RigidFlow: Self-Supervised Scene Flow Learning on Point Clouds by Local Rigidity Prior

In this work, we focus on scene flow learning on point clouds in a self-supervised manner. A real-world scene can be well modeled as a collection of rigidly moving parts, therefore its scene flow can be represented as a combination of rigid motion of each part. Inspired by this observation, we propose to generate pseudo scene flow for self-supervised learning based on piecewise rigid motion estimation, in which the source point cloud is decomposed into a set of local regions and each region is treated as rigid. By rigidly aligning each region with its potential counterpart in the target point cloud, we obtain a region-specific rigid transformation to represent the flow, which together constitutes the pseudo scene flow labels of the entire scene to enable network training. Compared with most existing approaches relying on point-wise similarities for point matching, our method explicitly enforces region-wise rigid alignments, yielding locally rigid pseudo scene flow labels. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our self-supervised learning method on FlyingThings3D and KITTI datasets. Comprehensive experiments show that our method achieves new state-of-the-art performance in self-supervised scene flow learning, without any ground truth scene flow for supervision, even outperforming some supervised counterparts.