Multi-Scale Raft: Combining Hierarchical Concepts for Learning-Based Optical Flow Estimation

Many classical and learning-based optical flow methods rely on hierarchical concepts to improve both accuracy and robustness. However, one of the currently most successful approaches – RAFT – hardly exploits such concepts. In this work, we show that multi-scale ideas are still valuable. More precisely, using RAFT as a baseline, we propose a novel multi-scale neural network that combines several hierarchical concepts within a single estimation framework. These concepts include (i) a partially shared coarse-to-fine architecture, (ii) multi-scale features, (iii) a hierarchical cost volume and (iv) a multi-scale multi-iteration loss. Experiments on MPI Sintel and KITTI clearly demonstrate the benefits of our approach. They show not only substantial improvements compared to RAFT, but also state-of-the-art results – in particular in non-occluded regions. Code will be available at https://github.com/cv-stuttgart/MS_RAFT.