Papers › PWC-Net: CNNs for Optical Flow Using Pyramid, Warping, and Cost Volume
PWC-Net: CNNs for Optical Flow Using Pyramid, Warping, and Cost Volume
Deqing Sun, Xiaodong Yang, Ming-Yu Liu, Jan Kautz
We present a compact but effective CNN model for optical flow, called PWC-Net. PWC-Net has been designed according to simple and well-established principles: pyramidal processing, warping, and the use of a cost volume. Cast in a learnable feature pyramid, PWC-Net uses the cur- rent optical flow estimate to warp the CNN features of the second image. It then uses the warped features and features of the first image to construct a cost volume, which is processed by a CNN to estimate the optical flow. PWC-Net is 17 times smaller in size and easier to train than the recent FlowNet2 model. Moreover, it outperforms all published optical flow methods on the MPI Sintel final pass and KITTI 2015 benchmarks, running at about 35 fps on Sintel resolution (1024x436) images. Our models are available on https://github.com/NVlabs/PWC-Net.
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Tasks
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
| Task | Dataset | Model | Metric | Value | Rank at snapshot | Leaderboard | Report |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dense Pixel Correspondence Estimation | HPatches | PWC-Net | Viewpoint I AEPE | 4.43 | #3 of 8 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Dense Pixel Correspondence Estimation | HPatches | PWC-Net | Viewpoint II AEPE | 11.44 | #3 of 8 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Dense Pixel Correspondence Estimation | HPatches | PWC-Net | Viewpoint III AEPE | 15.47 | #3 of 8 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Dense Pixel Correspondence Estimation | HPatches | PWC-Net | Viewpoint IV AEPE | 20.17 | #3 of 8 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Dense Pixel Correspondence Estimation | HPatches | PWC-Net | Viewpoint V AEPE | 28.30 | #3 of 8 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Optical Flow Estimation | KITTI 2015 (train) | PWC-Net | EPE | 10.35 | #19 of 19 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Optical Flow Estimation | KITTI 2015 (train) | PWC-Net | F1-all | 33.7 | #19 of 19 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Optical Flow Estimation | Spring | PWCNet | 1px total | 82.265 | #11 of 11 | Archive leaderboard | report |
Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.
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