VoteFlow: Enforcing Local Rigidity in Self-Supervised Scene Flow

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Lin, Yancong, Wang, Shiming, Nan, Liangliang, Kooij, Julian, Caesar, Holger
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866915245122912256
author Lin, Yancong
Wang, Shiming
Nan, Liangliang
Kooij, Julian
Caesar, Holger
author_facet Lin, Yancong
Wang, Shiming
Nan, Liangliang
Kooij, Julian
Caesar, Holger
contents Scene flow estimation aims to recover per-point motion from two adjacent LiDAR scans. However, in real-world applications such as autonomous driving, points rarely move independently of others, especially for nearby points belonging to the same object, which often share the same motion. Incorporating this locally rigid motion constraint has been a key challenge in self-supervised scene flow estimation, which is often addressed by post-processing or appending extra regularization. While these approaches are able to improve the rigidity of predicted flows, they lack an architectural inductive bias for local rigidity within the model structure, leading to suboptimal learning efficiency and inferior performance. In contrast, we enforce local rigidity with a lightweight add-on module in neural network design, enabling end-to-end learning. We design a discretized voting space that accommodates all possible translations and then identify the one shared by nearby points by differentiable voting. Additionally, to ensure computational efficiency, we operate on pillars rather than points and learn representative features for voting per pillar. We plug the Voting Module into popular model designs and evaluate its benefit on Argoverse 2 and Waymo datasets. We outperform baseline works with only marginal compute overhead. Code is available at https://github.com/tudelft-iv/VoteFlow.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_22328
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle VoteFlow: Enforcing Local Rigidity in Self-Supervised Scene Flow
Lin, Yancong
Wang, Shiming
Nan, Liangliang
Kooij, Julian
Caesar, Holger
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Scene flow estimation aims to recover per-point motion from two adjacent LiDAR scans. However, in real-world applications such as autonomous driving, points rarely move independently of others, especially for nearby points belonging to the same object, which often share the same motion. Incorporating this locally rigid motion constraint has been a key challenge in self-supervised scene flow estimation, which is often addressed by post-processing or appending extra regularization. While these approaches are able to improve the rigidity of predicted flows, they lack an architectural inductive bias for local rigidity within the model structure, leading to suboptimal learning efficiency and inferior performance. In contrast, we enforce local rigidity with a lightweight add-on module in neural network design, enabling end-to-end learning. We design a discretized voting space that accommodates all possible translations and then identify the one shared by nearby points by differentiable voting. Additionally, to ensure computational efficiency, we operate on pillars rather than points and learn representative features for voting per pillar. We plug the Voting Module into popular model designs and evaluate its benefit on Argoverse 2 and Waymo datasets. We outperform baseline works with only marginal compute overhead. Code is available at https://github.com/tudelft-iv/VoteFlow.
title VoteFlow: Enforcing Local Rigidity in Self-Supervised Scene Flow
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.22328