GAFlow: Incorporating Gaussian Attention into Optical Flow

TL;DR

GAFlow introduces Gaussian Attention modules into optical flow estimation, enhancing local discrimination and motion affinity, leading to improved performance on standard datasets.

Contribution

The paper proposes novel Gaussian-based attention modules integrated into optical flow models, improving local feature representation and motion matching accuracy.

Findings

Superior performance on optical flow benchmarks

Enhanced local structural information capture

Improved generalization ability

Abstract

Optical flow, or the estimation of motion fields from image sequences, is one of the fundamental problems in computer vision. Unlike most pixel-wise tasks that aim at achieving consistent representations of the same category, optical flow raises extra demands for obtaining local discrimination and smoothness, which yet is not fully explored by existing approaches. In this paper, we push Gaussian Attention (GA) into the optical flow models to accentuate local properties during representation learning and enforce the motion affinity during matching. Specifically, we introduce a novel Gaussian-Constrained Layer (GCL) which can be easily plugged into existing Transformer blocks to highlight the local neighborhood that contains fine-grained structural information. Moreover, for reliable motion analysis, we provide a new Gaussian-Guided Attention Module (GGAM) which not only inherits properties from Gaussian distribution to instinctively revolve around the neighbor fields of each point but also is empowered to put the emphasis on contextually related regions during matching. Our fully-equipped model, namely Gaussian Attention Flow network (GAFlow), naturally incorporates a series of novel Gaussian-based modules into the conventional optical flow framework for reliable motion analysis. Extensive experiments on standard optical flow datasets consistently demonstrate the exceptional performance of the proposed approach in terms of both generalization ability evaluation and online benchmark testing. Code is available at https://github.com/LA30/GAFlow.