StreamFlow: Streamlined Multi-Frame Optical Flow Estimation for Video Sequences

Occlusions between consecutive frames have long posed a significant challenge in optical flow estimation. The inherent ambiguity introduced by occlusions directly violates the brightness constancy constraint and considerably hinders pixel-to-pixel matching. To address this issue, multi-frame optical flow methods leverage adjacent frames to mitigate the local ambiguity. Nevertheless, prior multi-frame methods predominantly adopt recursive flow estimation, resulting in a considerable computational overlap. In contrast, we propose a streamlined in-batch framework that eliminates the need for extensive redundant recursive computations while concurrently developing effective spatio-temporal modeling approaches under in-batch estimation constraints. Specifically, we present a Streamlined In-batch Multi-frame (SIM) pipeline tailored to video input, attaining a similar level of time efficiency to two-frame networks. Furthermore, we introduce an efficient Integrative Spatio-temporal Coherence (ISC) modeling method for effective spatio-temporal modeling during the encoding phase, which introduces no additional parameter overhead. Additionally, we devise a Global Temporal Regressor (GTR) that effectively explores temporal relations during decoding. Benefiting from the efficient SIM pipeline and effective modules, StreamFlow not only excels in terms of performance on the challenging KITTI and Sintel datasets, with particular improvement in occluded areas but also attains a remarkable $63.82\%$ enhancement in speed compared with previous multi-frame methods. The code will be available soon at https://github.com/littlespray/StreamFlow.

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Peer review

Reviewer ba6H6/10 · confidence 5/52024-07-08

Summary

The paper proposes a multi-frame optical flow estimation model with a novel flow decoder that estimates a flow output for all frames simultaneously. The paper describes this process as a Stream-lined In-batch Multiframe (SIM) pipeline and argues that this leads to efficiency gains when processing video as each multi-frame batch needs to contain each video frame only once, i.e., the video processing can advance by multi-frame batch instead of frame-by-frame. The decoder is termed Global Temporal Regressor and uses an iterative design as common in many recent optical flow methods. In order to estimate multi-flow output the decoder uses a correlation volume for each pair of input images. The first step of the decoder is the output of a "MotionEncoder" which uses the current flow estimate and the correlation volume. These motion features form the input to a temporal feature encoder which is implemented with the Super Convolution Kernels by Sun et al., 2022. Spatial image features are than matched with a cross attention module and also input in the updater for the flow. The paper explains the stacking of feature over time and using the twins transformer for encoding temporal relationship in their Integrative Spatio-temporal Coherence (ISC) modeling. The paper reports experiments with the KITTI and MPI-Sintel datasets and two training schedules. The tables show that the proposed StreamFlow achieves either SOTA or close to SOTA performance. The paper reports that A100 GPU with 40GB of memory is enough to train either the method to work with 3 or 4 images as input to the batch. The paper reports a more detailed breakdown of Sintel results and an ablation study is provided.

Strengths

The stream processing for optical flow is new to the best of my knowledge. In the proposed computationally heavy method, it enables the distribution of the computational effort over multiple output. This idea brings the method to a computational level per frame which is similar to methods such as RAFT. The idea of video processing in batches with multiple outputs has been used in MTTR, a referring video object segmentation by Botach et al., 2022. The proposed flow decoder GTR is novel as it works with multiple correlation volumes, uses spatio-temporal features as inputs and combines them to an iterative design. The paper also proposes to append temporal input in space for spatio-temporal feature encoding in the ISC that are the "appearance features" for the flow decoder. The results shows that the proposed StreamFlow is very capable in estimating flow in the Sintel and KITTI datasets with a training schedule of only Chairs and Things. The paper contains an ablation study to evaluate the components of the proposed model.

