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Sparse Occlusion Detection with Optical Flow

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Abstract

We tackle the problem of detecting occluded regions in a video stream. Under assumptions of Lambertian reflection and static illumination, the task can be posed as a variational optimization problem, and its solution approximated using convex minimization. We describe efficient numerical schemes that reach the global optimum of the relaxed cost functional, for any number of independently moving objects, and any number of occlusion layers. We test the proposed algorithm on benchmark datasets, expanded to enable evaluation of occlusion detection performance, in addition to optical flow.

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Correspondence to Alper Ayvaci.

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A. Ayvaci and M. Raptis contributed equally to this work.

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Ayvaci, A., Raptis, M. & Soatto, S. Sparse Occlusion Detection with Optical Flow. Int J Comput Vis 97, 322–338 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11263-011-0490-7

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