RSF: Optimizing Rigid Scene Flow From 3D Point Clouds Without Labels

David Deng, Avideh Zakhor; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 2023, pp. 1277-1286

We present a method for optimizing object-level rigid 3D scene flow over two successive point clouds without any annotated labels in autonomous driving settings. Rather than using pointwise flow vectors, our approach represents scene flow as the composition a global ego-motion and a set of bounding boxes with their own rigid motions, exploiting the multi-body rigidity commonly present in dynamic scenes. We jointly optimize these parameters over a novel loss function based on the nearest neighbor distance using a differentiable bounding box formulation. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on KITTI Scene Flow and nuScenes without requiring any annotations, outperforming even supervised methods. Additionally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on motion segmentation and ego-motion estimation. Lastly, we visualize our predictions and validate our loss function design with an ablation study.