Weaknesses

The multiple input - multiple output processing does only partially address the high computation cost of recent optical flow methods. In particular the high memory costs limits the use of StreamFlow to non-edge devices. Considering that optical flow is a low-level visual cue, this prevents StreamFlow to be used as an optical flow sub-module in other tasks. The paper overstates the performance gains of the method. In particular, considering the full training schedule StreamFlow does not reach top performance on MPI-Sintel and in Kitti. While the table shows top performance on Kitti, the table does not include the on-line videoflow MOF method which achieves an F1-all score of 4.08 (Section 3 of VideoFlow supplemental material). The paper does not conduct any experiments with data other than MPI-Sintel and Kitti. The recent large image Spring dataset by Mehl et al., 2023 would be a good choice. The authors did not include consideration of MemFlow, CVPR 2024 by Dong and Fu which has been available on arXiv since April 2024. As one may argue that this is parallel work, I think their superior results raise questions about the design choices for the proposed method. Unrolling time into space in the ISC module seems to be a fairly standard trick. It is hard to think of it as a novel contribution, even though this may be the first time that it has been used in optical flow.

Questions

Is there a relationship between image size and memory requirements and if so can the method be used to process large-scale images, e.g., in Spring? The MPI-Sintel datasets makes numerous measures for detailed analysis of the flow results available. Can these measures be listed and discussed in the supplemental material? The efficiency analysis makes claims about the efficiency of StreamFlow but no such data is provided. The only information included seems the number of parameters and the latency of the method. No comparison to other methods is given except with VideoFlow-BOF on latency in the Table 4 (Appendix A.1). The training EPE is very low. Does this indicate overfitting? The paper needs some careful proof-reading: l.27 The consecutive flow goes backwards in time. Please check notation. l.48 "the aim of bidirectional flows" cannot be understood. l.83 "features from different in multiple scales" missing word. l.122 "iterative decoder is the paradigm proposed in RAFT" has been proposed earlier by Hur and Roth in their IRR-PWC, 2019 paper. l.177,184,200 "could" -> can Eqn. 2 is very confusing by typing Integration and using superscript and subscript for the time range. Needs better notation. l.173 jth should be j^{th} (superscript). Table 2. TransFlow has lower EPE on Matched-clean. l. 244 Abaltions -> Ablations l. 306 "it significantly increases during training." fragment, please complete the sentence. [33] should be updated to the peer-reviewed reference.

Rating

6

Confidence

5

Soundness

4

Presentation

3

Contribution

3

Limitations

The paper contains a limitation section that raises two relevant limitations of the proposed method: the large memory usage for training and the lack of temporal connections between batches.

