The Walt Disney Company
Edge-aware spatio-temporal filtering and optical flow estimation in real time

Abstract:

The disclosure provides an approach for edge-aware spatio-temporal filtering. In one embodiment, a filtering application receives as input a guiding video sequence and video sequence(s) from additional channel(s). The filtering application estimates a sparse optical flow from the guiding video sequence using a novel binary feature descriptor integrated into the Coarse-to-fine PatchMatch method to compute a quasi-dense nearest neighbor field. The filtering application then performs spatial edge-aware filtering of the sparse optical flow (to obtain a dense flow) and the additional channel(s), using an efficient evaluation of the permeability filter with only two scan-line passes per iteration. Further, the filtering application performs temporal filtering of the optical flow using an infinite impulse response filter that only requires one filter state updated based on new guiding video sequence video frames. The resulting optical flow may then be used in temporal edge-aware filtering of the additional channel(s) using the nonlinear infinite impulse response filter.