English

Learning Pixel Trajectories with Multiscale Contrastive Random Walks

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2022-04-05 v2

Abstract

A range of video modeling tasks, from optical flow to multiple object tracking, share the same fundamental challenge: establishing space-time correspondence. Yet, approaches that dominate each space differ. We take a step towards bridging this gap by extending the recent contrastive random walk formulation to much denser, pixel-level space-time graphs. The main contribution is introducing hierarchy into the search problem by computing the transition matrix between two frames in a coarse-to-fine manner, forming a multiscale contrastive random walk when extended in time. This establishes a unified technique for self-supervised learning of optical flow, keypoint tracking, and video object segmentation. Experiments demonstrate that, for each of these tasks, the unified model achieves performance competitive with strong self-supervised approaches specific to that task. Project webpage: https://jasonbian97.github.io/flowwalk

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2201.08379,
  title  = {Learning Pixel Trajectories with Multiscale Contrastive Random Walks},
  author = {Zhangxing Bian and Allan Jabri and Alexei A. Efros and Andrew Owens},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2201.08379},
  year   = {2022}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-24T08:57:02.992Z