CNN-Based Fluid Motion Estimation Using Correlation Coefficient and Multiscale Cost Volume

Motion estimation for complex fluid flows via their image sequences is a challenging issue in computer vision. It plays a significant role in scientific research and engineering applications related to meteorology, oceanography, and fluid mechanics. In this paper, we introduce a novel convolutional neural network (CNN)-based motion estimator for complex fluid flows using multiscale cost volume. It uses correlation coefficients as the matching costs, which can improve the accuracy of motion estimation by enhancing the discrimination of the feature matching and overcoming the feature distortions caused by the changes of fluid shapes and illuminations. Specifically, it first generates sparse seeds by a feature extraction network. A correlation pyramid is then constructed for all pairs of sparse seeds, and the predicted matches are iteratively updated through a recurrent neural network, which lookups a multi-scale cost volume from a correlation pyramid via a multi-scale search scheme. Then it uses the searched multi-scale cost volume, the current matches, and the context features as the input features to correlate the predicted matches. Since the multi-scale cost volume contains motion information for both large and small displacements, it can recover small-scale motion structures. However, the predicted matches are sparse, so the final flow field is computed by performing a CNN-based interpolation for these sparse matches. The experimental results show that our method significantly outperforms the current motion estimators in capturing different motion patterns in complex fluid flows, especially in recovering some small-scale vortices. It also achieves state-of-the-art evaluation results on the public fluid datasets and successfully captures the storms in Jupiter’s White Ovals from the remote sensing images.