Promoting Single-Modal Optical Flow Network for Diverse Cross-Modal Flow Estimation

In recent years, optical flow methods develop rapidly, achieving unprecedented high performance. Most of the methods only consider single-modal optical flow under the well-known brightness-constancy assumption. However, in many application systems, images of different modalities need to be aligned, which demands to estimate cross-modal flow between the cross-modal image pairs. A lot of cross-modal matching methods are designed for some specific cross-modal scenarios. We argue that the prior knowledge of the advanced optical flow models can be transferred to the cross-modal flow estimation, which may be a simple but unified solution for diverse cross-modal matching tasks. To verify our hypothesis, we design a self-supervised framework to promote the single-modal optical flow networks for diverse corss-modal flow estimation. Moreover, we add a Cross-Modal-Adapter block as a plugin to the state-of-the-art optical flow model RAFT for better performance in cross-modal scenarios. Our proposed Modality Promotion Framework and Cross-Modal Adapter have multiple advantages compared to the existing methods. The experiments demonstrate that our method is effective on multiple datasets of different cross-modal scenarios.