Authorsrebuttal2024-08-10

Response from Authors

Dear Reviewer, Thank you very much for your valuable and prompt feedback. We sincerely appreciate the time and effort you have invested in reviewing our work and highlighting areas that require further clarification. We are eager to address your concerns as follows: **Q1: Relationship between image size and memory usage.** A: With PyTorch 2.2 and flash-attention, using 12 refinements and 4 frames, the GPU memory usage for StreamFlow is as follows. Specifically, when the image size increases by 4 times, the GPU memory usage increases to nearly 4.4 times. When the image size is increased by 9 times, GPU memory usage grows to nearly 20 times. For most current scenarios, StreamFlow still maintains a relatively moderate use of GPU memory. The variation in GPU memory usage may be influenced by underlying optimizations in the framework. We believe the memory usage could be further optimized in the future. | Image Size | GPU Memory | | ------------ | ------------ | | 360x640 | 1.19 G | | 720x1280 | 5.20 G | | 1080x1920 | 24.11 G| **Q2: All evaluation parameters for MPI-Sintel.** A: We have collected all measures including ``all/matched/unmatched EPE, d0-10, d10-60, d60-140, s0-10, s10-40, s40+`` in Table 2 of the attched PDF. Compared to its two-frame baseline, StreamFlow performs exceptionally well in unmatched areas, validating its effectiveness in addressing occlusion issues. We would add a more detailed analysis for each metric in the supplements. **Q3: Relative accuracy of StreamFlow.** A: Thank you for your insightful comments and for pointing out concerns about the descriptions in this work. Our initial intention is to highlight its notable 0-shot cross-dataset generalization results, and we hope it did not come across as overstating its performance. We will refine the expression in the revised version to minimize potential misunderstandings. For instance, we will revise the content between Lines #223 and #230 to: ``From Table 1, we could learn that StreamFlow achieves excellent 0-shot cross-dataset performance on Sintel and KITTI. Compared to previous methods, StreamFlow reduces the 0-shot end-point error by 0.16 and 0.08 on the challenging Sintel clean and final passes, respectively. On KITTI, StreamFlow surpasses the previous 0-shot results with 0.11 and 17.65% lower EPE and Fl-all metrics. Besides, without self-supervised pre-training or bi-directional flows, StreamFlow attains commendable accuracy and efficiency on the challenging Sintel and KITTI test benchmarks using (C)+T+S+K+H schedule.`` Besides, StreamFlow indeed uses experimental settings different from others. However, this may also highlight StreamFlow’s advantages. For instance: (1) On the Spring dataset, StreamFlow was only trained for 180k iterations while outperforming MemFlow, which was trained for 400k iterations with the same batch size and learning rate. (2) For Sintel testing, StreamFlow was trained for 300k iterations on FlyingThings and 180k on T+S+H+K, while MemFlow was initially trained for 120k (FlyingChairs) and 150k (FlyingThings) in a 2-frame setting, followed by 600k iterations on FlyingThings and 600k on T+S+H+K. Despite this, StreamFlow still delivers good results, especially on Spring. (3) As for VideoFlow, it employs more frames and bidirectional flows for training, achieving excellent results on the KITTI dataset. We will update the result in Table 1 and add the related discussion. However, VideoFlow explores the accuracy and efficiency under bidirectional flow estimation, which differs from the focus of StreamFlow on a non-overlapping, continuous unidirectional flow pipeline. Additionally, its latency is significantly higher than that of StreamFlow. Therefore, A more relevant comparison for highlighting the issues that StreamFlow addresses is with the baseline method, Twins-SKFlow. In the end, we greatly appreciate your valuable comments and the opportunity to clarify these points. Please kindly let us know if you have any further questions or require additional clarification. We highly value your insights and stand ready to provide any further information that could be helpful.

Reviewer zwXh4/10 · confidence 3/52024-07-10

Summary

This work focuses on the task of multi-frame optical flow estimation. It challenges the traditional pair-wise flow estimation approach in multi-frame scenarios, which involves redundant calculations. To address this issue, a new framework is proposed that takes multiple frames as input and predicts successive unidirectional flows in a single forward pass.

Strengths

- The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance. - The authors have conducted lots of experiments in the ablation study to justify their designs.

Weaknesses

- The paper is challenging to follow due to several presentation issues. Specifically, the `Integration’ operation used in Eq. 2 is not clearly defined. Additionally, from Eq. 5 to Eq. 9, using mathematical notations rather than component names to represent the model components in GTR would improve clarity and conciseness. Furthermore, the main figure requires more detailed captions to enhance comprehensibility. - Lack of further evaluations. To enhance the validation of the proposed method, the author should also test their model’s generalizability on the widely used Spring [1] benchmark, as it is a standard in many recent optical flow estimation studies. - Unclear Core Motivation. In my understanding, the core motivation of this paper is to enable the `simultaneous prediction of successive unidirectional flows in a single forward pass`, as opposed to making per-pair estimations in multi-frame flow estimation scenarios. However, I observed that there are numerous pair-wise operations among the inputs, such as cost volume calculations, in the `single forward pass`. I suggest that the authors allocate less space to describing these pair-wise operations and instead focus more on discussing and analyzing their designs that enhance efficiency in the `single forward pass`. For example, providing a detailed analysis of the time complexity of the proposed method compared to other methods would be beneficial. Additionally, it would be helpful for the authors to include comparisons and discussions regarding recent multi-frame flow estimation methods, such as MemFlow [2]. [1] Spring: A High-Resolution High-Detail Dataset and Benchmark for Scene Flow, Optical Flow and Stereo. [2] MemFlow: Optical Flow Estimation and Prediction with Memory.

Questions

Please see the "Weaknesses" section for my questions and suggestions. If the author can address these concerns, I would be willing to consider raising my rating.

