Trustworthy Self-Attention: Enabling the Network to Focus Only on the Most Relevant References

The prediction of optical flow for occluded points is still a difficult problem that has not yet been solved. Recent methods use self-attention to find relevant non-occluded points as references for estimating the optical flow of occluded points based on the assumption of self-similarity. However, they rely on visual features of a single image and weak constraints, which are not sufficient to constrain the trained network to focus on erroneous and weakly relevant reference points. We make full use of online occlusion recognition information to construct occlusion extended visual features and two strong constraints, allowing the network to learn to focus only on the most relevant references without requiring occlusion ground truth to participate in the training of the network. Our method adds very few network parameters to the original framework, making it very lightweight. Extensive experiments show that our model has the greatest cross-dataset generalization. Our method achieves much greater error reduction, 18.6%, 16.2%, and 20.1% for all points, non-occluded points, and occluded points respectively from the state-of-the-art GMA-base method, MATCHFlow(GMA), on Sintel Albedo pass. Furthermore, our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on the Sintel bench-marks, ranking #1 among all published methods on Sintel clean pass. The code will be open-source.