SMURF: Self-Teaching Multi-Frame Unsupervised RAFT with Full-Image Warping

Abstract

We present SMURF, a method for unsupervised learning of optical flow that improves state of the art on all benchmarks by $36\%$ to $40\%$ (over the prior best method UFlow) and even outperforms several supervised approaches such as PWC-Net and FlowNet2. Our method integrates architecture improvements from supervised optical flow, i.e. the RAFT model, with new ideas for unsupervised learning that include a sequence-aware self-supervision loss, a technique for handling out-of-frame motion, and an approach for learning effectively from multi-frame video data while still only requiring two frames for inference.