward 3D Gaussian sparse-view reconstruction methods provide an efficient solution for real-time novel view synthesis by leveraging geometric priors learned from large-scale multi-view datasets and computing 3D Gaussian centers via back-projection. Despite offering strong geometric cues, both feed-forward multi-view depth estimation and flow-depth joint estimation face key limitations: the former suffers from mislocation and artifact issues in low-texture or repetitive regions, while the latter is prone to local noise and global inconsistency due to unreliable matches when ground-truth flow supervision is unavailable. To overcome this, we propose JointSplat, a unified framework that leverages the complementarity between optical flow and depth via a novel probabilistic optimization mechanism. Specifically, this pixel-level mechanism scales the information fusion between depth and flow based on the matching probability of optical flow during training. Building upon the above mechanism, we further propose a novel multi-view depth-consistency loss to leverage the reliability of supervision while suppressing misleading gradients in uncertain areas. Evaluated on RealEstate10K and ACID, JointSplat consistently outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods, demonstrating the effectiveness and robustness of our proposed probabilistic joint flow-depth optimization approach for high-fidelity sparse-view 3D reconstruction.

None
EDCFlow: Exploring Temporally Dense Difference Maps for Event-based Optical Flow Estimation 2025-06-04
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Recent learning-based methods for event-based optical flow estimation utilize cost volumes for pixel matching but suffer from redundant computations and limited scalability to higher resolutions for flow refinement. In this work, we take advantage of the complementarity between temporally dense feature differences of adjacent event frames and cost volume and present a lightweight event-based optical flow network (EDCFlow) to achieve high-quality flow estimation at a higher resolution. Specifically, an attention-based multi-scale temporal feature difference layer is developed to capture diverse motion patterns at high resolution in a computation-efficient manner. An adaptive fusion of high-resolution difference motion features and low-resolution correlation motion features is performed to enhance motion representation and model generalization. Notably, EDCFlow can serve as a plug-and-play refinement module for RAFT-like event-based methods to enhance flow details. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EDCFlow achieves better performance with lower complexity compared to existing methods, offering superior generalization.

14 pages, 8 figures None
Learning Optical Flow Field via Neural Ordinary Differential Equation 2025-06-03
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Recent works on optical flow estimation use neural networks to predict the flow field that maps positions of one image to positions of the other. These networks consist of a feature extractor, a correlation volume, and finally several refinement steps. These refinement steps mimic the iterative refinements performed by classical optimization algorithms and are usually implemented by neural layers (e.g., GRU) which are recurrently executed for a fixed and pre-determined number of steps. However, relying on a fixed number of steps may result in suboptimal performance because it is not tailored to the input data. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach for predicting the derivative of the flow using a continuous model, namely neural ordinary differential equations (ODE). One key advantage of this approach is its capacity to model an equilibrium process, dynamically adjusting the number of compute steps based on the data at hand. By following a particular neural architecture, ODE solver, and associated hyperparameters, our proposed model can replicate the exact same updates as recurrent cells used in existing works, offering greater generality. Through extensive experimental analysis on optical flow benchmarks, we demonstrate that our approach achieves an impressive improvement over baseline and existing models, all while requiring only a single refinement step.

CVPRW 2025 None
LinkTo-Anime: A 2D Animation Optical Flow Dataset from 3D Model Rendering 2025-06-03
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Existing optical flow datasets focus primarily on real-world simulation or synthetic human motion, but few are tailored to Celluloid(cel) anime character motion: a domain with unique visual and motion characteristics. To bridge this gap and facilitate research in optical flow estimation and downstream tasks such as anime video generation and line drawing colorization, we introduce LinkTo-Anime, the first high-quality dataset specifically designed for cel anime character motion generated with 3D model rendering. LinkTo-Anime provides rich annotations including forward and backward optical flow, occlusion masks, and Mixamo Skeleton. The dataset comprises 395 video sequences, totally 24,230 training frames, 720 validation frames, and 4,320 test frames. Furthermore, a comprehensive benchmark is constructed with various optical flow estimation methods to analyze the shortcomings and limitations across multiple datasets.

None
Flying Co-Stereo: Enabling Long-Range Aerial Dense Mapping via Collaborative Stereo Vision of Dynamic-Baseline 2025-05-31
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Lightweight long-range mapping is critical for safe navigation of UAV swarms in large-scale unknown environments. Traditional stereo vision systems with fixed short baselines face limited perception ranges. To address this, we propose Flying Co-Stereo, a cross-agent collaborative stereo vision system that leverages the wide-baseline spatial configuration of two UAVs for long-range dense mapping. Key innovations include: (1) a dual-spectrum visual-inertial-ranging estimator for robust baseline estimation; (2) a hybrid feature association strategy combining deep learning-based cross-agent matching and optical-flow-based intra-agent tracking; (3) A sparse-to-dense depth recovery scheme,refining dense monocular depth predictions using exponential fitting of long-range triangulated sparse landmarks for precise metric-scale mapping. Experiments demonstrate the Flying Co-Stereo system achieves dense 3D mapping up to 70 meters with 2.3%-9.7% relative error, outperforming conventional systems by up to 350% in depth range and 450% in coverage area. The project webpage: https://xingxingzuo.github.io/flying_co_stereo

Code Link
Improving Optical Flow and Stereo Depth Estimation by Leveraging Uncertainty-Based Learning Difficulties 2025-05-31
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Conventional training for optical flow and stereo depth models typically employs a uniform loss function across all pixels. However, this one-size-fits-all approach often overlooks the significant variations in learning difficulty among individual pixels and contextual regions. This paper investigates the uncertainty-based confidence maps which capture these spatially varying learning difficulties and introduces tailored solutions to address them. We first present the Difficulty Balancing (DB) loss, which utilizes an error-based confidence measure to encourage the network to focus more on challenging pixels and regions. Moreover, we identify that some difficult pixels and regions are affected by occlusions, resulting from the inherently ill-posed matching problem in the absence of real correspondences. To address this, we propose the Occlusion Avoiding (OA) loss, designed to guide the network into cycle consistency-based confident regions, where feature matching is more reliable. By combining the DB and OA losses, we effectively manage various types of challenging pixels and regions during training. Experiments on both optical flow and stereo depth tasks consistently demonstrate significant performance improvements when applying our proposed combination of the DB and OA losses.

CVPRW2025 None
Multi-Scale RAFT: Combining Hierarchical Concepts for Learning-based Optical FLow Estimation 2025-05-29
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Many classical and learning-based optical flow methods rely on hierarchical concepts to improve both accuracy and robustness. However, one of the currently most successful approaches -- RAFT -- hardly exploits such concepts. In this work, we show that multi-scale ideas are still valuable. More precisely, using RAFT as a baseline, we propose a novel multi-scale neural network that combines several hierarchical concepts within a single estimation framework. These concepts include (i) a partially shared coarse-to-fine architecture, (ii) multi-scale features, (iii) a hierarchical cost volume and (iv) a multi-scale multi-iteration loss. Experiments on MPI Sintel and KITTI clearly demonstrate the benefits of our approach. They show not only substantial improvements compared to RAFT, but also state-of-the-art results -- in particular in non-occluded regions. Code will be available at https://github.com/cv-stuttgart/MS_RAFT.

Code Link
Object Concepts Emerge from Motion 2025-05-27
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Object concepts play a foundational role in human visual cognition, enabling perception, memory, and interaction in the physical world. Inspired by findings in developmental neuroscience - where infants are shown to acquire object understanding through observation of motion - we propose a biologically inspired framework for learning object-centric visual representations in an unsupervised manner. Our key insight is that motion boundary serves as a strong signal for object-level grouping, which can be used to derive pseudo instance supervision from raw videos. Concretely, we generate motion-based instance masks using off-the-shelf optical flow and clustering algorithms, and use them to train visual encoders via contrastive learning. Our framework is fully label-free and does not rely on camera calibration, making it scalable to large-scale unstructured video data. We evaluate our approach on three downstream tasks spanning both low-level (monocular depth estimation) and high-level (3D object detection and occupancy prediction) vision. Our models outperform previous supervised and self-supervised baselines and demonstrate strong generalization to unseen scenes. These results suggest that motion-induced object representations offer a compelling alternative to existing vision foundation models, capturing a crucial but overlooked level of abstraction: the visual instance. The corresponding code will be released upon paper acceptance.

None
Brightness-Invariant Tracking Estimation in Tagged MRI 2025-05-23
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Magnetic resonance (MR) tagging is an imaging technique for noninvasively tracking tissue motion in vivo by creating a visible pattern of magnetization saturation (tags) that deforms with the tissue. Due to longitudinal relaxation and progression to steady-state, the tags and tissue brightnesses change over time, which makes tracking with optical flow methods error-prone. Although Fourier methods can alleviate these problems, they are also sensitive to brightness changes as well as spectral spreading due to motion. To address these problems, we introduce the brightness-invariant tracking estimation (BRITE) technique for tagged MRI. BRITE disentangles the anatomy from the tag pattern in the observed tagged image sequence and simultaneously estimates the Lagrangian motion. The inherent ill-posedness of this problem is addressed by leveraging the expressive power of denoising diffusion probabilistic models to represent the probabilistic distribution of the underlying anatomy and the flexibility of physics-informed neural networks to estimate biologically-plausible motion. A set of tagged MR images of a gel phantom was acquired with various tag periods and imaging flip angles to demonstrate the impact of brightness variations and to validate our method. The results show that BRITE achieves more accurate motion and strain estimates as compared to other state of the art methods, while also being resistant to tag fading.

Accep...

Accepted by IPMI 2025

None
Efficient Correlation Volume Sampling for Ultra-High-Resolution Optical Flow Estimation 2025-05-22
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Recent optical flow estimation methods often employ local cost sampling from a dense all-pairs correlation volume. This results in quadratic computational and memory complexity in the number of pixels. Although an alternative memory-efficient implementation with on-demand cost computation exists, this is slower in practice and therefore prior methods typically process images at reduced resolutions, missing fine-grained details. To address this, we propose a more efficient implementation of the all-pairs correlation volume sampling, still matching the exact mathematical operator as defined by RAFT. Our approach outperforms on-demand sampling by up to 90% while maintaining low memory usage, and performs on par with the default implementation with up to 95% lower memory usage. As cost sampling makes up a significant portion of the overall runtime, this can translate to up to 50% savings for the total end-to-end model inference in memory-constrained environments. Our evaluation of existing methods includes an 8K ultra-high-resolution dataset and an additional inference-time modification of the recent SEA-RAFT method. With this, we achieve state-of-the-art results at high resolutions both in accuracy and efficiency.

None
V2V: Scaling Event-Based Vision through Efficient Video-to-Voxel Simulation 2025-05-22
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Event-based cameras offer unique advantages such as high temporal resolution, high dynamic range, and low power consumption. However, the massive storage requirements and I/O burdens of existing synthetic data generation pipelines and the scarcity of real data prevent event-based training datasets from scaling up, limiting the development and generalization capabilities of event vision models. To address this challenge, we introduce Video-to-Voxel (V2V), an approach that directly converts conventional video frames into event-based voxel grid representations, bypassing the storage-intensive event stream generation entirely. V2V enables a 150 times reduction in storage requirements while supporting on-the-fly parameter randomization for enhanced model robustness. Leveraging this efficiency, we train several video reconstruction and optical flow estimation model architectures on 10,000 diverse videos totaling 52 hours--an order of magnitude larger than existing event datasets, yielding substantial improvements.

None
Planar Velocity Estimation for Fast-Moving Mobile Robots Using Event-Based Optical Flow 2025-05-19
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Accurate velocity estimation is critical in mobile robotics, particularly for driver assistance systems and autonomous driving. Wheel odometry fused with Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) data is a widely used method for velocity estimation; however, it typically requires strong assumptions, such as non-slip steering, or complex vehicle dynamics models that do not hold under varying environmental conditions like slippery surfaces. We introduce an approach to velocity estimation that is decoupled from wheel-to-surface traction assumptions by leveraging planar kinematics in combination with optical flow from event cameras pointed perpendicularly at the ground. The asynchronous micro-second latency and high dynamic range of event cameras make them highly robust to motion blur, a common challenge in vision-based perception techniques for autonomous driving. The proposed method is evaluated through in-field experiments on a 1:10 scale autonomous racing platform and compared to precise motion capture data, demonstrating not only performance on par with the state-of-the-art Event-VIO method but also a 38.3 % improvement in lateral error. Qualitative experiments at highway speeds of up to 32 m/s further confirm the effectiveness of our approach, indicating significant potential for real-world deployment.

