Optical Flow

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Overview

Optical flow estimates a motion vector for each image pixel, helping systems track objects, stabilize video, guide robots, and interpolate or compress frames. Methods range from classical local and variational estimation to deep correlation-based networks such as RAFT, global matching transformers, and models that use pretrained vision features; event-camera methods handle asynchronous motion cues. Training commonly uses synthetic labeled data, while self-supervised approaches exploit photometric, geometric, and temporal consistency when labels are scarce. A central challenge is making accurate estimates transfer to real scenes with occlusion, large motion, lighting changes, and image corruption without excessive computation.

Latest papers

CardsList

58 papers9 papers in the last four weeks, level with the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

  1. Real Time Motion Detection in Video Inspired by Photonic Time Stretch

    Oct 23, 2026Callen MacPhee, Yiming Zhou, Bahram JalaliOptical Flow

    ECE Department, UCLA, 405 Hilgard Ave., Los Angeles, 90095, California, USA.

  2. TinyFlow: Breaking the Warping Bottleneck for Edge Optical Flow

    Oct 23, 2026Xiao'ao Song, Chahat Deep SinghOptical FlowEdge Inference

    The authors are with the Perception, Robotics, AI, Sensing (PRAISe) Lab, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, USA.

  3. Foundation Model Driven Optical Flow

    Oct 19, 2026Praroop Chanda, Suryansh KumarOptical FlowVision Foundation Models

    Visual and Spatial AI Lab, VCCM Section, Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas, USA · Department of ECEN, Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas, USA · College of PVFA, Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas, USA +1

  4. FLoTS-SLAM: Optical Flow-Derived Uncertainty for Monocular Dynamic SLAM with Two-Stage Optimization

    Oct 16, 2026Haorui Du, Lipu ZhouDynamic SLAMVisual SLAM

    The authors are with the School of Instrument Science and Optoelectronics Engineering, Beihang University, Beijing 100191, China

  5. DuSRFlow: Dual-Lens Super-Resolution via Parallax-Aware Flow Estimation and Complementary Reference Warping

    Oct 10, 2026Fangpu Zhang, Huanjing Yue, Zifan Cui +3Reference-Based Image Super-ResolutionImage Super-Resolution

    State Key Laboratory of Smart Power Distribution Equipment and System, Tianjin University and School of Electrical and Information Engineering, Tianjin University · School of Electrical and Information Engineering, Tianjin University, Tianjin, China, 300072 · Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd.

  6. EchoDiST: Self-distillation-based joint learning for diffusion-conditioned echocardiographic myocardial motion estimation

    Oct 8, 2026Feiyue Qi, Xingyue Wei, Jianwen LuoMedical Image AnalysisEchocardiography

    School of Biomedical Engineering, Tsinghua Medicine, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 100084, China

  7. FloVMos: Optical Flow-based Medical Video Mosaicking

    Oct 3, 2026Jinyang Liu, Sandesh Ghimire, Chaman Singh +5Medical Image RegistrationOptical Flow

    Electrical and Computer Engineering, Northeastern University, 360 Huntington Ave, Boston, 02115, MA, USA. · Dermatology Service, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, 1275 York Ave, New York, 10065, NY, USA.

  8. FAST: Flow Any Scene Transformer

    Sep 30, 2026Yongjian Zhang, Longguang Wang, Zhuo Song +3Optical FlowVision Transformer

    School of Electronics and Communication Engineering, the Shenzhen Campus of Sun Yat-sen University, Sun Yat-sen University, Shenzhen, China · Hong Kong Polytechnic University, HKSAR, China · School of Computer Science and Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China

  9. E-WAVE: Event-based Continuous Optical Flow via Warping-Aligned Visual Encoding

    Sep 28, 2026Jiale Wu, Xiaoyang Bai, Haoming Yu +3Optical FlowEvent-Based Vision

    Zhejiang University. · The University of Hong Kong.

  10. Accurate Motion Estimation with Bézier Control Point for Efficient Frame Interpolation

    Sep 20, 2026Shuhao Han, Chenyang Wu, Chun-Le Guo +4Optical FlowVideo Frame Interpolation

    VCIP, College of Computer Science, Nankai University, Tianjin 300350, China · VCIP, College of Computer Science, Nankai University, Tianjin 300350, China, and also with the Nankai International Advanced Research Institute (NKIARI), Futian, Shenzhen 518045, China · Alibaba Group, Hangzhou 311121, China

  11. Optical-Flow Wingbeat Counting in MuJoCo: A Comparison of Convolutional, Spiking, and Attention-Based Temporal Models

    Sep 15, 2026Zhang NengboOptical FlowAerial Robotics

    School of Aerospace Engineering, Engineering Campus Universiti Sains Malaysia, 14300 Nibong Tebal, Pulau Pinang, Malaysia

  12. FreeFlow: A Bias-free Hierarchical Transformer for Optical Flow Estimation

    Sep 10, 2026Vladislav Bargatin, Alexander Yakovenko, Khaled Abud +1Optical FlowVision Transformer

    AI Center, Lomonosov MSU, Moscow, Russia · Lomonosov Moscow State University, Moscow, Russia · MSU Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Moscow, Russia

