# Towards Dependable Optical Flow: Benchmarks for Real-World Spatiotemporal Corruptions

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.14865 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.14865/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 68 of its 89 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Nov 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 68)

- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [Benchmarking Neural Network Robustness to Common Corruptions and Perturbations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.12261/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Deep Multi-scale Convolutional Neural Network for Dynamic Scene Deblurring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.02177/) (2016)
- [Benchmarking Robustness in Object Detection: Autonomous Driving when Winter is Coming](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.07484/) (2019)
- [GMFlow: Learning Optical Flow via Global Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.13680/) (2021)
- [FlowFormer: A Transformer Architecture for Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16194/) (2022)
- [Rerender A Video: Zero-Shot Text-Guided Video-to-Video Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.07954/) (2023)
- [Learning to Estimate Hidden Motions with Global Motion Aggregation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02409/) (2021)
- [UnFlow: Unsupervised Learning of Optical Flow with a Bidirectional Census Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07837/) (2017)
- [SelFlow: Self-Supervised Learning of Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09117/) (2019)
- [On the Robustness of Semantic Segmentation Models to Adversarial Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09856/) (2017)
- [Learning by Analogy: Reliable Supervision from Transformations for Unsupervised Optical Flow Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.13045/) (2020)
- [Delivering Arbitrary-Modal Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.01480/) (2023)
- [The Surprising Effectiveness of Diffusion Models for Optical Flow and Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.01923/) (2023)
- [FlowFormer++: Masked Cost Volume Autoencoding for Pretraining Optical Flow Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.01237/) (2023)
- [Benchmarking Robustness of 3D Object Detection to Common Corruptions in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11040/) (2023)
- [Event-Based Fusion for Motion Deblurring with Cross-modal Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.00167/) (2021)
- [Benchmarking the Robustness of Semantic Segmentation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.05005/) (2019)
- [FLAVR: Flow-Agnostic Video Representations for Fast Frame Interpolation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.08512/) (2020)
- [CRAFT: Cross-Attentional Flow Transformer for Robust Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16896/) (2022)
- [EpicFlow: Edge-Preserving Interpolation of Correspondences for Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1501.02565/) (2015)
- [FlowVid: Taming Imperfect Optical Flows for Consistent Video-to-Video Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.17681/) (2023)
- [SMURF: Self-Teaching Multi-Frame Unsupervised RAFT with Full-Image Warping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.07014/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [RobustSpring: Benchmarking Robustness to Image Corruptions for Optical Flow, Scene Flow and Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09368/) (2025)
- [RoHOI: Robustness Benchmark for Human-Object Interaction Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.09111/) (2025)
- [Benchmarking Semantic Segmentation Models via Appearance and Geometry Attribute Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.01535/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Optical flow estimation is a fundamental task in dynamic scene understanding and computer vision. While recent deep models achieve impressive accuracy on clean benchmarks, their robustness to common visual and temporal degradations remains insufficiently explored. To address this gap, we establish a real-video-based spatiotemporal corruption benchmark suite that complements rendered and mixed-source robustness benchmarks, systematically evaluating two complementary aspects of visual perception: domain robustness and motion-distribution robustness. We construct two targeted benchmarks: KITTI Flow Corruptions (KITTI-FC) for dynamic outdoor scenes and GoPro Flow Corruptions (GoPro-FC) for diverse first-person-view complex motions. Both benchmarks use captured source data and apply 24 controlled, predominantly algorithmic corruptions encompassing digital, illumination, weather, noise, blur, and video artifacts. To quantify robustness, we use two complementary axes: the GT-free output-stability error Rs and the GT-based accuracy degradation Rd, together with their clean-error-normalized variants. We systematically evaluate 33 model variants from 17 representative optical flow methods. Our results show that, under the evaluated corruption schedules, models exhibit greater vulnerability to local structural information loss (e.g., JPEG compression and spatter) than to global perceptual distortions (e.g., fog and saturation). We further find that in-domain fine-tuning does not guarantee relative robustness and that no single current method dominates across all tested source and motion settings. Our work provides a controlled diagnostic framework for assessing optical flow robustness and developing reliable perception systems in complex environments. Code and benchmark resources are publicly available at https://github.com/ZhonghuaYi/optical_flow_robustness_benchmark.