xbob.optflow.liu 1.1.2

Differences between Matlab and Bob/Python ports

I have detected inconsistencies between output produced by these pythonic bindings and Ce Liu’s Matlab-based implementation. In all instances, these differences come from differences in either the gray-scaling conversion and/or the decompression routines for the test images and movies. Once a precise input is given in double-precision gray-scale, both bindings (ours and Ce Liu’s Matlab ones) give out exactly the same output.

This means that you should expect precision problems if you feed in videos or lossy input formats such as JPEG images. If you input HDF5 files, Matlab .mat files or any other data in formats which are not subject to lossy compression/decompression, this data is pre-grayscaled and stored in double-precision floating point numbers, the output is consistently the same, no matter which environment you use.

If you input data which is not double-precision gray-scale, then it is (1) converted to double-precision representation and then (2) gray-scaled. These steps are taken in this order in both bindings. Depending on which you are using (Bob/Python versus Matlab), the results will be slightly different. This small differences in the input to the flow estimation engine will make Liu’s framework give (hopefully slightly) different output. The outputs should be comparable though, but your mileage may vary.

New SOR-based Implementation

More recently (in August 2011), Ce Liu introduced a version of the Optical Flow framework using Successive Over-Relaxation (SOR) instead of Conjugate Gradient (CG) for minization. The new framework is presumably faster, but does not give similar results compared to the old CG-based one.

If you would like to give it a spin, use the method sor_flow instead of cg_flow as shown above. Notice that the defaults for both implementations are different, following the defaults pre-set in the Matlab MEX code in the different releases.

Particularly, avoid feeding colored images to sor_flow. While that works OK with cg_flow, sor_flow gives inconsistent results everytime it is run. I recommend gray-scaling images before using sor_flow. With that, results are at least consistent between runs. I’m not sure about their correctness. Ce Liu has been informed and should be working on it soon enough (today is 14.Nov.2012).

To access this implementation, use xbob.optflow.liu.sor_flow.

Access to the MATLAB code

Once you have installed the package, you will have access to a directory called matlab, which contains the code as it is/was distributed by Ce Liu, and a few Matlab routines that can be used to produce samples for testing. To use the Matlab code, you must:

$ # matlab/cg_based  => CG-based implementation
$ # matlab/sor_based => SOR-based implementation
$ cd matlab/cg_based/mex
$ mex Coarse2FineTwoFrames.cpp OpticalFlow.cpp GaussianPyramid.cpp
$ cd ..

At this point, the MEX is compiled and ready to be used. You will find 2 routines on the directory: flowimage and flowmovie. They can be used to process single images or movie files. They both produce HDF5 files that can be used as test input for this package’s test suite, or for inspection (use h5dump to look into the file contents).

Here is an example of usage for the Matlab function flowimage:

$ matlab
...
>> flowimage ../../xbob/optflow/liu/data/gray table .

This will generate a file called table.hdf5 that contains the flow calculated for the table example, i.e. between images table1.png and table2.png. The input images are pre-gray-scaled and are taken from the directory ../../xbob/optflow/liu/data/gray, following your command.

You will find more examples on this directory and on the ../../xbob/optflow/liu/data/gray directory.