# The Devil in the Details: Simple and Effective Optical Flow Synthetic Data Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.07378 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.07378/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 18 of its 35 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Aug 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [RAFT: Recurrent All-Pairs Field Transforms for Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12039/) (2020)
- [FlowNet: Learning Optical Flow with Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.06852/) (2015)
- [PWC-Net: CNNs for Optical Flow Using Pyramid, Warping, and Cost Volume](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.02371/) (2017)
- [A Large Dataset to Train Convolutional Networks for Disparity, Optical Flow, and Scene Flow Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.02134/) (2015)
- [FlowNet 2.0: Evolution of Optical Flow Estimation with Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01925/) (2016)
- [Virtual Worlds as Proxy for Multi-Object Tracking Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.06457/) (2016)
- [Super SloMo: High Quality Estimation of Multiple Intermediate Frames for Video Interpolation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.00080/) (2017)
- [Iterative Residual Refinement for Joint Optical Flow and Occlusion Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05290/) (2019)
- [What Matters in Unsupervised Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04902/) (2020)
- [MaskFlownet: Asymmetric Feature Matching with Learnable Occlusion Mask](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.10955/) (2020)
- [AutoFlow: Learning a Better Training Set for Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14544/) (2021)
- [Models Matter, So Does Training: An Empirical Study of CNNs for Optical Flow Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.05571/) (2018)
- [Accurate Optical Flow via Direct Cost Volume Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.07325/) (2017)
- [What Makes Good Synthetic Training Data for Learning Disparity and Optical Flow Estimation?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.06397/) (2018)
- [Learning-based Video Motion Magnification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02684/) (2018)
- [Learning optical flow from still images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.03965/) (2021)
- [Imposing Consistency for Optical Flow Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.07262/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent work on dense optical flow has shown significant progress, primarily in a supervised learning manner requiring a large amount of labeled data. Due to the expensiveness of obtaining large scale real-world data, computer graphics are typically leveraged for constructing datasets. However, there is a common belief that synthetic-to-real domain gaps limit generalization to real scenes. In this paper, we show that the required characteristics in an optical flow dataset are rather simple and present a simpler synthetic data generation method that achieves a certain level of realism with compositions of elementary operations. With 2D motion-based datasets, we systematically analyze the simplest yet critical factors for generating synthetic datasets. Furthermore, we propose a novel method of utilizing occlusion masks in a supervised method and observe that suppressing gradients on occluded regions serves as a powerful initial state in the curriculum learning sense. The RAFT network initially trained on our dataset outperforms the original RAFT on the two most challenging online benchmarks, MPI Sintel and KITTI 2015.