Robust Optical Flow Estimation in Rainy Scenes

Abstract: Optical flow estimation in the rainy scenes is challenging due to background degradation introduced by rain streaks and rain accumulation effects in the scene. Rain accumulation effect refers to poor visibility of remote objects due to the intense rainfall. Most existing optical flow methods are erroneous when applied to rain sequences because the conventional brightness constancy constraint (BCC) and gradient constancy constraint (GCC) generally break down in this situation. Based on the observation that the RGB color channels receive raindrop radiance equally, we introduce a residue channel as a new data constraint to reduce the effect of rain streaks. To handle rain accumulation, our method decomposes the image into a piecewise-smooth background layer and a high-frequency detail layer. It also enforces the BCC on the background layer only. Results on both synthetic dataset and real images show that our algorithm outperforms existing methods on different types of rain sequences. To our knowledge, this is the first optical flow method specifically dealing with rain.