Traditional techniques of dense optical flow estimation do not generally yield symmetrical solutions: the results will differ if they are applied between images I1 and I2 or between images I2 and I1. In this work, we present a method to recover a dense optical flow field map from two images, while explicitely taking into account the symmetry across the images as well as possible occlusions in the flow field. The idea is to consider both displacements vectors from I1 to I2 and I2 to I1 and to minimise an energy functional that explicitely encodes all those properties. This variational problem is then solved using the gradient flow defined by the Euler–Lagrange equations associated to the energy. To prove the importance of the concepts of symmetry and occlusions for optical flow computation, we have extended a classical approach to handle those. Experiments clearly showthe added value of these properties to improve the accuracy of the computed flows.