None
FreeDriveRF: Monocular RGB Dynamic NeRF without Poses for Autonomous Driving via Point-Level Dynamic-Static Decoupling 2025-05-14
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Dynamic scene reconstruction for autonomous driving enables vehicles to perceive and interpret complex scene changes more precisely. Dynamic Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) have recently shown promising capability in scene modeling. However, many existing methods rely heavily on accurate poses inputs and multi-sensor data, leading to increased system complexity. To address this, we propose FreeDriveRF, which reconstructs dynamic driving scenes using only sequential RGB images without requiring poses inputs. We innovatively decouple dynamic and static parts at the early sampling level using semantic supervision, mitigating image blurring and artifacts. To overcome the challenges posed by object motion and occlusion in monocular camera, we introduce a warped ray-guided dynamic object rendering consistency loss, utilizing optical flow to better constrain the dynamic modeling process. Additionally, we incorporate estimated dynamic flow to constrain the pose optimization process, improving the stability and accuracy of unbounded scene reconstruction. Extensive experiments conducted on the KITTI and Waymo datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our method in dynamic scene modeling for autonomous driving.

7 pag...

7 pages, 9 figures, accepted by ICRA2025

None
Towards Anytime Optical Flow Estimation with Event Cameras 2025-05-13
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Event cameras respond to changes in log-brightness at the millisecond level, making them ideal for optical flow estimation. However, existing datasets from event cameras provide only low frame rate ground truth for optical flow, limiting the research potential of event-driven optical flow. To address this challenge, we introduce a low-latency event representation, Unified Voxel Grid, and propose EVA-Flow, an EVent-based Anytime Flow estimation network to produce high-frame-rate event optical flow with only low-frame-rate optical flow ground truth for supervision. Furthermore, we propose the Rectified Flow Warp Loss (RFWL) for the unsupervised assessment of intermediate optical flow. A comprehensive variety of experiments on MVSEC, DESC, and our EVA-FlowSet demonstrates that EVA-Flow achieves competitive performance, super-low-latency (5ms), time-dense motion estimation (200Hz), and strong generalization. Our code will be available at https://github.com/Yaozhuwa/EVA-Flow.

Accep...

Accepted to Sensors. Our code will be available at https://github.com/Yaozhuwa/EVA-Flow

Code Link
EventDiff: A Unified and Efficient Diffusion Model Framework for Event-based Video Frame Interpolation 2025-05-13
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Video Frame Interpolation (VFI) is a fundamental yet challenging task in computer vision, particularly under conditions involving large motion, occlusion, and lighting variation. Recent advancements in event cameras have opened up new opportunities for addressing these challenges. While existing event-based VFI methods have succeeded in recovering large and complex motions by leveraging handcrafted intermediate representations such as optical flow, these designs often compromise high-fidelity image reconstruction under subtle motion scenarios due to their reliance on explicit motion modeling. Meanwhile, diffusion models provide a promising alternative for VFI by reconstructing frames through a denoising process, eliminating the need for explicit motion estimation or warping operations. In this work, we propose EventDiff, a unified and efficient event-based diffusion model framework for VFI. EventDiff features a novel Event-Frame Hybrid AutoEncoder (HAE) equipped with a lightweight Spatial-Temporal Cross Attention (STCA) module that effectively fuses dynamic event streams with static frames. Unlike previous event-based VFI methods, EventDiff performs interpolation directly in the latent space via a denoising diffusion process, making it more robust across diverse and challenging VFI scenarios. Through a two-stage training strategy that first pretrains the HAE and then jointly optimizes it with the diffusion model, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple synthetic and real-world event VFI datasets. The proposed method outperforms existing state-of-the-art event-based VFI methods by up to 1.98dB in PSNR on Vimeo90K-Triplet and shows superior performance in SNU-FILM tasks with multiple difficulty levels. Compared to the emerging diffusion-based VFI approach, our method achieves up to 5.72dB PSNR gain on Vimeo90K-Triplet and 4.24X faster inference.

None
Monocular Depth Guided Occlusion-Aware Disparity Refinement via Semi-supervised Learning in Laparoscopic Images 2025-05-13
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Occlusion and the scarcity of labeled surgical data are significant challenges in disparity estimation for stereo laparoscopic images. To address these issues, this study proposes a Depth Guided Occlusion-Aware Disparity Refinement Network (DGORNet), which refines disparity maps by leveraging monocular depth information unaffected by occlusion. A Position Embedding (PE) module is introduced to provide explicit spatial context, enhancing the network's ability to localize and refine features. Furthermore, we introduce an Optical Flow Difference Loss (OFDLoss) for unlabeled data, leveraging temporal continuity across video frames to improve robustness in dynamic surgical scenes. Experiments on the SCARED dataset demonstrate that DGORNet outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of End-Point Error (EPE) and Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE), particularly in occlusion and texture-less regions. Ablation studies confirm the contributions of the Position Embedding and Optical Flow Difference Loss, highlighting their roles in improving spatial and temporal consistency. These results underscore DGORNet's effectiveness in enhancing disparity estimation for laparoscopic surgery, offering a practical solution to challenges in disparity estimation and data limitations.

None
Asynchronous Multi-Object Tracking with an Event Camera 2025-05-12
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Events cameras are ideal sensors for enabling robots to detect and track objects in highly dynamic environments due to their low latency output, high temporal resolution, and high dynamic range. In this paper, we present the Asynchronous Event Multi-Object Tracking (AEMOT) algorithm for detecting and tracking multiple objects by processing individual raw events asynchronously. AEMOT detects salient event blob features by identifying regions of consistent optical flow using a novel Field of Active Flow Directions built from the Surface of Active Events. Detected features are tracked as candidate objects using the recently proposed Asynchronous Event Blob (AEB) tracker in order to construct small intensity patches of each candidate object. A novel learnt validation stage promotes or discards candidate objects based on classification of their intensity patches, with promoted objects having their position, velocity, size, and orientation estimated at their event rate. We evaluate AEMOT on a new Bee Swarm Dataset, where it tracks dozens of small bees with precision and recall performance exceeding that of alternative event-based detection and tracking algorithms by over 37%. Source code and the labelled event Bee Swarm Dataset will be open sourced

7 pag...

7 pages, 5 figures, published in IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2025

None
Nonlinear Motion-Guided and Spatio-Temporal Aware Network for Unsupervised Event-Based Optical Flow 2025-05-08
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Event cameras have the potential to capture continuous motion information over time and space, making them well-suited for optical flow estimation. However, most existing learning-based methods for event-based optical flow adopt frame-based techniques, ignoring the spatio-temporal characteristics of events. Additionally, these methods assume linear motion between consecutive events within the loss time window, which increases optical flow errors in long-time sequences. In this work, we observe that rich spatio-temporal information and accurate nonlinear motion between events are crucial for event-based optical flow estimation. Therefore, we propose E-NMSTFlow, a novel unsupervised event-based optical flow network focusing on long-time sequences. We propose a Spatio-Temporal Motion Feature Aware (STMFA) module and an Adaptive Motion Feature Enhancement (AMFE) module, both of which utilize rich spatio-temporal information to learn spatio-temporal data associations. Meanwhile, we propose a nonlinear motion compensation loss that utilizes the accurate nonlinear motion between events to improve the unsupervised learning of our network. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our method. Remarkably, our method ranks first among unsupervised learning methods on the MVSEC and DSEC-Flow datasets. Our project page is available at https://wynelio.github.io/E-NMSTFlow.

Accep...

Accepted to ICRA 2025. Project Page: https://wynelio.github.io/E-NMSTFlow

Code Link
TimeTracker: Event-based Continuous Point Tracking for Video Frame Interpolation with Non-linear Motion 2025-05-06
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Video frame interpolation (VFI) that leverages the bio-inspired event cameras as guidance has recently shown better performance and memory efficiency than the frame-based methods, thanks to the event cameras' advantages, such as high temporal resolution. A hurdle for event-based VFI is how to effectively deal with non-linear motion, caused by the dynamic changes in motion direction and speed within the scene. Existing methods either use events to estimate sparse optical flow or fuse events with image features to estimate dense optical flow. Unfortunately, motion errors often degrade the VFI quality as the continuous motion cues from events do not align with the dense spatial information of images in the temporal dimension. In this paper, we find that object motion is continuous in space, tracking local regions over continuous time enables more accurate identification of spatiotemporal feature correlations. In light of this, we propose a novel continuous point tracking-based VFI framework, named TimeTracker. Specifically, we first design a Scene-Aware Region Segmentation (SARS) module to divide the scene into similar patches. Then, a Continuous Trajectory guided Motion Estimation (CTME) module is proposed to track the continuous motion trajectory of each patch through events. Finally, intermediate frames at any given time are generated through global motion optimization and frame refinement. Moreover, we collect a real-world dataset that features fast non-linear motion. Extensive experiments show that our method outperforms prior arts in both motion estimation and frame interpolation quality.

Accep...

Accepted by CVPR 2025

None
LPVIMO-SAM: Tightly-coupled LiDAR/Polarization Vision/Inertial/Magnetometer/Optical Flow Odometry via Smoothing and Mapping 2025-04-29
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We propose a tightly-coupled LiDAR/Polarization Vision/Inertial/Magnetometer/Optical Flow Odometry via Smoothing and Mapping (LPVIMO-SAM) framework, which integrates LiDAR, polarization vision, inertial measurement unit, magnetometer, and optical flow in a tightly-coupled fusion. This framework enables high-precision and highly robust real-time state estimation and map construction in challenging environments, such as LiDAR-degraded, low-texture regions, and feature-scarce areas. The LPVIMO-SAM comprises two subsystems: a Polarized Vision-Inertial System and a LiDAR/Inertial/Magnetometer/Optical Flow System. The polarized vision enhances the robustness of the Visual/Inertial odometry in low-feature and low-texture scenarios by extracting the polarization information of the scene. The magnetometer acquires the heading angle, and the optical flow obtains the speed and height to reduce the accumulated error. A magnetometer heading prior factor, an optical flow speed observation factor, and a height observation factor are designed to eliminate the cumulative errors of the LiDAR/Inertial odometry through factor graph optimization. Meanwhile, the LPVIMO-SAM can maintain stable positioning even when one of the two subsystems fails, further expanding its applicability in LiDAR-degraded, low-texture, and low-feature environments. Code is available on https://github.com/junxiaofanchen/LPVIMO-SAM.

submi...

submitted to IROS2025

Code Link
Explicit Motion Handling and Interactive Prompting for Video Camouflaged Object Detection 2025-04-28
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Camouflage poses challenges in distinguishing a static target, whereas any movement of the target can break this disguise. Existing video camouflaged object detection (VCOD) approaches take noisy motion estimation as input or model motion implicitly, restricting detection performance in complex dynamic scenes. In this paper, we propose a novel Explicit Motion handling and Interactive Prompting framework for VCOD, dubbed EMIP, which handles motion cues explicitly using a frozen pre-trained optical flow fundamental model. EMIP is characterized by a two-stream architecture for simultaneously conducting camouflaged segmentation and optical flow estimation. Interactions across the dual streams are realized in an interactive prompting way that is inspired by emerging visual prompt learning. Two learnable modules, i.e., the camouflaged feeder and motion collector, are designed to incorporate segmentation-to-motion and motion-to-segmentation prompts, respectively, and enhance outputs of the both streams. The prompt fed to the motion stream is learned by supervising optical flow in a self-supervised manner. Furthermore, we show that long-term historical information can also be incorporated as a prompt into EMIP and achieve more robust results with temporal consistency. Experimental results demonstrate that our EMIP achieves new state-of-the-art records on popular VCOD benchmarks. Our code is made publicly available at https://github.com/zhangxin06/EMIP.

Accep...

Accepted to TIP; Corresponding author: Keren Fu (fkrsuper@scu.edu.cn). Code: https://github.com/zhangxin06/EMIP

Code Link
FEDORA: Flying Event Dataset fOr Reactive behAvior 2025-04-26
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The ability of resource-constrained biological systems such as fruitflies to perform complex and high-speed maneuvers in cluttered environments has been one of the prime sources of inspiration for developing vision-based autonomous systems. To emulate this capability, the perception pipeline of such systems must integrate information cues from tasks including optical flow and depth estimation, object detection and tracking, and segmentation, among others. However, the conventional approach of employing slow, synchronous inputs from standard frame-based cameras constrains these perception capabilities, particularly during high-speed maneuvers. Recently, event-based sensors have emerged as low latency and low energy alternatives to standard frame-based cameras for capturing high-speed motion, effectively speeding up perception and hence navigation. For coherence, all the perception tasks must be trained on the same input data. However, present-day datasets are curated mainly for a single or a handful of tasks and are limited in the rate of the provided ground truths. To address these limitations, we present Flying Event Dataset fOr Reactive behAviour (FEDORA) - a fully synthetic dataset for perception tasks, with raw data from frame-based cameras, event-based cameras, and Inertial Measurement Units (IMU), along with ground truths for depth, pose, and optical flow at a rate much higher than existing datasets.

Publi...

Published in the Proceedings of the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2024

None
PIV-FlowDiffuser:Transfer-learning-based denoising diffusion models for PIV 2025-04-21
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Deep learning algorithms have significantly reduced the computational time and improved the spatial resolution of particle image velocimetry~(PIV). However, the models trained on synthetic datasets might have a degraded performance on practical particle images due to domain gaps. As a result, special residual patterns are often observed for the vector fields of deep learning-based estimators. To reduce the special noise step-by-step, we employ a denoising diffusion model~(FlowDiffuser) for PIV analysis. And the data-hungry iterative denoising diffusion model is trained via a transfer learning strategy, resulting in our PIV-FlowDiffuser method. Specifically, (1) pre-training a FlowDiffuser model with multiple optical flow datasets of the computer vision community, such as Sintel, KITTI, etc; (2) fine-tuning the pre-trained model on synthetic PIV datasets. Note that the PIV images are upsampled by a factor of two to resolve the small-scale turbulent flow structures. The visualized results indicate that our PIV-FlowDiffuser effectively suppresses the noise patterns. Therefore, the denoising diffusion model reduces the average end-point error~($AEE$) by 59.4% over RAFT256-PIV baseline on the classic Cai's dataset. Besides, PIV-FlowDiffuser exhibits enhanced generalization performance on unseen particle images due to transfer learning. Overall, this study highlights the transfer-learning-based denoising diffusion models for PIV. And a detailed implementation is recommended for interested readers in the repository https://github.com/Zhu-Qianyu/PIV-FlowDiffuser.

Code Link
MicroFlow: Domain-Specific Optical Flow for Ground Deformation Estimation in Seismic Events 2025-04-21
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Dense ground displacement measurements are crucial for geological studies but are impractical to collect directly. Traditionally, displacement fields are estimated using patch matching on optical satellite images from different acquisition times. While deep learning-based optical flow models are promising, their adoption in ground deformation analysis is hindered by challenges such as the absence of real ground truth, the need for sub-pixel precision, and temporal variations due to geological or anthropogenic changes. In particular, we identify that deep learning models relying on explicit correlation layers struggle at estimating small displacements in real-world conditions. Instead, we propose a model that employs iterative refinements with explicit warping layers and a correlation-independent backbone, enabling sub-pixel precision. Additionally, a non-convex variant of Total Variation regularization preserves fault-line sharpness while maintaining smoothness elsewhere. Our model significantly outperforms widely used geophysics methods on semi-synthetic benchmarks and generalizes well to challenging real-world scenarios captured by both medium- and high-resolution sensors. Project page: https://jbertrand89.github.io/microflow/.

Code Link
FlowLoss: Dynamic Flow-Conditioned Loss Strategy for Video Diffusion Models 2025-04-20
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Video Diffusion Models (VDMs) can generate high-quality videos, but often struggle with producing temporally coherent motion. Optical flow supervision is a promising approach to address this, with prior works commonly employing warping-based strategies that avoid explicit flow matching. In this work, we explore an alternative formulation, FlowLoss, which directly compares flow fields extracted from generated and ground-truth videos. To account for the unreliability of flow estimation under high-noise conditions in diffusion, we propose a noise-aware weighting scheme that modulates the flow loss across denoising steps. Experiments on robotic video datasets suggest that FlowLoss improves motion stability and accelerates convergence in early training stages. Our findings offer practical insights for incorporating motion-based supervision into noise-conditioned generative models.

None
Seeing Through Pixel Motion: Learning Obstacle Avoidance from Optical Flow with One Camera 2025-04-19
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Optical flow captures the motion of pixels in an image sequence over time, providing information about movement, depth, and environmental structure. Flying insects utilize this information to navigate and avoid obstacles, allowing them to execute highly agile maneuvers even in complex environments. Despite its potential, autonomous flying robots have yet to fully leverage this motion information to achieve comparable levels of agility and robustness. Challenges of control from optical flow include extracting accurate optical flow at high speeds, handling noisy estimation, and ensuring robust performance in complex environments. To address these challenges, we propose a novel end-to-end system for quadrotor obstacle avoidance using monocular optical flow. We develop an efficient differentiable simulator coupled with a simplified quadrotor model, allowing our policy to be trained directly through first-order gradient optimization. Additionally, we introduce a central flow attention mechanism and an action-guided active sensing strategy that enhances the policy's focus on task-relevant optical flow observations to enable more responsive decision-making during flight. Our system is validated both in simulation and the real world using an FPV racing drone. Despite being trained in a simple environment in simulation, our system is validated both in simulation and the real world using an FPV racing drone. Despite being trained in a simple environment in simulation, our system demonstrates agile and robust flight in various unknown, cluttered environments in the real world at speeds of up to 6m/s.

None
Many Perception Tasks are Highly Redundant Functions of their Input Data 2025-04-19
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We show that many perception tasks, from visual recognition, semantic segmentation, optical flow, depth estimation to vocalization discrimination, are highly redundant functions of their input data. Images or spectrograms, projected into different subspaces, formed by orthogonal bases in pixel, Fourier or wavelet domains, can be used to solve these tasks remarkably well regardless of whether it is the top subspace where data varies the most, some intermediate subspace with moderate variability--or the bottom subspace where data varies the least. This phenomenon occurs because different subspaces have a large degree of redundant information relevant to the task.

None
Event-Enhanced Blurry Video Super-Resolution 2025-04-18
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In this paper, we tackle the task of blurry video super-resolution (BVSR), aiming to generate high-resolution (HR) videos from low-resolution (LR) and blurry inputs. Current BVSR methods often fail to restore sharp details at high resolutions, resulting in noticeable artifacts and jitter due to insufficient motion information for deconvolution and the lack of high-frequency details in LR frames. To address these challenges, we introduce event signals into BVSR and propose a novel event-enhanced network, Ev-DeblurVSR. To effectively fuse information from frames and events for feature deblurring, we introduce a reciprocal feature deblurring module that leverages motion information from intra-frame events to deblur frame features while reciprocally using global scene context from the frames to enhance event features. Furthermore, to enhance temporal consistency, we propose a hybrid deformable alignment module that fully exploits the complementary motion information from inter-frame events and optical flow to improve motion estimation in the deformable alignment process. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that Ev-DeblurVSR establishes a new state-of-the-art performance on both synthetic and real-world datasets. Notably, on real data, our method is +2.59 dB more accurate and 7.28$\times$ faster than the recent best BVSR baseline FMA-Net. Code: https://github.com/DachunKai/Ev-DeblurVSR.

AAAI ...

AAAI 2025. Project page: https://dachunkai.github.io/ev-deblurvsr.github.io/

Code Link
SAM-Based Building Change Detection with Distribution-Aware Fourier Adaptation and Edge-Constrained Warping 2025-04-17
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Building change detection remains challenging for urban development, disaster assessment, and military reconnaissance. While foundation models like Segment Anything Model (SAM) show strong segmentation capabilities, SAM is limited in the task of building change detection due to domain gap issues. Existing adapter-based fine-tuning approaches face challenges with imbalanced building distribution, resulting in poor detection of subtle changes and inaccurate edge extraction. Additionally, bi-temporal misalignment in change detection, typically addressed by optical flow, remains vulnerable to background noises. This affects the detection of building changes and compromises both detection accuracy and edge recognition. To tackle these challenges, we propose a new SAM-Based Network with Distribution-Aware Fourier Adaptation and Edge-Constrained Warping (FAEWNet) for building change detection. FAEWNet utilizes the SAM encoder to extract rich visual features from remote sensing images. To guide SAM in focusing on specific ground objects in remote sensing scenes, we propose a Distribution-Aware Fourier Aggregated Adapter to aggregate task-oriented changed information. This adapter not only effectively addresses the domain gap issue, but also pays attention to the distribution of changed buildings. Furthermore, to mitigate noise interference and misalignment in height offset estimation, we design a novel flow module that refines building edge extraction and enhances the perception of changed buildings. Our state-of-the-art results on the LEVIR-CD, S2Looking and WHU-CD datasets highlight the effectiveness of FAEWNet. The code is available at https://github.com/SUPERMAN123000/FAEWNet.

Code Link
SC3EF: A Joint Self-Correlation and Cross-Correspondence Estimation Framework for Visible and Thermal Image Registration 2025-04-17
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Multispectral imaging plays a critical role in a range of intelligent transportation applications, including advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), traffic monitoring, and night vision. However, accurate visible and thermal (RGB-T) image registration poses a significant challenge due to the considerable modality differences. In this paper, we present a novel joint Self-Correlation and Cross-Correspondence Estimation Framework (SC3EF), leveraging both local representative features and global contextual cues to effectively generate RGB-T correspondences. For this purpose, we design a convolution-transformer-based pipeline to extract local representative features and encode global correlations of intra-modality for inter-modality correspondence estimation between unaligned visible and thermal images. After merging the local and global correspondence estimation results, we further employ a hierarchical optical flow estimation decoder to progressively refine the estimated dense correspondence maps. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method, outperforming the current state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods on representative RGB-T datasets. Furthermore, it also shows competitive generalization capabilities across challenging scenarios, including large parallax, severe occlusions, adverse weather, and other cross-modal datasets (e.g., RGB-N and RGB-D).

None
Perturbed State Space Feature Encoders for Optical Flow with Event Cameras 2025-04-14
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With their motion-responsive nature, event-based cameras offer significant advantages over traditional cameras for optical flow estimation. While deep learning has improved upon traditional methods, current neural networks adopted for event-based optical flow still face temporal and spatial reasoning limitations. We propose Perturbed State Space Feature Encoders (P-SSE) for multi-frame optical flow with event cameras to address these challenges. P-SSE adaptively processes spatiotemporal features with a large receptive field akin to Transformer-based methods, while maintaining the linear computational complexity characteristic of SSMs. However, the key innovation that enables the state-of-the-art performance of our model lies in our perturbation technique applied to the state dynamics matrix governing the SSM system. This approach significantly improves the stability and performance of our model. We integrate P-SSE into a framework that leverages bi-directional flows and recurrent connections, expanding the temporal context of flow prediction. Evaluations on DSEC-Flow and MVSEC datasets showcase P-SSE's superiority, with 8.48% and 11.86% improvements in EPE performance, respectively.

10 pa...

10 pages, 4 figures, 4 tables. Equal contribution by Gokul Raju Govinda Raju and Nikola Zubi'c

None
Towards On-Device Learning and Reconfigurable Hardware Implementation for Encoded Single-Photon Signal Processing 2025-04-12
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Deep neural networks (DNNs) enhance the accuracy and efficiency of reconstructing key parameters from time-resolved photon arrival signals recorded by single-photon detectors. However, the performance of conventional backpropagation-based DNNs is highly dependent on various parameters of the optical setup and biological samples under examination, necessitating frequent network retraining, either through transfer learning or from scratch. Newly collected data must also be stored and transferred to a high-performance GPU server for retraining, introducing latency and storage overhead. To address these challenges, we propose an online training algorithm based on a One-Sided Jacobi rotation-based Online Sequential Extreme Learning Machine (OSOS-ELM). We fully exploit parallelism in executing OSOS-ELM on a heterogeneous FPGA with integrated ARM cores. Extensive evaluations of OSOS-ELM and OSELM demonstrate that both achieve comparable accuracy across different network dimensions (i.e., input, hidden, and output layers), while OSOS-ELM proves to be more hardware-efficient. By leveraging the parallelism of OSOS-ELM, we implement a holistic computing prototype on a Xilinx ZCU104 FPGA, which integrates a multi-core CPU and programmable logic fabric. We validate our approach through three case studies involving single-photon signal analysis: sensing through fog using commercial single-photon LiDAR, fluorescence lifetime estimation in FLIM, and blood flow index reconstruction in DCS, all utilizing one-dimensional data encoded from photonic signals. From a hardware perspective, we optimize the OSOS-ELM workload by employing multi-tasked processing on ARM CPU cores and pipelined execution on the FPGA's logic fabric. We also implement our OSOS-ELM on the NVIDIA Jetson Xavier NX GPU to comprehensively investigate its computing performance on another type of heterogeneous computing platform.

14 pa...

14 pages, 8 figures, 4 tables

None
Hardware, Algorithms, and Applications of the Neuromorphic Vision Sensor: a Review 2025-04-11
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Neuromorphic, or event, cameras represent a transformation in the classical approach to visual sensing encodes detected instantaneous per-pixel illumination changes into an asynchronous stream of event packets. Their novelty compared to standard cameras lies in the transition from capturing full picture frames at fixed time intervals to a sparse data format which, with its distinctive qualities, offers potential improvements in various applications. However, these advantages come at the cost of reinventing algorithmic procedures or adapting them to effectively process the new data format. In this survey, we systematically examine neuromorphic vision along three main dimensions. First, we highlight the technological evolution and distinctive hardware features of neuromorphic cameras from their inception to recent models. Second, we review image processing algorithms developed explicitly for event-based data, covering key works on feature detection, tracking, and optical flow -which form the basis for analyzing image elements and transformations -as well as depth and pose estimation or object recognition, which interpret more complex scene structures and components. These techniques, drawn from classical computer vision and modern data-driven approaches, are examined to illustrate the breadth of applications for event-based cameras. Third, we present practical application case studies demonstrating how event cameras have been successfully used across various industries and scenarios. Finally, we analyze the challenges limiting widespread adoption, identify significant research gaps compared to standard imaging techniques, and outline promising future directions and opportunities that neuromorphic vision offers.

26 pa...

26 pages total, 26 without references, two images and five tables. Submitted to IEEE Sensors

None
Towards Efficient Real-Time Video Motion Transfer via Generative Time Series Modeling 2025-04-07
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We propose a deep learning framework designed to significantly optimize bandwidth for motion-transfer-enabled video applications, including video conferencing, virtual reality interactions, health monitoring systems, and vision-based real-time anomaly detection. To capture complex motion effectively, we utilize the First Order Motion Model (FOMM), which encodes dynamic objects by detecting keypoints and their associated local affine transformations. These keypoints are identified using a self-supervised keypoint detector and arranged into a time series corresponding to the successive frames. Forecasting is performed on these keypoints by integrating two advanced generative time series models into the motion transfer pipeline, namely the Variational Recurrent Neural Network (VRNN) and the Gated Recurrent Unit with Normalizing Flow (GRU-NF). The predicted keypoints are subsequently synthesized into realistic video frames using an optical flow estimator paired with a generator network, thereby facilitating accurate video forecasting and enabling efficient, low-frame-rate video transmission. We validate our results across three datasets for video animation and reconstruction using the following metrics: Mean Absolute Error, Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture Embedding Distance, Structural Similarity Index, and Average Pair-wise Displacement. Our results confirm that by utilizing the superior reconstruction property of the Variational Autoencoder, the VRNN integrated FOMM excels in applications involving multi-step ahead forecasts such as video conferencing. On the other hand, by leveraging the Normalizing Flow architecture for exact likelihood estimation, and enabling efficient latent space sampling, the GRU-NF based FOMM exhibits superior capabilities for producing diverse future samples while maintaining high visual quality for tasks like real-time video-based anomaly detection.

None
GG-SSMs: Graph-Generating State Space Models 2025-04-05
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State Space Models (SSMs) are powerful tools for modeling sequential data in computer vision and time series analysis domains. However, traditional SSMs are limited by fixed, one-dimensional sequential processing, which restricts their ability to model non-local interactions in high-dimensional data. While methods like Mamba and VMamba introduce selective and flexible scanning strategies, they rely on predetermined paths, which fails to efficiently capture complex dependencies. We introduce Graph-Generating State Space Models (GG-SSMs), a novel framework that overcomes these limitations by dynamically constructing graphs based on feature relationships. Using Chazelle's Minimum Spanning Tree algorithm, GG-SSMs adapt to the inherent data structure, enabling robust feature propagation across dynamically generated graphs and efficiently modeling complex dependencies. We validate GG-SSMs on 11 diverse datasets, including event-based eye-tracking, ImageNet classification, optical flow estimation, and six time series datasets. GG-SSMs achieve state-of-the-art performance across all tasks, surpassing existing methods by significant margins. Specifically, GG-SSM attains a top-1 accuracy of 84.9% on ImageNet, outperforming prior SSMs by 1%, reducing the KITTI-15 error rate to 2.77%, and improving eye-tracking detection rates by up to 0.33% with fewer parameters. These results demonstrate that dynamic scanning based on feature relationships significantly improves SSMs' representational power and efficiency, offering a versatile tool for various applications in computer vision and beyond.

12 pa...

12 pages, 8 tables, 2 figures, CVPR 2025 Camera Ready paper

None
3D Scene Understanding Through Local Random Access Sequence Modeling 2025-04-04
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3D scene understanding from single images is a pivotal problem in computer vision with numerous downstream applications in graphics, augmented reality, and robotics. While diffusion-based modeling approaches have shown promise, they often struggle to maintain object and scene consistency, especially in complex real-world scenarios. To address these limitations, we propose an autoregressive generative approach called Local Random Access Sequence (LRAS) modeling, which uses local patch quantization and randomly ordered sequence generation. By utilizing optical flow as an intermediate representation for 3D scene editing, our experiments demonstrate that LRAS achieves state-of-the-art novel view synthesis and 3D object manipulation capabilities. Furthermore, we show that our framework naturally extends to self-supervised depth estimation through a simple modification of the sequence design. By achieving strong performance on multiple 3D scene understanding tasks, LRAS provides a unified and effective framework for building the next generation of 3D vision models.

Proje...

Project webpage: https://neuroailab.github.io/projects/lras_3d/

Code Link
DropMAE: Learning Representations via Masked Autoencoders with Spatial-Attention Dropout for Temporal Matching Tasks 2025-04-04
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This paper studies masked autoencoder (MAE) video pre-training for various temporal matching-based downstream tasks, i.e., object-level tracking tasks including video object tracking (VOT) and video object segmentation (VOS), self-supervised visual correspondence learning, dense tracking tasks including optical flow estimation and long-term point tracking, and 3D point cloud tracking. Specifically, our work explores to provide a general representation to boost the temporal matching ability in various downstream tracking tasks. To achieve this, we firstly find that a simple extension of MAE, which randomly masks out frame patches in videos and reconstruct the frame pixels, heavily relies on spatial cues while ignoring temporal relations for frame reconstruction, thus leading to sub-optimal temporal matching representations. To alleviate this, we propose DropMAE, which adaptively performs spatial-attention dropout in the frame reconstruction to facilitate temporal correspondence learning in videos. We obtain several important findings with DropMAE: 1) DropMAE is a strong and efficient temporal matching learner, which achieves better fine-tuning results on matching-based tasks than the ImageNet-based MAE with 2x faster pre-training speed. 2) DropMAE is effective for different tracking tasks, i.e., object-level matching tasks including VOT and VOS, dense tracking tasks including optical flow estimation and tracking any point (TAP), and even 3D tracking in the different modality of point cloud data. Since none exists, we build ViT-based trackers for different downstream tracking tasks, and our pre-trained DropMAE model can be directly loaded in these ViT-based trackers for fine-tuning without further modifications. Experiments on 6 downstream tracking tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of DropMAE as a general pre-trained representation for diverse tracking tasks.

Exten...

Extension of DropMAE for 6 temporal matching-based downstream tasks

None
L-LBVC: Long-Term Motion Estimation and Prediction for Learned Bi-Directional Video Compression 2025-04-03
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Recently, learned video compression (LVC) has shown superior performance under low-delay configuration. However, the performance of learned bi-directional video compression (LBVC) still lags behind traditional bi-directional coding. The performance gap mainly arises from inaccurate long-term motion estimation and prediction of distant frames, especially in large motion scenes. To solve these two critical problems, this paper proposes a novel LBVC framework, namely L-LBVC. Firstly, we propose an adaptive motion estimation module that can handle both short-term and long-term motions. Specifically, we directly estimate the optical flows for adjacent frames and non-adjacent frames with small motions. For non-adjacent frames with large motions, we recursively accumulate local flows between adjacent frames to estimate long-term flows. Secondly, we propose an adaptive motion prediction module that can largely reduce the bit cost for motion coding. To improve the accuracy of long-term motion prediction, we adaptively downsample reference frames during testing to match the motion ranges observed during training. Experiments show that our L-LBVC significantly outperforms previous state-of-the-art LVC methods and even surpasses VVC (VTM) on some test datasets under random access configuration.

Accep...

Accepted to 2025 Data Compression Conference (DCC)

None
Towards Mobile Sensing with Event Cameras on High-agility Resource-constrained Devices: A Survey 2025-04-03
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With the increasing complexity of mobile device applications, these devices are evolving toward high agility. This shift imposes new demands on mobile sensing, particularly in terms of achieving high accuracy and low latency. Event-based vision has emerged as a disruptive paradigm, offering high temporal resolution, low latency, and energy efficiency, making it well-suited for high-accuracy and low-latency sensing tasks on high-agility platforms. However, the presence of substantial noisy events, the lack of inherent semantic information, and the large data volume pose significant challenges for event-based data processing on resource-constrained mobile devices. This paper surveys the literature over the period 2014-2024, provides a comprehensive overview of event-based mobile sensing systems, covering fundamental principles, event abstraction methods, algorithmic advancements, hardware and software acceleration strategies. We also discuss key applications of event cameras in mobile sensing, including visual odometry, object tracking, optical flow estimation, and 3D reconstruction, while highlighting the challenges associated with event data processing, sensor fusion, and real-time deployment. Furthermore, we outline future research directions, such as improving event camera hardware with advanced optics, leveraging neuromorphic computing for efficient processing, and integrating bio-inspired algorithms to enhance perception. To support ongoing research, we provide an open-source \textit{Online Sheet} with curated resources and recent developments. We hope this survey serves as a valuable reference, facilitating the adoption of event-based vision across diverse applications.

32 pages, 9 figures None
Self-Calibrating 4D Novel View Synthesis from Monocular Videos Using Gaussian Splatting 2025-03-31
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Gaussian Splatting (GS) has significantly elevated scene reconstruction efficiency and novel view synthesis (NVS) accuracy compared to Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF), particularly for dynamic scenes. However, current 4D NVS methods, whether based on GS or NeRF, primarily rely on camera parameters provided by COLMAP and even utilize sparse point clouds generated by COLMAP for initialization, which lack accuracy as well are time-consuming. This sometimes results in poor dynamic scene representation, especially in scenes with large object movements, or extreme camera conditions e.g. small translations combined with large rotations. Some studies simultaneously optimize the estimation of camera parameters and scenes, supervised by additional information like depth, optical flow, etc. obtained from off-the-shelf models. Using this unverified information as ground truth can reduce robustness and accuracy, which does frequently occur for long monocular videos (with e.g. > hundreds of frames). We propose a novel approach that learns a high-fidelity 4D GS scene representation with self-calibration of camera parameters. It includes the extraction of 2D point features that robustly represent 3D structure, and their use for subsequent joint optimization of camera parameters and 3D structure towards overall 4D scene optimization. We demonstrate the accuracy and time efficiency of our method through extensive quantitative and qualitative experimental results on several standard benchmarks. The results show significant improvements over state-of-the-art methods for 4D novel view synthesis. The source code will be released soon at https://github.com/fangli333/SC-4DGS.

GitHu...

GitHub Page: https://github.com/fangli333/SC-4DGS

Code Link
Towards Mobile Sensing with Event Cameras on High-mobility Resource-constrained Devices: A Survey 2025-03-29
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With the increasing complexity of mobile device applications, these devices are evolving toward high mobility. This shift imposes new demands on mobile sensing, particularly in terms of achieving high accuracy and low latency. Event-based vision has emerged as a disruptive paradigm, offering high temporal resolution, low latency, and energy efficiency, making it well-suited for high-accuracy and low-latency sensing tasks on high-mobility platforms. However, the presence of substantial noisy events, the lack of inherent semantic information, and the large data volume pose significant challenges for event-based data processing on resource-constrained mobile devices. This paper surveys the literature over the period 2014-2024, provides a comprehensive overview of event-based mobile sensing systems, covering fundamental principles, event abstraction methods, algorithmic advancements, hardware and software acceleration strategies. We also discuss key applications of event cameras in mobile sensing, including visual odometry, object tracking, optical flow estimation, and 3D reconstruction, while highlighting the challenges associated with event data processing, sensor fusion, and real-time deployment. Furthermore, we outline future research directions, such as improving event camera hardware with advanced optics, leveraging neuromorphic computing for efficient processing, and integrating bio-inspired algorithms to enhance perception. To support ongoing research, we provide an open-source \textit{Online Sheet} with curated resources and recent developments. We hope this survey serves as a valuable reference, facilitating the adoption of event-based vision across diverse applications.

32 pages, 9 figures None
MotionDiff: Training-free Zero-shot Interactive Motion Editing via Flow-assisted Multi-view Diffusion 2025-03-27
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Generative models have made remarkable advancements and are capable of producing high-quality content. However, performing controllable editing with generative models remains challenging, due to their inherent uncertainty in outputs. This challenge is praticularly pronounced in motion editing, which involves the processing of spatial information. While some physics-based generative methods have attempted to implement motion editing, they typically operate on single-view images with simple motions, such as translation and dragging. These methods struggle to handle complex rotation and stretching motions and ensure multi-view consistency, often necessitating resource-intensive retraining. To address these challenges, we propose MotionDiff, a training-free zero-shot diffusion method that leverages optical flow for complex multi-view motion editing. Specifically, given a static scene, users can interactively select objects of interest to add motion priors. The proposed Point Kinematic Model (PKM) then estimates corresponding multi-view optical flows during the Multi-view Flow Estimation Stage (MFES). Subsequently, these optical flows are utilized to generate multi-view motion results through decoupled motion representation in the Multi-view Motion Diffusion Stage (MMDS). Extensive experiments demonstrate that MotionDiff outperforms other physics-based generative motion editing methods in achieving high-quality multi-view consistent motion results. Notably, MotionDiff does not require retraining, enabling users to conveniently adapt it for various down-stream tasks.

None
FloVD: Optical Flow Meets Video Diffusion Model for Enhanced Camera-Controlled Video Synthesis 2025-03-25
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We present FloVD, a novel video diffusion model for camera-controllable video generation. FloVD leverages optical flow to represent the motions of the camera and moving objects. This approach offers two key benefits. Since optical flow can be directly estimated from videos, our approach allows for the use of arbitrary training videos without ground-truth camera parameters. Moreover, as background optical flow encodes 3D correlation across different viewpoints, our method enables detailed camera control by leveraging the background motion. To synthesize natural object motion while supporting detailed camera control, our framework adopts a two-stage video synthesis pipeline consisting of optical flow generation and flow-conditioned video synthesis. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method over previous approaches in terms of accurate camera control and natural object motion synthesis.

Our p...

Our paper has been accepted to CVPR 2025. Website: https://jinwonjoon.github.io/flovd_site/ Code: https://github.com/JinWonjoon/FloVD

Code Link
BiM-VFI: Bidirectional Motion Field-Guided Frame Interpolation for Video with Non-uniform Motions 2025-03-24
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Existing Video Frame interpolation (VFI) models tend to suffer from time-to-location ambiguity when trained with video of non-uniform motions, such as accelerating, decelerating, and changing directions, which often yield blurred interpolated frames. In this paper, we propose (i) a novel motion description map, Bidirectional Motion field (BiM), to effectively describe non-uniform motions; (ii) a BiM-guided Flow Net (BiMFN) with Content-Aware Upsampling Network (CAUN) for precise optical flow estimation; and (iii) Knowledge Distillation for VFI-centric Flow supervision (KDVCF) to supervise the motion estimation of VFI model with VFI-centric teacher flows. The proposed VFI is called a Bidirectional Motion field-guided VFI (BiM-VFI) model. Extensive experiments show that our BiM-VFI model significantly surpasses the recent state-of-the-art VFI methods by 26% and 45% improvements in LPIPS and STLPIPS respectively, yielding interpolated frames with much fewer blurs at arbitrary time instances.

The l...

The last two authors are co-corresponding authors

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SHIRE: Enhancing Sample Efficiency using Human Intuition in REinforcement Learning 2025-03-19
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The ability of neural networks to perform robotic perception and control tasks such as depth and optical flow estimation, simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), and automatic control has led to their widespread adoption in recent years. Deep Reinforcement Learning has been used extensively in these settings, as it does not have the unsustainable training costs associated with supervised learning. However, DeepRL suffers from poor sample efficiency, i.e., it requires a large number of environmental interactions to converge to an acceptable solution. Modern RL algorithms such as Deep Q Learning and Soft Actor-Critic attempt to remedy this shortcoming but can not provide the explainability required in applications such as autonomous robotics. Humans intuitively understand the long-time-horizon sequential tasks common in robotics. Properly using such intuition can make RL policies more explainable while enhancing their sample efficiency. In this work, we propose SHIRE, a novel framework for encoding human intuition using Probabilistic Graphical Models (PGMs) and using it in the Deep RL training pipeline to enhance sample efficiency. Our framework achieves 25-78% sample efficiency gains across the environments we evaluate at negligible overhead cost. Additionally, by teaching RL agents the encoded elementary behavior, SHIRE enhances policy explainability. A real-world demonstration further highlights the efficacy of policies trained using our framework.

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DPFlow: Adaptive Optical Flow Estimation with a Dual-Pyramid Framework 2025-03-19
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Optical flow estimation is essential for video processing tasks, such as restoration and action recognition. The quality of videos is constantly increasing, with current standards reaching 8K resolution. However, optical flow methods are usually designed for low resolution and do not generalize to large inputs due to their rigid architectures. They adopt downscaling or input tiling to reduce the input size, causing a loss of details and global information. There is also a lack of optical flow benchmarks to judge the actual performance of existing methods on high-resolution samples. Previous works only conducted qualitative high-resolution evaluations on hand-picked samples. This paper fills this gap in optical flow estimation in two ways. We propose DPFlow, an adaptive optical flow architecture capable of generalizing up to 8K resolution inputs while trained with only low-resolution samples. We also introduce Kubric-NK, a new benchmark for evaluating optical flow methods with input resolutions ranging from 1K to 8K. Our high-resolution evaluation pushes the boundaries of existing methods and reveals new insights about their generalization capabilities. Extensive experimental results show that DPFlow achieves state-of-the-art results on the MPI-Sintel, KITTI 2015, Spring, and other high-resolution benchmarks.

Accep...

Accepted at CVPR 2025. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/hmorimitsu/ptlflow/tree/main/ptlflow/models/dpflow. 24 pages, 17 figures

Code Link
EMoTive: Event-guided Trajectory Modeling for 3D Motion Estimation 2025-03-17
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Visual 3D motion estimation aims to infer the motion of 2D pixels in 3D space based on visual cues. The key challenge arises from depth variation induced spatio-temporal motion inconsistencies, disrupting the assumptions of local spatial or temporal motion smoothness in previous motion estimation frameworks. In contrast, event cameras offer new possibilities for 3D motion estimation through continuous adaptive pixel-level responses to scene changes. This paper presents EMoTive, a novel event-based framework that models spatio-temporal trajectories via event-guided non-uniform parametric curves, effectively characterizing locally heterogeneous spatio-temporal motion. Specifically, we first introduce Event Kymograph - an event projection method that leverages a continuous temporal projection kernel and decouples spatial observations to encode fine-grained temporal evolution explicitly. For motion representation, we introduce a density-aware adaptation mechanism to fuse spatial and temporal features under event guidance, coupled with a non-uniform rational curve parameterization framework to adaptively model heterogeneous trajectories. The final 3D motion estimation is achieved through multi-temporal sampling of parametric trajectories, yielding optical flow and depth motion fields. To facilitate evaluation, we introduce CarlaEvent3D, a multi-dynamic synthetic dataset for comprehensive validation. Extensive experiments on both this dataset and a real-world benchmark demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

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ProbDiffFlow: An Efficient Learning-Free Framework for Probabilistic Single-Image Optical Flow Estimation 2025-03-16
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This paper studies optical flow estimation, a critical task in motion analysis with applications in autonomous navigation, action recognition, and film production. Traditional optical flow methods require consecutive frames, which are often unavailable due to limitations in data acquisition or real-world scene disruptions. Thus, single-frame optical flow estimation is emerging in the literature. However, existing single-frame approaches suffer from two major limitations: (1) they rely on labeled training data, making them task-specific, and (2) they produce deterministic predictions, failing to capture motion uncertainty. To overcome these challenges, we propose ProbDiffFlow, a training-free framework that estimates optical flow distributions from a single image. Instead of directly predicting motion, ProbDiffFlow follows an estimation-by-synthesis paradigm: it first generates diverse plausible future frames using a diffusion-based model, then estimates motion from these synthesized samples using a pre-trained optical flow model, and finally aggregates the results into a probabilistic flow distribution. This design eliminates the need for task-specific training while capturing multiple plausible motions. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that ProbDiffFlow achieves superior accuracy, diversity, and efficiency, outperforming existing single-image and two-frame baselines.

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FG-DFPN: Flow Guided Deformable Frame Prediction Network 2025-03-14
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Video frame prediction remains a fundamental challenge in computer vision with direct implications for autonomous systems, video compression, and media synthesis. We present FG-DFPN, a novel architecture that harnesses the synergy between optical flow estimation and deformable convolutions to model complex spatio-temporal dynamics. By guiding deformable sampling with motion cues, our approach addresses the limitations of fixed-kernel networks when handling diverse motion patterns. The multi-scale design enables FG-DFPN to simultaneously capture global scene transformations and local object movements with remarkable precision. Our experiments demonstrate that FG-DFPN achieves state-of-the-art performance on eight diverse MPEG test sequences, outperforming existing methods by 1dB PSNR while maintaining competitive inference speeds. The integration of motion cues with adaptive geometric transformations makes FG-DFPN a promising solution for next-generation video processing systems that require high-fidelity temporal predictions. The model and instructions to reproduce our results will be released at: https://github.com/KUIS-AI-Tekalp-Research Group/frame-prediction

Submi...

Submitted to 33th European Signal Processing Conference (EUSIPCO) 2025

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Manydepth2: Motion-Aware Self-Supervised Monocular Depth Estimation in Dynamic Scenes 2025-03-13
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Despite advancements in self-supervised monocular depth estimation, challenges persist in dynamic scenarios due to the dependence on assumptions about a static world. In this paper, we present Manydepth2, to achieve precise depth estimation for both dynamic objects and static backgrounds, all while maintaining computational efficiency. To tackle the challenges posed by dynamic content, we incorporate optical flow and coarse monocular depth to create a pseudo-static reference frame. This frame is then utilized to build a motion-aware cost volume in collaboration with the vanilla target frame. Furthermore, to improve the accuracy and robustness of the network architecture, we propose an attention-based depth network that effectively integrates information from feature maps at different resolutions by incorporating both channel and non-local attention mechanisms. Compared to methods with similar computational costs, Manydepth2 achieves a significant reduction of approximately five percent in root-mean-square error for self-supervised monocular depth estimation on the KITTI-2015 dataset. The code could be found at https://github.com/kaichen-z/Manydepth2.

Monoc...

Monocular Depth Estimation, Self-Supervised, Optical Flow

Code Link
Flow-NeRF: Joint Learning of Geometry, Poses, and Dense Flow within Unified Neural Representations 2025-03-13
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Learning accurate scene reconstruction without pose priors in neural radiance fields is challenging due to inherent geometric ambiguity. Recent development either relies on correspondence priors for regularization or uses off-the-shelf flow estimators to derive analytical poses. However, the potential for jointly learning scene geometry, camera poses, and dense flow within a unified neural representation remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we present Flow-NeRF, a unified framework that simultaneously optimizes scene geometry, camera poses, and dense optical flow all on-the-fly. To enable the learning of dense flow within the neural radiance field, we design and build a bijective mapping for flow estimation, conditioned on pose. To make the scene reconstruction benefit from the flow estimation, we develop an effective feature enhancement mechanism to pass canonical space features to world space representations, significantly enhancing scene geometry. We validate our model across four important tasks, i.e., novel view synthesis, depth estimation, camera pose prediction, and dense optical flow estimation, using several datasets. Our approach surpasses previous methods in almost all metrics for novel-view view synthesis and depth estimation and yields both qualitatively sound and quantitatively accurate novel-view flow. Our project page is https://zhengxunzhi.github.io/flownerf/.

Code Link
ST-FlowNet: An Efficient Spiking Neural Network for Event-Based Optical Flow Estimation 2025-03-13
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Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have emerged as a promising tool for event-based optical flow estimation tasks due to their ability to leverage spatio-temporal information and low-power capabilities. However, the performance of SNN models is often constrained, limiting their application in real-world scenarios. In this work, we address this gap by proposing a novel neural network architecture, ST-FlowNet, specifically tailored for optical flow estimation from event-based data. The ST-FlowNet architecture integrates ConvGRU modules to facilitate cross-modal feature augmentation and temporal alignment of the predicted optical flow, improving the network's ability to capture complex motion dynamics. Additionally, to overcome the challenges associated with training SNNs, we introduce a novel approach to derive SNN models from pre-trained artificial neural networks (ANNs) through ANN-to-SNN conversion or our proposed BISNN method. Notably, the BISNN method alleviates the complexities involved in biological parameter selection, further enhancing the robustness of SNNs in optical flow estimation tasks. Extensive evaluations on three benchmark event-based datasets demonstrate that the SNN-based ST-FlowNet model outperforms state-of-the-art methods, delivering superior performance in accurate optical flow estimation across a diverse range of dynamic visual scenes. Furthermore, the inherent energy efficiency of SNN models is highlighted, establishing a compelling advantage for their practical deployment. Overall, our work presents a novel framework for optical flow estimation using SNNs and event-based data, contributing to the advancement of neuromorphic vision applications.

12 pa...

12 pages, 5 figures, 5 tables; This work has been submitted for possible publication

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Investigation of Frame Differences as Motion Cues for Video Object Segmentation 2025-03-12
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Automatic Video Object Segmentation (AVOS) refers to the task of autonomously segmenting target objects in video sequences without relying on human-provided annotations in the first frames. In AVOS, the use of motion information is crucial, with optical flow being a commonly employed method for capturing motion cues. However, the computation of optical flow is resource-intensive, making it unsuitable for real-time applications, especially on edge devices with limited computational resources. In this study, we propose using frame differences as an alternative to optical flow for motion cue extraction. We developed an extended U-Net-like AVOS model that takes a frame on which segmentation is performed and a frame difference as inputs, and outputs an estimated segmentation map. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model achieves performance comparable to the model with optical flow as an input, particularly when applied to videos captured by stationary cameras. Our results suggest the usefulness of employing frame differences as motion cues in cases with limited computational resources.

8 pag...

8 pages, 3 figures, 2 tables. Accepted to The 9th International Conference on Machine Learning and Soft Computing (ICMLSC 2025)

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TinySense: A Lighter Weight and More Power-efficient Avionics System for Flying Insect-scale Robots 2025-03-11
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In this paper, we introduce advances in the sensor suite of an autonomous flying insect robot (FIR) weighing less than a gram. FIRs, because of their small weight and size, offer unparalleled advantages in terms of material cost and scalability. However, their size introduces considerable control challenges, notably high-speed dynamics, restricted power, and limited payload capacity. While there have been advancements in developing lightweight sensors, often drawing inspiration from biological systems, no sub-gram aircraft has been able to attain sustained hover without relying on feedback from external sensing such as a motion capture system. The lightest vehicle capable of sustained hovering -- the first level of ``sensor autonomy'' -- is the much larger 28 g Crazyflie. Previous work reported a reduction in size of that vehicle's avionics suite to 187 mg and 21 mW. Here, we report a further reduction in mass and power to only 78.4 mg and 15 mW. We replaced the laser rangefinder with a lighter and more efficient pressure sensor, and built a smaller optic flow sensor around a global-shutter imaging chip. A Kalman Filter (KF) fuses these measurements to estimate the state variables that are needed to control hover: pitch angle, translational velocity, and altitude. Our system achieved performance comparable to that of the Crazyflie's estimator while in flight, with root mean squared errors of 1.573 deg, 0.186 m/s, and 0.136 m, respectively, relative to motion capture.

Accep...

Accepted to ICRA 2025

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MambaFlow: A Mamba-Centric Architecture for End-to-End Optical Flow Estimation 2025-03-10
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Optical flow estimation based on deep learning, particularly the recently proposed top-performing methods that incorporate the Transformer, has demonstrated impressive performance, due to the Transformer's powerful global modeling capabilities. However, the quadratic computational complexity of attention mechanism in the Transformers results in time-consuming training and inference. To alleviate these issues, we propose a novel MambaFlow framework that leverages the high accuracy and efficiency of Mamba architecture to capture features with local correlation while preserving its global information, achieving remarkable performance. To the best of our knowledge, the proposed method is the first Mamba-centric architecture for end-to-end optical flow estimation. It comprises two primary contributed components, both of which are Mamba-centric: a feature enhancement Mamba (FEM) module designed to optimize feature representation quality and a flow propagation Mamba (FPM) module engineered to address occlusion issues by facilitate effective flow information dissemination. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art results, despite encountering occluded regions. On the Sintel benchmark, MambaFlow achieves an EPE all of 1.60, surpassing the leading 1.74 of GMFlow. Additionally, MambaFlow significantly improves inference speed with a runtime of 0.113 seconds, making it 18% faster than GMFlow. The source code will be made publicly available upon acceptance of the paper.

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ReynoldsFlow: Exquisite Flow Estimation via Reynolds Transport Theorem 2025-03-09
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Optical flow is a fundamental technique for motion estimation, widely applied in video stabilization, interpolation, and object tracking. Traditional optical flow estimation methods rely on restrictive assumptions like brightness constancy and slow motion constraints. Recent deep learning-based flow estimations require extensive training on large domain-specific datasets, making them computationally demanding. Also, artificial intelligence (AI) advances have enabled deep learning models to take advantage of optical flow as an important feature for object tracking and motion analysis. Since optical flow is commonly encoded in HSV for visualization, its conversion to RGB for neural network processing is nonlinear and may introduce perceptual distortions. These transformations amplify the sensitivity to estimation errors, potentially affecting the predictive accuracy of the networks. To address these challenges that are influential to the performance of downstream network models, we propose Reynolds flow, a novel training-free flow estimation inspired by the Reynolds transport theorem, offering a principled approach to modeling complex motion dynamics. In addition to conventional HSV-based visualization of Reynolds flow, we also introduce an RGB-encoded representation of Reynolds flow designed to improve flow visualization and feature enhancement for neural networks. We evaluated the effectiveness of Reynolds flow in video-based tasks. Experimental results on three benchmarks, tiny object detection on UAVDB, infrared object detection on Anti-UAV, and pose estimation on GolfDB, demonstrate that networks trained with RGB-encoded Reynolds flow achieve SOTA performance, exhibiting improved robustness and efficiency across all tasks.

10 pa...

10 pages, 3 figures, 3 tables

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Leveraging Consistent Spatio-Temporal Correspondence for Robust Visual Odometry 2025-03-08
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Recent approaches to VO have significantly improved performance by using deep networks to predict optical flow between video frames. However, existing methods still suffer from noisy and inconsistent flow matching, making it difficult to handle challenging scenarios and long-sequence estimation. To overcome these challenges, we introduce Spatio-Temporal Visual Odometry (STVO), a novel deep network architecture that effectively leverages inherent spatio-temporal cues to enhance the accuracy and consistency of multi-frame flow matching. With more accurate and consistent flow matching, STVO can achieve better pose estimation through the bundle adjustment (BA). Specifically, STVO introduces two innovative components: 1) the Temporal Propagation Module that utilizes multi-frame information to extract and propagate temporal cues across adjacent frames, maintaining temporal consistency; 2) the Spatial Activation Module that utilizes geometric priors from the depth maps to enhance spatial consistency while filtering out excessive noise and incorrect matches. Our STVO achieves state-of-the-art performance on TUM-RGBD, EuRoc MAV, ETH3D and KITTI Odometry benchmarks. Notably, it improves accuracy by 77.8% on ETH3D benchmark and 38.9% on KITTI Odometry benchmark over the previous best methods.

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Implicit Neural Representation for Video and Image Super-Resolution 2025-03-06
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We present a novel approach for super-resolution that utilizes implicit neural representation (INR) to effectively reconstruct and enhance low-resolution videos and images. By leveraging the capacity of neural networks to implicitly encode spatial and temporal features, our method facilitates high-resolution reconstruction using only low-resolution inputs and a 3D high-resolution grid. This results in an efficient solution for both image and video super-resolution. Our proposed method, SR-INR, maintains consistent details across frames and images, achieving impressive temporal stability without relying on the computationally intensive optical flow or motion estimation typically used in other video super-resolution techniques. The simplicity of our approach contrasts with the complexity of many existing methods, making it both effective and efficient. Experimental evaluations show that SR-INR delivers results on par with or superior to state-of-the-art super-resolution methods, while maintaining a more straightforward structure and reduced computational demands. These findings highlight the potential of implicit neural representations as a powerful tool for reconstructing high-quality, temporally consistent video and image signals from low-resolution data.

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BAT: Learning Event-based Optical Flow with Bidirectional Adaptive Temporal Correlation 2025-03-05
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Event cameras deliver visual information characterized by a high dynamic range and high temporal resolution, offering significant advantages in estimating optical flow for complex lighting conditions and fast-moving objects. Current advanced optical flow methods for event cameras largely adopt established image-based frameworks. However, the spatial sparsity of event data limits their performance. In this paper, we present BAT, an innovative framework that estimates event-based optical flow using bidirectional adaptive temporal correlation. BAT includes three novel designs: 1) a bidirectional temporal correlation that transforms bidirectional temporally dense motion cues into spatially dense ones, enabling accurate and spatially dense optical flow estimation; 2) an adaptive temporal sampling strategy for maintaining temporal consistency in correlation; 3) spatially adaptive temporal motion aggregation to efficiently and adaptively aggregate consistent target motion features into adjacent motion features while suppressing inconsistent ones. Our results rank $1^{st}$ on the DSEC-Flow benchmark, outperforming existing state-of-the-art methods by a large margin while also exhibiting sharp edges and high-quality details. Notably, our BAT can accurately predict future optical flow using only past events, significantly outperforming E-RAFT's warm-start approach. Code: \textcolor{magenta}{https://github.com/gangweiX/BAT}.

10 pages Code Link
Anomaly detection in non-stationary videos using time-recursive differencing network based prediction 2025-03-04
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Most videos, including those captured through aerial remote sensing, are usually non-stationary in nature having time-varying feature statistics. Although, sophisticated reconstruction and prediction models exist for video anomaly detection, effective handling of non-stationarity has seldom been considered explicitly. In this paper, we propose to perform prediction using a time-recursive differencing network followed by autoregressive moving average estimation for video anomaly detection. The differencing network is employed to effectively handle non-stationarity in video data during the anomaly detection. Focusing on the prediction process, the effectiveness of the proposed approach is demonstrated considering a simple optical flow based video feature, and by generating qualitative and quantitative results on three aerial video datasets and two standard anomaly detection video datasets. EER, AUC and ROC curve based comparison with several existing methods including the state-of-the-art reveal the superiority of the proposed approach.

Copyr...

Copyright 2022 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works

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Memory-Efficient Optical Flow via Radius-Distribution Orthogonal Cost Volume 2025-03-04
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The full 4D cost volume in Recurrent All-Pairs Field Transforms (RAFT) or global matching by Transformer achieves impressive performance for optical flow estimation. However, their memory consumption increases quadratically with input resolution, rendering them impractical for high-resolution images. In this paper, we present MeFlow, a novel memory-efficient method for high-resolution optical flow estimation. The key of MeFlow is a recurrent local orthogonal cost volume representation, which decomposes the 2D search space dynamically into two 1D orthogonal spaces, enabling our method to scale effectively to very high-resolution inputs. To preserve essential information in the orthogonal space, we utilize self attention to propagate feature information from the 2D space to the orthogonal space. We further propose a radius-distribution multi-scale lookup strategy to model the correspondences of large displacements at a negligible cost. We verify the efficiency and effectiveness of our method on the challenging Sintel and KITTI benchmarks, and real-world 4K ($2160!\times!3840$) images. Our method achieves competitive performance on both Sintel and KITTI benchmarks, while maintaining the highest memory efficiency on high-resolution inputs.

10 pages, 9 figures None
MLINE-VINS: Robust Monocular Visual-Inertial SLAM With Flow Manhattan and Line Features 2025-03-03
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In this paper we introduce MLINE-VINS, a novel monocular visual-inertial odometry (VIO) system that leverages line features and Manhattan Word assumption. Specifically, for line matching process, we propose a novel geometric line optical flow algorithm that efficiently tracks line features with varying lengths, whitch is do not require detections and descriptors in every frame. To address the instability of Manhattan estimation from line features, we propose a tracking-by-detection module that consistently tracks and optimizes Manhattan framse in consecutive images. By aligning the Manhattan World with the VIO world frame, the tracking could restart using the latest pose from back-end, simplifying the coordinate transformations within the system. Furthermore, we implement a mechanism to validate Manhattan frames and a novel global structural constraints back-end optimization. Extensive experiments results on vairous datasets, including benchmark and self-collected datasets, show that the proposed approach outperforms existing methods in terms of accuracy and long-range robustness. The source code of our method is available at: https://github.com/LiHaoy-ux/MLINE-VINS.

Code Link
EVLoc: Event-based Visual Localization in LiDAR Maps via Event-Depth Registration 2025-02-28
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Event cameras are bio-inspired sensors with some notable features, including high dynamic range and low latency, which makes them exceptionally suitable for perception in challenging scenarios such as high-speed motion and extreme lighting conditions. In this paper, we explore their potential for localization within pre-existing LiDAR maps, a critical task for applications that require precise navigation and mobile manipulation. Our framework follows a paradigm based on the refinement of an initial pose. Specifically, we first project LiDAR points into 2D space based on a rough initial pose to obtain depth maps, and then employ an optical flow estimation network to align events with LiDAR points in 2D space, followed by camera pose estimation using a PnP solver. To enhance geometric consistency between these two inherently different modalities, we develop a novel frame-based event representation that improves structural clarity. Additionally, given the varying degrees of bias observed in the ground truth poses, we design a module that predicts an auxiliary variable as a regularization term to mitigate the impact of this bias on network convergence. Experimental results on several public datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method. To facilitate future research, both the code and the pre-trained models are made available online.

None
L4P: Low-Level 4D Vision Perception Unified 2025-02-18
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The spatio-temporal relationship between the pixels of a video carries critical information for low-level 4D perception. A single model that reasons about it should be able to solve several such tasks well. Yet, most state-of-the-art methods rely on architectures specialized for the task at hand. We present L4P (pronounced "LAP"), a feedforward, general-purpose architecture that solves low-level 4D perception tasks in a unified framework. L4P combines a ViT-based backbone with per-task heads that are lightweight and therefore do not require extensive training. Despite its general and feedforward formulation, our method matches or surpasses the performance of existing specialized methods on both dense tasks, such as depth or optical flow estimation, and sparse tasks, such as 2D/3D tracking. Moreover, it solves all those tasks at once in a time comparable to that of individual single-task methods.

None
A primal-dual adaptive finite element method for total variation minimization 2025-02-18
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Based on previous work we extend a primal-dual semi-smooth Newton method for minimizing a general $L^1$-$L^2$-$TV$ functional over the space of functions of bounded variations by adaptivity in a finite element setting. For automatically generating an adaptive grid we introduce indicators based on a-posteriori error estimates. Further we discuss data interpolation methods on unstructured grids in the context of image processing and present a pixel-based interpolation method. The efficiency of our derived adaptive finite element scheme is demonstrated on image inpainting and the task of computing the optical flow in image sequences. In particular, for optical flow estimation we derive an adaptive finite element coarse-to-fine scheme which allows resolving large displacements and speeds-up the computing time significantly.

None
Super Resolution image reconstructs via total variation-based image deconvolution: a majorization-minimization approach 2025-02-15
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This work aims to reconstruct image sequences with Total Variation regularity in super-resolution. We consider, in particular, images of scenes for which the point-to-point image transformation is a plane projective transformation. We first describe the super-resolution image's imaging observation model, an interpolation and Fusion estimator, and Projection on Convex Sets. We explain motion and compute the optical flow of a sequence of images using the Horn-Shunck algorithm to estimate motion. We then propose a Total Variation regulazer via a Majorization-Minimization approach to obtain a suitable result. Super Resolution restoration from motion measurements is also discussed. Finally, the simulation's part demonstrates the power of the proposed methodology. As expected, this model does not give real-time results, as seen in the numerical experiments section, but it is the cornerstone for future approaches. Finally, the simulation's part demonstrates the power of the proposed methodology. As expected, this model does not give real-time results, as seen in the numerical experiments section, but it is the cornerstone for future approaches.

60 pages None
Learning semantical dynamics and spatiotemporal collaboration for human pose estimation in video 2025-02-15
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Temporal modeling and spatio-temporal collaboration are pivotal techniques for video-based human pose estimation. Most state-of-the-art methods adopt optical flow or temporal difference, learning local visual content correspondence across frames at the pixel level, to capture motion dynamics. However, such a paradigm essentially relies on localized pixel-to-pixel similarity, which neglects the semantical correlations among frames and is vulnerable to image quality degradations (e.g. occlusions or blur). Moreover, existing approaches often combine motion and spatial (appearance) features via simple concatenation or summation, leading to practical challenges in fully leveraging these distinct modalities. In this paper, we present a novel framework that learns multi-level semantical dynamics and dense spatio-temporal collaboration for multi-frame human pose estimation. Specifically, we first design a Multi-Level Semantic Motion Encoder using a multi-masked context and pose reconstruction strategy. This strategy stimulates the model to explore multi-granularity spatiotemporal semantic relationships among frames by progressively masking the features of (patch) cubes and frames. We further introduce a Spatial-Motion Mutual Learning module which densely propagates and consolidates context information from spatial and motion features to enhance the capability of the model. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach sets new state-of-the-art results on three benchmark datasets, PoseTrack2017, PoseTrack2018, and PoseTrack21.

None
CMRNext: Camera to LiDAR Matching in the Wild for Localization and Extrinsic Calibration 2025-02-14
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LiDARs are widely used for mapping and localization in dynamic environments. However, their high cost limits their widespread adoption. On the other hand, monocular localization in LiDAR maps using inexpensive cameras is a cost-effective alternative for large-scale deployment. Nevertheless, most existing approaches struggle to generalize to new sensor setups and environments, requiring retraining or fine-tuning. In this paper, we present CMRNext, a novel approach for camera-LIDAR matching that is independent of sensor-specific parameters, generalizable, and can be used in the wild for monocular localization in LiDAR maps and camera-LiDAR extrinsic calibration. CMRNext exploits recent advances in deep neural networks for matching cross-modal data and standard geometric techniques for robust pose estimation. We reformulate the point-pixel matching problem as an optical flow estimation problem and solve the Perspective-n-Point problem based on the resulting correspondences to find the relative pose between the camera and the LiDAR point cloud. We extensively evaluate CMRNext on six different robotic platforms, including three publicly available datasets and three in-house robots. Our experimental evaluations demonstrate that CMRNext outperforms existing approaches on both tasks and effectively generalizes to previously unseen environments and sensor setups in a zero-shot manner. We make the code and pre-trained models publicly available at http://cmrnext.cs.uni-freiburg.de .

Accep...

Accepted to IEEE Transactions on Robotics (T-RO), 2025

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EdgeFlowNet: 100FPS@1W Dense Optical Flow For Tiny Mobile Robots 2025-02-12
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Optical flow estimation is a critical task for tiny mobile robotics to enable safe and accurate navigation, obstacle avoidance, and other functionalities. However, optical flow estimation on tiny robots is challenging due to limited onboard sensing and computation capabilities. In this paper, we propose EdgeFlowNet , a high-speed, low-latency dense optical flow approach for tiny autonomous mobile robots by harnessing the power of edge computing. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach by deploying EdgeFlowNet on a tiny quadrotor to perform static obstacle avoidance, flight through unknown gaps and dynamic obstacle dodging. EdgeFlowNet is about 20 faster than the previous state-of-the-art approaches while improving accuracy by over 20% and using only 1.08W of power enabling advanced autonomy on palm-sized tiny mobile robots.

https...

https://pear.wpi.edu/research/edgeflownet.html

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BlinkVision: A Benchmark for Optical Flow, Scene Flow and Point Tracking Estimation using RGB Frames and Events 2025-02-11
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Recent advances in event-based vision suggest that these systems complement traditional cameras by providing continuous observation without frame rate limitations and a high dynamic range, making them well-suited for correspondence tasks such as optical flow and point tracking. However, there is still a lack of comprehensive benchmarks for correspondence tasks that include both event data and images. To address this gap, we propose BlinkVision, a large-scale and diverse benchmark with multiple modalities and dense correspondence annotations. BlinkVision offers several valuable features: 1) Rich modalities: It includes both event data and RGB images. 2) Extensive annotations: It provides dense per-pixel annotations covering optical flow, scene flow, and point tracking. 3) Large vocabulary: It contains 410 everyday categories, sharing common classes with popular 2D and 3D datasets like LVIS and ShapeNet. 4) Naturalistic: It delivers photorealistic data and covers various naturalistic factors, such as camera shake and deformation. BlinkVision enables extensive benchmarks on three types of correspondence tasks (optical flow, point tracking, and scene flow estimation) for both image-based and event-based methods, offering new observations, practices, and insights for future research. The benchmark website is https://www.blinkvision.net/.

Accep...

Accepted to ECCV 2024. Project Page: https://zju3dv.github.io/blinkvision

Code Link
A Survey of Representation Learning, Optimization Strategies, and Applications for Omnidirectional Vision 2025-02-11
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Omnidirectional image (ODI) data is captured with a field-of-view of 360x180, which is much wider than the pinhole cameras and captures richer surrounding environment details than the conventional perspective images. In recent years, the availability of customer-level 360 cameras has made omnidirectional vision more popular, and the advance of deep learning (DL) has significantly sparked its research and applications. This paper presents a systematic and comprehensive review and analysis of the recent progress of DL for omnidirectional vision. It delineates the distinct challenges and complexities encountered in applying DL to omnidirectional images as opposed to traditional perspective imagery. Our work covers four main contents: (i) A thorough introduction to the principles of omnidirectional imaging and commonly explored projections of ODI; (ii) A methodical review of varied representation learning approaches tailored for ODI; (iii) An in-depth investigation of optimization strategies specific to omnidirectional vision; (iv) A structural and hierarchical taxonomy of the DL methods for the representative omnidirectional vision tasks, from visual enhancement (e.g., image generation and super-resolution) to 3D geometry and motion estimation (e.g., depth and optical flow estimation), alongside the discussions on emergent research directions; (v) An overview of cutting-edge applications (e.g., autonomous driving and virtual reality), coupled with a critical discussion on prevailing challenges and open questions, to trigger more research in the community.

37 pa...

37 pages, 24 figures, accepted by IJCV

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Generalizable Implicit Motion Modeling for Video Frame Interpolation 2025-02-10
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Motion modeling is critical in flow-based Video Frame Interpolation (VFI). Existing paradigms either consider linear combinations of bidirectional flows or directly predict bilateral flows for given timestamps without exploring favorable motion priors, thus lacking the capability of effectively modeling spatiotemporal dynamics in real-world videos. To address this limitation, in this study, we introduce Generalizable Implicit Motion Modeling (GIMM), a novel and effective approach to motion modeling for VFI. Specifically, to enable GIMM as an effective motion modeling paradigm, we design a motion encoding pipeline to model spatiotemporal motion latent from bidirectional flows extracted from pre-trained flow estimators, effectively representing input-specific motion priors. Then, we implicitly predict arbitrary-timestep optical flows within two adjacent input frames via an adaptive coordinate-based neural network, with spatiotemporal coordinates and motion latent as inputs. Our GIMM can be easily integrated with existing flow-based VFI works by supplying accurately modeled motion. We show that GIMM performs better than the current state of the art on standard VFI benchmarks.

