Optical Flow Estimation using Laplacian Mesh Energy

In this paper we present a novel non-rigid optical flow algorithm for dense image correspondence and non-rigid registration. The algorithm uses a unique Laplacian Mesh Energy term to encourage local smoothness whilst simul-taneously preserving non-rigid deformation. Laplacian de-formation approaches have become popular in graphics re-search as they enable mesh deformations to preserve local surface shape. In this work we propose a novel Laplacian Mesh Energy formula to ensure such sensible local defor-mations between image pairs. We express this wholly with-in the optical flow optimization, and show its application in a novel coarse-to-fine pyramidal approach. Our algorith-m achieves the state-of-the-art performance in all trials on the Garg et al. dataset, and top tier performance on the Middlebury evaluation. 1