SphereFlow: 6 DoF scene flow from RGB-D pairs

We take a new approach to computing dense scene flow between a pair of consecutive RGB-D frames. We exploit the availability of depth data by seeking correspondences with respect to patches specified not as the pixels inside square windows, but as the 3D points that are the inliers of spheres in world space. Our primary contribution is to show that by reasoning in terms of such patches under 6 DoF rigid body motions in 3D, we succeed in obtaining compelling results at displacements large and small without relying on either of two simplifying assumptions that pervade much of the earlier literature: brightness constancy or local surface planarity. As a consequence of our approach, our output is a dense field of 3D rigid body motions, in contrast to the 3D translations that are the norm in scene flow. Reasoning in our manner additionally allows us to carry out occlusion handling using a 6 DoF consistency check for the flow computed in both directions and a patchwise silhouette check to help reason about alignments in occlusion areas, and to promote smoothness of the flow fields using an intuitive local rigidity prior. We carry out our optimization in two steps, obtaining a first correspondence field using an adaptation of PatchMatch, and subsequently using alpha-expansion to jointly handle occlusions and perform regularization. We show attractive flow results on challenging synthetic and real-world scenes that push the practical limits of the aforementioned assumptions.