Exploiting Implicit Rigidity Constraints via Weight-Sharing Aggregation for Scene Flow Estimation from Point Clouds

TL;DR — Without resorting to explicit pose estimation and/or 3D object segmentation, we mathematically prove that utilizing weight-sharing aggregations can introduce implicit rigidity constraints, thereby preserving the local structural rigidity.

Abstract

Scene flow estimation, which predicts the 3D motion of scene points from point clouds, is a core task in autonomous driving and many other 3D vision applications. Existing methods either suffer from structure distortion due to ignorance of rigid motion consistency or require explicit pose estimation and 3D object segmentation. Errors of estimated poses and segmented objects would yield inaccurate rigidity constraints and in turn mislead scene flow estimation. In this paper, we propose a novel weight-sharing aggregation (WSA) method for feature and scene flow up-sampling. WSA does not rely on estimated poses and segmented objects, and can implicitly enforce rigidity constraints to avoid structure distortion in scene flow estimation. To further exploit geometric information and preserve local structure, we design a deformation degree module aim to keep the local region invariance. We modify the PointPWC-Net and integrate the proposed WSA and deformation degree module into the enhanced PointPWC-Net to derive an end-to-end scene flow estimation network, called WSAFlowNet. Extensive experimental results on the FlyingThings3D and KITTI datasets demonstrate that our WSAFlowNet achieves the state-of-the-art performance and outperforms previous methods by a large margin. We will release the source code of WSAFlowNet upon the publicity of the paper.