Consistent Optical Flow for Stereo Video

Video editing plays an important role in today’s cinematic post-production: editing operations are typically applied on a keyframe basis and propagated automatically to the rest of the sequence. Thereby, small inconsistencies in correspondences used for the propagation of editing operations accumulate and need to be corrected manually. The amount of required manual interaction increases further when editing stereoscopic video sequences. In this paper, we propose an algorithm for looped correspondence estimation yielding consistent correspondences that can be used for reliable propagation of editing operations along a stereoscopic video sequence, avoiding drift and error accumulation common to standard approaches. Taking an additional spatially adjacent image into account, we extend standard two-image optical flow algorithms and exploit data redundancy within stereoscopic video sequences. Our proposed algorithm not only yields robust and consistent correspondences for stereo footage, but also improves the accuracy of standard two-image motion estimation as demonstrated for several test scenes with known ground truth.