  13. Did You Steal My Shot? Pioneering Camera Motion Plagiarism Detection in Generative Videos

    Sep 8, 2026Chengguo Zhang, Ping PingCamera Motion UnderstandingOptical Flow

    Hohai University Nanjing, China

  14. PhysFlow: Physics-Aware Optical Flow for Motion Controllable Video Generation

    Sep 8, 2026Cong Wang, Hanxin Zhu, Yonglin Tian +5Optical FlowPhysical Consistency in Video Generation

    State Key Laboratory of Multi-modal Artificial Intelligence Systems, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, China · School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China · Zhongguancun Academy, Beijing 100094, China +2

  15. When Does Advection-Aware Graph Nowcasting Help? A Controlled Study of Distributed Solar Ramp Forecasting with a Self-Supervised Cloud-Motion Estimator

    Sep 8, 2026Phillip JiangSolar Power ForecastingSolar Irradiance Forecasting

    Appsofa LLC

  16. NSFlow: End-to-End Differentiable Neuro-Symbolic Optical Flow for Visual Odometry

    Sep 5, 2026Yicheng Lin, Zhipeng Fei, Yuxiu Xu +3Optical FlowVisual Odometry

    Guangzhou Purpleriver Electronic Technology Co., Ltd, Guangzhou, China · State Key Laboratory of Intelligent Manufacturing Equipment and Technology, School of Mechanical Science and Engineering, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China

  17. Distilling deep optical flow stereo methods to retrieve dense three-dimensional wind fields

    Sep 2, 2026Thomas J. Vandal, Dong L. Wu, James L. Carr +5Optical FlowStereo Matching

    Zeus AI · NASA Goddard Space Flight Center · Carr Astronautics +1

  18. WiFlow: Estimating Optical Flow using WiFi Channel State Information

    Sep 2, 2026Thomas Weigel, Simon Kiefhaber, Fabian Portner +2Optical FlowWi-Fi Sensing

    Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany · Hessian Center for AI (hessian.AI), Germany · Technische Universiteit Delft, The Netherlands

  19. Pose-Anchored Optical Flow for Low-Latency Human Action Anticipation in Human-Robot Teaming

    Aug 26, 2026Lewis de Zoete Grundy, Chris McCarthy, Christopher FlukeHuman Behavior PredictionOptical Flow

    School of Science, Computing and Emerging Technologies, Swinburne University of Technology, John St, Hawthorn VIC 3122, Australia

  20. KLTNet: Learning Sparse Feature Tracking for Robust and Accurate Monocular Visual-Inertial Odometry

    Aug 25, 2026Renbiao Jin, Danping Zou, Wenxian YuPoint TrackingVisual-Inertial Odometry

    Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200240, China

  21. On the Choice of Tensor Estimation for Corner Detection, Optical Flow and Denoising

    Aug 23, 2026Freddie Åström, Michael FelsbergImage EnhancementOptical Flow

    Computer Vision Laboratory, Linköping University, Sweden · Center for Medical Image Science and Visualization (CMIV), Linköping University

  22. Modality-Invariant Coarse-to-Fine Retinal Image Registration

    Aug 14, 2026Bo Wen, Nehal Nailesh Mehta, Melanie Tran +3Medical Image RegistrationCross-Modal Image Registration

  23. Static in Frames, Dynamic in Events: Rethinking Features in Event Cameras as Motion Cues

    Aug 11, 2026Hesam Araghi, Jan van Gemert, Nergis TomenOptical FlowEvent-Based Vision

    Computer Vision Lab, Delft University of Technology

  24. Multiple Hypothesis Flow Estimation for Video Frame Interpolation under Matching Ambiguity

    Aug 7, 2026Zibo Su, Jing Kong, Ruixing Wang +2Optical FlowVideo Frame Interpolation

    1Xidian University · 2DJI Technology Co., Ltd.

  25. Optical Flow from Photons

    Aug 1, 2026Wendi Liu, Weichao Zeng, Weihang Ran +2Optical Flow

    The University of Tokyo

  26. ENCORE: Event-Assisted Complementary Motion Refinement for Learned Video Compression

    Jul 30, 2026Shuhan Ye, Hongbin Yu, Chenqi Kong +4Optical FlowEvent-Based Optical Flow

    School of Computer Science, Wuhan University, Wuhan, China · School of Artificial Intelligence, Ningbo University, Ningbo, China · National University of Singapore, Singapore +2

  27. Optical Flow Sensor: A Direction-Selective Bionic Retina Design

    Jul 30, 2026Juchen Zhou, Bonan Yan, Yuchao YangOptical FlowEvent-Based Vision

    Peking University, China

  28. Physically Real-time Infrared Attack against Optical Flow Estimation Networks

    Jul 29, 2026Shen You, Wei Jiang, Jiarui Liu +4Optical FlowAdversarial Attacks

    City University of Hong Kong Tat Chee Avenue, Kowloon, Hong Kong SAR · University of Electronic Science and Technology Chengdu, Sichuan, China · Shenzhen University Shenzhen,Guangdong,China +1

  29. On the Real-World Generalisability of Optical Flow Models

    Jul 11, 2026Petter Reijalt, Sander Gielisse, Rickard Karlsson +1Optical Flow

    Computer Vision Lab, TU Delft, Delft, the Netherlands

  30. FlowPainter: Inpainting Optical Flow via Confidence-Guided Completion

    Jul 11, 2026Yuang Meng, Chenyang Wu, Xianshun Liu +7Optical FlowDiffusion Model Guidance

    VCIP, CS, Nankai University · OPPO Research Institute · The Hong Kong Polytechnic University