  We introduce multigrid Predictive Filter Flow (mgPFF), a framework for
unsupervised learning on videos. The mgPFF takes as input a pair of frames and
outputs per-pixel filters to warp one frame to the other. Compared to optical
flow used for warping frames, mgPFF is more powerful in modeling sub-pixel
movement and dealing with corruption (e.g., motion blur). We develop a
multigrid coarse-to-fine modeling strategy that avoids the requirement of
learning large filters to capture large displacement. This allows us to train
an extremely compact model (4.6MB) which operates in a progressive way over
multiple resolutions with shared weights. We train mgPFF on unsupervised,
free-form videos and show that mgPFF is able to not only estimate long-range
flow for frame reconstruction and detect video shot transitions, but also
readily amendable for video object segmentation and pose tracking, where it
substantially outperforms the published state-of-the-art without bells and
whistles. Moreover, owing to mgPFF's nature of per-pixel filter prediction, we
have the unique opportunity to visualize how each pixel is evolving during
solving these tasks, thus gaining better interpretability.

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition