By now, I'm down to 5th place on the Sintel Clean rankings: http://sintel.is.tue.mpg.de/quant?metric_id=6&selected_pass=... but my entry H-v3 was 1st place when I submitted it. The algorithm is
Mota C., Stuke I., Aach T., Barth E. Divide-and-Conquer Strategies for Estimating Multiple Transparent Motions. In: Jähne B., Mester R., Barth E., Scharr H. (eds) Complex Motion. IWCM 2004.
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-69866-1_6
(so I misremembered the year. it was end of 2004 instead of 2005)
I did tweak it in a few details such as using a 5x5px ica instead of the constant brightness assumption but mainly I replaced the gauss seidel iteration (12) with brute forcing (10) so in effect I'm approximating the c* with Monte Carlo sampling on the GPU. Then as the last step, I use LUTs to fill in gaps in the prediction with their maximum likelihood prior as memorized from a large collection of real-world flow maps.
BTW as luck would have it, we are currently leading Bomberland (team CloudGamepad) with a deep learning AI trained for more than 200 million simulation steps. Yet JFB (the 2nd ranked team) uses handcrafted C++ rules and they beat us every time. It's just that against other opponents our probabilistic AI is random enough to confuse them, which is why we're still barely on the 1st place. But unless we can significantly improve things soon, I expect us to lose the tournament later this month because we will not be able to beat JFB in a fair duel. I bet on deep learning here and I'm already regretting it.
I'll reply about the camera to TaylorAlexander
