mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Accurate Optical Flow via Direct Cost Volume Processing

arXiv 1704.07325 ↗First posted 24 Apr 2017cs.CVcited by 66

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Abstract (arXiv)

We present an optical flow estimation approach that operates on the full four-dimensional cost volume. This direct approach shares the structural benefits of leading stereo matching pipelines, which are known to yield high accuracy. To this day, such approaches have been considered impractical due to the size of the cost volume. We show that the full four-dimensional cost volume can be constructed in a fraction of a second due to its regularity. We then exploit this regularity further by adapting semi-global matching to the four-dimensional setting. This yields a pipeline that achieves significantly higher accuracy than state-of-the-art optical flow methods while being faster than most. Our approach outperforms all published general-purpose optical flow methods on both Sintel and KITTI 2015 benchmarks.

Key facts. Cited by 66 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). First posted on arXiv 24 Apr 2017.

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Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2021: 25; 2022: 7; 2023: 9; 2024: 16; 2025: 8; 2026: 1.

66 papers.

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  1. 2023CoTracker: It is Better to Track Togethercited by 516
  2. 2021Learning to Estimate Hidden Motions with Global Motion Aggregationcited by 223
  3. 2024SpatialTracker: Tracking Any 2D Pixels in 3D Spacecited by 178
  4. 2024SEA-RAFT: Simple, Efficient, Accurate RAFT for Optical Flowcited by 169
  5. 2021Track to Detect and Segment: An Online Multi-Object Trackercited by 156
  6. 2021E-RAFT: Dense Optical Flow from Event Camerascited by 149
  7. 2021Efficient Regional Memory Network for Video Object Segmentationcited by 86
  8. 2022CRAFT: Cross-Attentional Flow Transformer for Robust Optical Flowcited by 82
  9. 2023Siamese Masked Autoencoderscited by 75
  10. 2021SMURF: Self-Teaching Multi-Frame Unsupervised RAFT with Full-Image Warpingcited by 74
  11. 2022Global Matching with Overlapping Attention for Optical Flow Estimationcited by 64
  12. 2024DINO-Tracker: Taming DINO for Self-Supervised Point Tracking in a Single Videocited by 64
38 more
  1. 2022Deep Equilibrium Optical Flow Estimationcited by 63
  2. 2024DELTA: Dense Efficient Long-range 3D Tracking for any videocited by 62
  3. 2023Dense Optical Tracking: Connecting the Dotscited by 58
  4. 2021High-Resolution Optical Flow from 1D Attention and Correlationcited by 54
  5. 2025AllTracker: Efficient Dense Point Tracking at High Resolutioncited by 54
  6. 2021Learning Optical Flow from a Few Matchescited by 53
  7. 2024TAPTR: Tracking Any Point with Transformers as Detectioncited by 43
  8. 2021Extreme Rotation Estimation using Dense Correlation Volumescited by 42
  9. 2025WAFT: Warping-Alone Field Transforms for Optical Flowcited by 32
  10. 2021Optical Flow Estimation for Spiking Cameracited by 29
  11. 2021Learning optical flow from still imagescited by 28
  12. 2024Local Feature Matching Using Deep Learning: A Surveycited by 26
  13. 2021FCCDN: Feature Constraint Network for VHR Image Change Detectioncited by 25
  14. 2023DropMAE: Learning Representations via Masked Autoencoders with Spatial-Attention Dropout for Temporal Matching Taskscited by 22
  15. 2022Spatio-Temporal Deformable Attention Network for Video Deblurringcited by 21
  16. 2021The Functional Correspondence Problemcited by 20
  17. 2021Deep Depth from Focus with Differential Focus Volumecited by 20
  18. 2024TAPTRv2: Attention-based Position Update Improves Tracking Any Pointcited by 18
  19. 2024Autogenic Language Embedding for Coherent Point Trackingcited by 17
  20. 2021Overcoming Obstructions via Bandwidth-Limited Multi-Agent Spatial Handshakingcited by 16
  21. 2023SAMConvex: Fast Discrete Optimization for CT Registration using Self-supervised Anatomical Embedding and Correlation Pyramidcited by 14
  22. 2021Optical Flow Estimation from a Single Motion-blurred Imagecited by 11
  23. 2023FlowText: Synthesizing Realistic Scene Text Video with Optical Flow Estimationcited by 10
  24. 2024Trajectory-aligned Space-time Tokens for Few-shot Action Recognitioncited by 10
  25. 2021M4Depth: Monocular depth estimation for autonomous vehicles in unseen environmentscited by 9
  26. 2021FastRIFE: Optimization of Real-Time Intermediate Flow Estimation for Video Frame Interpolationcited by 9
  27. 2025DELTAv2: Accelerating Dense 3D Trackingcited by 9
  28. 2024TAPTRv3: Spatial and Temporal Context Foster Robust Tracking of Any Point in Long Videocited by 8
  29. 2021Enhanced Correlation Matching based Video Frame Interpolationcited by 7
  30. 2024NeuFlow: Real-time, High-accuracy Optical Flow Estimation on Robots Using Edge Devicescited by 7
  31. 2021Learning by Distillation: A Self-Supervised Learning Framework for Optical Flow Estimationcited by 6
  32. 2021Sensor-Guided Optical Flowcited by 4
  33. 2021Joint Detection of Motion Boundaries and Occlusionscited by 4
  34. 2023Learning Fine-Grained Features for Pixel-wise Video Correspondencescited by 4
  35. 2023Learning Residual Elastic Warps for Image Stitching under Dirichlet Boundary Conditioncited by 4
  36. 2021Target Detection and Segmentation in Circular-Scan Synthetic-Aperture-Sonar Images using Semi-Supervised Convolutional Encoder-Decoderscited by 3
  37. 2021Normalized Convolution Upsampling for Refined Optical Flow Estimationcited by 3
  38. 2025ProbDiffFlow: An Efficient Learning-Free Framework for Probabilistic Single-Image Optical Flow Estimationcited by 2

50 most cited of 66 All 66 (JSON)