  We propose a novel approach for optical flow estimation , targeted at large
displacements with significant oc-clusions. It consists of two steps: i) dense
matching by edge-preserving interpolation from a sparse set of matches; ii)
variational energy minimization initialized with the dense matches. The
sparse-to-dense interpolation relies on an appropriate choice of the distance,
namely an edge-aware geodesic distance. This distance is tailored to handle
occlusions and motion boundaries -- two common and difficult issues for optical
flow computation. We also propose an approximation scheme for the geodesic
distance to allow fast computation without loss of performance. Subsequent to
the dense interpolation step, standard one-level variational energy
minimization is carried out on the dense matches to obtain the final flow
estimation. The proposed approach, called Edge-Preserving Interpolation of
Correspondences (EpicFlow) is fast and robust to large displacements. It
significantly outperforms the state of the art on MPI-Sintel and performs on
par on Kitti and Middlebury.
