MEMFOF: High-Resolution Training for Memory-Efficient Multi-Frame
  Optical Flow Estimation
Authors: name: Vladislav Bargatin; name: Egor Chistov; name: Alexander Yakovenko; name: Dmitriy Vatolin
Published: 2025-06-29 09:01:42

Abstract: Recent advances in optical flow estimation have prioritized accuracy at the
cost of growing GPU memory consumption, particularly for high-resolution
(FullHD) inputs. We introduce MEMFOF, a memory-efficient multi-frame optical
flow method that identifies a favorable trade-off between multi-frame
estimation and GPU memory usage. Notably, MEMFOF requires only 2.09 GB of GPU
memory at runtime for 1080p inputs, and 28.5 GB during training, which uniquely
positions our method to be trained at native 1080p without the need for
cropping or downsampling. We systematically revisit design choices from
RAFT-like architectures, integrating reduced correlation volumes and
high-resolution training protocols alongside multi-frame estimation, to achieve
state-of-the-art performance across multiple benchmarks while substantially
reducing memory overhead. Our method outperforms more resource-intensive
alternatives in both accuracy and runtime efficiency, validating its robustness
for flow estimation at high resolutions. At the time of submission, our method
ranks first on the Spring benchmark with a 1-pixel (1px) outlier rate of 3.289,
leads Sintel (clean) with an endpoint error (EPE) of 0.963, and achieves the
best Fl-all error on KITTI-2015 at 2.94%. The code is available at
https://github.com/msu-video-group/memfof.