  Finding image correspondences remains a challenging problem in the presence
of intra-class variations and large changes in scene layout. Semantic flow
methods are designed to handle images depicting different instances of the same
object or scene category. We introduce a novel approach to semantic flow,
dubbed proposal flow, that establishes reliable correspondences using object
proposals. Unlike prevailing semantic flow approaches that operate on pixels or
regularly sampled local regions, proposal flow benefits from the
characteristics of modern object proposals, that exhibit high repeatability at
multiple scales, and can take advantage of both local and geometric consistency
constraints among proposals. We also show that the corresponding sparse
proposal flow can effectively be transformed into a conventional dense flow
field. We introduce two new challenging datasets that can be used to evaluate
both general semantic flow techniques and region-based approaches such as
proposal flow. We use these benchmarks to compare different matching
algorithms, object proposals, and region features within proposal flow, to the
state of the art in semantic flow. This comparison, along with experiments on
standard datasets, demonstrates that proposal flow significantly outperforms
existing semantic flow methods in various settings.