Proje...

Project Page: https://gseancdat.github.io/projects/GIMMVFI

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Image Velocimetry using Direct Displacement Field estimation with Neural Networks for Fluids 2025-01-28
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An important tool for experimental fluids mechanics research is Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV). Several robust methodologies have been proposed to perform the estimation of velocity field from the images, however, alternative methods are still needed to increase the spatial resolution of the results. This work presents a novel approach for estimating fluid flow fields using neural networks and the optical flow equation to predict displacement vectors between sequential images. The result is a continuous representation of the displacement, that can be evaluated on the full spatial resolution of the image. The methodology was validated on synthetic and experimental images. Accurate results were obtained in terms of the estimation of instantaneous velocity fields, and of the determined time average turbulence quantities and power spectral density. The methodology proposed differs of previous attempts of using machine learning for this task: it does not require any previous training, and could be directly used in any pair of images.

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Quadcopter Position Hold Function using Optical Flow in a Smartphone-based Flight Computer 2025-01-25
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Purpose. This paper explores the capability of smartphones as computing devices for a quadcopter, specifically in terms of the ability of drones to maintain a position known as the position hold function. Image processing can be performed with the phone's sensors and powerful built-in camera. Method. Using Shi-Tomasi corner detection and the Lucas-Kanade sparse optical flow algorithms, ground features are recognized and tracked using the downward-facing camera. The position is maintained by computing quadcopter displacement from the center of the image using Euclidian distance, and the corresponding pitch and roll estimate is calculated using the PID controller. Results. Actual flights show a double standard deviation of 18.66 cm from the center for outdoor tests. With a quadcopter size of 58cm x 58cm used, it implies that 95% of the time, the quadcopter is within a diameter of 96 cm. For indoor tests, a double standard deviation of 10.55 cm means that 95% of the time, the quadcopter is within a diameter of 79 cm. Conclusion. Smartphone sensors and cameras can be used to perform optical flow position hold functions, proving their potential as computing devices for drones. Recommendations. To further improve the positioning system of the phone-based quadcopter system, it is suggested that potential sensor fusion be explored with the phone's GNSS sensor, which gives absolute positioning information for outdoor applications. Research Implications. As different devices and gadgets are integrated into the smartphone, this paper presents an opportunity for phone manufacturers and researchers to explore the potential of smartphones for a drone use-case.

13 pages None
MONA: Moving Object Detection from Videos Shot by Dynamic Camera 2025-01-22
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Dynamic urban environments, characterized by moving cameras and objects, pose significant challenges for camera trajectory estimation by complicating the distinction between camera-induced and object motion. We introduce MONA, a novel framework designed for robust moving object detection and segmentation from videos shot by dynamic cameras. MONA comprises two key modules: Dynamic Points Extraction, which leverages optical flow and tracking any point to identify dynamic points, and Moving Object Segmentation, which employs adaptive bounding box filtering, and the Segment Anything for precise moving object segmentation. We validate MONA by integrating with the camera trajectory estimation method LEAP-VO, and it achieves state-of-the-art results on the MPI Sintel dataset comparing to existing methods. These results demonstrate MONA's effectiveness for moving object detection and its potential in many other applications in the urban planning field.

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Machine Learning Modeling for Multi-order Human Visual Motion Processing 2025-01-22
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Our research aims to develop machines that learn to perceive visual motion as do humans. While recent advances in computer vision (CV) have enabled DNN-based models to accurately estimate optical flow in naturalistic images, a significant disparity remains between CV models and the biological visual system in both architecture and behavior. This disparity includes humans' ability to perceive the motion of higher-order image features (second-order motion), which many CV models fail to capture because of their reliance on the intensity conservation law. Our model architecture mimics the cortical V1-MT motion processing pathway, utilizing a trainable motion energy sensor bank and a recurrent graph network. Supervised learning employing diverse naturalistic videos allows the model to replicate psychophysical and physiological findings about first-order (luminance-based) motion perception. For second-order motion, inspired by neuroscientific findings, the model includes an additional sensing pathway with nonlinear preprocessing before motion energy sensing, implemented using a simple multilayer 3D CNN block. When exploring how the brain acquired the ability to perceive second-order motion in natural environments, in which pure second-order signals are rare, we hypothesized that second-order mechanisms were critical when estimating robust object motion amidst optical fluctuations, such as highlights on glossy surfaces. We trained our dual-pathway model on novel motion datasets with varying material properties of moving objects. We found that training to estimate object motion from non-Lambertian materials naturally endowed the model with the capacity to perceive second-order motion, as can humans. The resulting model effectively aligns with biological systems while generalizing to both first- and second-order motion phenomena in natural scenes.

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Vector-Symbolic Architecture for Event-Based Optical Flow 2025-01-22
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From a perspective of feature matching, optical flow estimation for event cameras involves identifying event correspondences by comparing feature similarity across accompanying event frames. In this work, we introduces an effective and robust high-dimensional (HD) feature descriptor for event frames, utilizing Vector Symbolic Architectures (VSA). The topological similarity among neighboring variables within VSA contributes to the enhanced representation similarity of feature descriptors for flow-matching points, while its structured symbolic representation capacity facilitates feature fusion from both event polarities and multiple spatial scales. Based on this HD feature descriptor, we propose a novel feature matching framework for event-based optical flow, encompassing both model-based (VSA-Flow) and self-supervised learning (VSA-SM) methods. In VSA-Flow, accurate optical flow estimation validates the effectiveness of HD feature descriptors. In VSA-SM, a novel similarity maximization method based on the HD feature descriptor is proposed to learn optical flow in a self-supervised way from events alone, eliminating the need for auxiliary grayscale images. Evaluation results demonstrate that our VSA-based method achieves superior accuracy in comparison to both model-based and self-supervised learning methods on the DSEC benchmark, while remains competitive among both methods on the MVSEC benchmark. This contribution marks a significant advancement in event-based optical flow within the feature matching methodology.

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DCPI-Depth: Explicitly Infusing Dense Correspondence Prior to Unsupervised Monocular Depth Estimation 2025-01-21
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There has been a recent surge of interest in learning to perceive depth from monocular videos in an unsupervised fashion. A key challenge in this field is achieving robust and accurate depth estimation in challenging scenarios, particularly in regions with weak textures or where dynamic objects are present. This study makes three major contributions by delving deeply into dense correspondence priors to provide existing frameworks with explicit geometric constraints. The first novelty is a contextual-geometric depth consistency loss, which employs depth maps triangulated from dense correspondences based on estimated ego-motion to guide the learning of depth perception from contextual information, since explicitly triangulated depth maps capture accurate relative distances among pixels. The second novelty arises from the observation that there exists an explicit, deducible relationship between optical flow divergence and depth gradient. A differential property correlation loss is, therefore, designed to refine depth estimation with a specific emphasis on local variations. The third novelty is a bidirectional stream co-adjustment strategy that enhances the interaction between rigid and optical flows, encouraging the former towards more accurate correspondence and making the latter more adaptable across various scenarios under the static scene hypotheses. DCPI-Depth, a framework that incorporates all these innovative components and couples two bidirectional and collaborative streams, achieves state-of-the-art performance and generalizability across multiple public datasets, outperforming all existing prior arts. Specifically, it demonstrates accurate depth estimation in texture-less and dynamic regions, and shows more reasonable smoothness. Our source code will be publicly available at mias.group/DCPI-Depth upon publication.

13 pages, 8 figures None
Event-based vision for egomotion estimation using precise event timing 2025-01-20
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Egomotion estimation is crucial for applications such as autonomous navigation and robotics, where accurate and real-time motion tracking is required. However, traditional methods relying on inertial sensors are highly sensitive to external conditions, and suffer from drifts leading to large inaccuracies over long distances. Vision-based methods, particularly those utilising event-based vision sensors, provide an efficient alternative by capturing data only when changes are perceived in the scene. This approach minimises power consumption while delivering high-speed, low-latency feedback. In this work, we propose a fully event-based pipeline for egomotion estimation that processes the event stream directly within the event-based domain. This method eliminates the need for frame-based intermediaries, allowing for low-latency and energy-efficient motion estimation. We construct a shallow spiking neural network using a synaptic gating mechanism to convert precise event timing into bursts of spikes. These spikes encode local optical flow velocities, and the network provides an event-based readout of egomotion. We evaluate the network's performance on a dedicated chip, demonstrating strong potential for low-latency, low-power motion estimation. Additionally, simulations of larger networks show that the system achieves state-of-the-art accuracy in egomotion estimation tasks with event-based cameras, making it a promising solution for real-time, power-constrained robotics applications.

10 pa...

10 pages, 7 figures. Supplementary material: 4 pages, 1 figure

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Spatially-guided Temporal Aggregation for Robust Event-RGB Optical Flow Estimation 2025-01-01
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Current optical flow methods exploit the stable appearance of frame (or RGB) data to establish robust correspondences across time. Event cameras, on the other hand, provide high-temporal-resolution motion cues and excel in challenging scenarios. These complementary characteristics underscore the potential of integrating frame and event data for optical flow estimation. However, most cross-modal approaches fail to fully utilize the complementary advantages, relying instead on simply stacking information. This study introduces a novel approach that uses a spatially dense modality to guide the aggregation of the temporally dense event modality, achieving effective cross-modal fusion. Specifically, we propose an event-enhanced frame representation that preserves the rich texture of frames and the basic structure of events. We use the enhanced representation as the guiding modality and employ events to capture temporally dense motion information. The robust motion features derived from the guiding modality direct the aggregation of motion information from events. To further enhance fusion, we propose a transformer-based module that complements sparse event motion features with spatially rich frame information and enhances global information propagation. Additionally, a mix-fusion encoder is designed to extract comprehensive spatiotemporal contextual features from both modalities. Extensive experiments on the MVSEC and DSEC-Flow datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework. Leveraging the complementary strengths of frames and events, our method achieves leading performance on the DSEC-Flow dataset. Compared to the event-only model, frame guidance improves accuracy by 10%. Furthermore, it outperforms the state-of-the-art fusion-based method with a 4% accuracy gain and a 45% reduction in inference time.

12 pa...

12 pages, 8 figures, under review

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Improve Myocardial Strain Estimation based on Deformable Groupwise Registration with a Locally Low-Rank Dissimilarity Metric 2024-12-31
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Background: Current mainstream cardiovascular magnetic resonance-feature tracking (CMR-FT) methods, including optical flow and pairwise registration, often suffer from the drift effect caused by accumulative tracking errors. Here, we developed a CMR-FT method based on deformable groupwise registration with a locally low-rank (LLR) dissimilarity metric to improve myocardial tracking and strain estimation accuracy. Methods: The proposed method, Groupwise-LLR, performs feature tracking by iteratively updating the entire displacement field across all cardiac phases to minimize the sum of the patchwise signal ranks of the deformed movie. The method was compared with alternative CMR-FT methods including the Farneback optical flow, a sequentially pairwise registration method, and a global low rankness-based groupwise registration method via a simulated dataset (n = 20), a public cine data set (n = 100), and an in-house tagging-MRI patient dataset (n = 16). The proposed method was also compared with two general groupwise registration methods, nD+t B-Splines and pTVreg, in simulations and in vivo tracking. Results: On the simulated dataset, Groupwise-LLR achieved the lowest point tracking errors and voxelwise/global strain errors. On the public dataset, Groupwise-LLR achieved the lowest contour tracking errors, reduced the drift effect in late-diastole, and preserved similar inter-observer reproducibility as the alternative methods. On the patient dataset, Groupwise-LLR correlated better with tagging-MRI for radial strains than the other CMR-FT methods in multiple myocardial segments and levels. Conclusions: The proposed Groupwise-LLR reduces the drift effect and provides more accurate myocardial tracking and strain estimation than the alternative methods. The method may thus facilitate a more accurate estimation of myocardial strains for clinical assessments of cardiac function.

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