Rating

4

Confidence

3

Soundness

2

Presentation

1

Contribution

2

Limitations

Yes.

Authorsrebuttal2024-08-12

Dear Reviewer, Thank you once again for taking the time to review our manuscript. We have tried our best to address the questions you raised (please see our responses in the top-level comment and above) and have revised the paper according to the suggestions provided by all reviewers. Please kindly let us know if there are any additional questions requiring further clarification. Your feedback is highly valued, and we are more than willing to provide any further information that may be helpful.

Reviewer PByw5/10 · confidence 4/52024-07-12

Summary

The paper presents StreamFlow, a new optical flow estimation method tailored for video inputs. StreamFlow differentiates itself from earlier methods by incorporating a streamlined in-batch multi-frame pipeline that reduces duplicate computations across consecutive frames, thereby enhancing efficiency. Additionally, the introduction of an ISC module and a GTR decoder allows for effective leverage of spatio-temporal information without an increase in parameter count. Extensive experiments demonstrate that StreamFlow surpasses existing methods on the Sintel and KITTI datasets in both accuracy and efficiency.

Strengths

- The method designs are technically sound and well-motivated. - Quantitative results on the Sintel and KITTI datasets surpass previous works, demonstrating the proposed method's superior generalization capability. - The proposed methods achieve faster runtime with a parameter-efficient architecture. - Extensive ablation studies clearly demonstrate the impact of each proposed module and explore multiple variations.

Weaknesses

- The literature review in Section 2 appears insufficient. It should be expanded to include more detailed discussions of related works such as SKFlow and Videoflow, upon which the architectural designs of this paper are based. - As I understand it, the primary motivation of this research is to design a non-overlapping inference pipeline for multi-frame estimation. This raises a question about how the non-overlapping inference affects accuracy in terms of frame distance, a topic that seems to be omitted from the paper. For instance, when given three input frames [t-1, t, t+1], a pair-wise pipeline might estimate flow f_t,t+1, and then f_t+1,t+2 using [t, t+1, t+2]. In contrast, if the SIM pipeline computes f_t,t+1 using [t-1, t, t+1], it then predicts f_t+1,t+2 using [t+1, t+2, t+3], thereby missing the opportunity to utilize frame t in estimating the flow for f_t+1, t+2. I would expect this loss of information may become more severe with longer frame lengths. Such analysis should be included in the first row of Table 3 (ablation of SIM Pipeline), yet the ablation study was conducted naively, focusing solely on latency without considering factors that affect accuracy.

Questions

Please check the weaknesses above.

Rating

5

Confidence

4

Soundness

3

Presentation

3

Contribution

3

Limitations

The authors described limitations adequately.

Authorsrebuttal2024-08-12

Dear Reviewer, Thank you once again for taking the time to review our manuscript. We have tried our best to address the questions you raised (please see our responses in the top-level comment and above) and have revised the paper according to the suggestions provided by all reviewers. Please kindly let us know if there are any additional questions requiring further clarification. Your feedback is highly valued, and we are more than willing to provide any further information that may be helpful.

Reviewer PByw2024-08-13

I thank the authors for their rebuttal and the additional results provided. While there is no compelling reason to oppose publication, and I acknowledge the contributions of the paper, I do not find them to be particularly significant. Therefore, I will maintain my current rating.

Reviewer ba6H2024-08-09

Rebuttal

I thank the authors for their rebuttal and the additional results on the Spring dataset. I also would like to acknowledge the new graph giving an overview and comparison of the efficiency of various methods. But unfortunately, I find that the rebuttal only answers some of my questions. My Q1 was about the relationship between image size and memory, while the authors provided helpful information, the question has not been answered. My Q2 was a request to report all evaluation parameters for MPI-Sintel. In weaknesses, I had pointed out that VideoFlow MOF outperforms StreamFlow for accuracy on Kitti, and that MemFlow has reported superior results. While I understand that different experimental setting lead to different results, the strong claims made in the paper about the relative accuracy of StreamFlow seem overstated.

Program Chairsdecision2024-09-25

Decision

Accept (poster)

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