Learning Occlusion-Aware Dense Correspondences for Multi-Modal Images

We introduce a scalable multi-modal approach to learn dense, i.e., pixel-level, correspondences and occlusion maps, between images in a video sequence. The problems of finding dense correspondences and occlusion maps are fundamental in computer vision. In this work we jointly train a deep network to tackle both, with a shared feature extraction stage. We use depth and color images with ground truth optical flow and occlusion maps to train the network end-to-end. From the multi-modal input, the network learns to estimate occlusion maps, optical flows, and a correspondence embedding providing a meaningful latent feature space. We evaluate the performance on a dataset of images derived from synthetic characters, and perform a thorough ablation study to demonstrate that the proposed components of our architecture combine to achieve the lowest correspondence error. The scalability of our proposed method comes from the ability to incorporate additional modalities, e.g., infrared images.