On the Nonlinear Statistics of Optical Flow

In "A naturalistic open source movie for optical flow evaluation," Butler et al. create a database of ground-truth optical flow from the computer-generated video Sintel. We study the high-contrast $3\times 3$ patches from this video, and provide evidence that this dataset is well-modeled by a torus (a nonlinear 2-dimensional manifold). Our main tools are persistent homology and zigzag persistence, which are popular techniques from the field of computational topology. We show that the optical flow torus model is naturally equipped with the structure of a fiber bundle, which is furthermore related to the statistics of range images.