PCSTracker: Long-Term Scene Flow Estimation for Point Cloud Sequences
This addresses the challenge of fine-grained 3D motion analysis for applications like robotics and autonomous driving, though it is an incremental improvement over existing methods.
The paper tackles the problem of maintaining temporal consistency in point cloud scene flow estimation over long sequences, where PCSTracker achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on synthetic and real-world datasets while running at 32.5 FPS.
Point cloud scene flow estimation is fundamental to long-term and fine-grained 3D motion analysis. However, existing methods are typically limited to pairwise settings and struggle to maintain temporal consistency over long sequences as geometry evolves, occlusions emerge, and errors accumulate. In this work, we propose PCSTracker, the first end-to-end framework specifically designed for consistent scene flow estimation in point cloud sequences. Specifically, we introduce an iterative geometry motion joint optimization module (IGMO) that explicitly models the temporal evolution of point features to alleviate correspondence inconsistencies caused by dynamic geometric changes. In addition, a spatio-temporal point trajectory update module (STTU) is proposed to leverage broad temporal context to infer plausible positions for occluded points, ensuring coherent motion estimation. To further handle long sequences, we employ an overlapping sliding-window inference strategy that alternates cross-window propagation and in-window refinement, effectively suppressing error accumulation and maintaining stable long-term motion consistency. Extensive experiments on the synthetic PointOdyssey3D and real-world ADT3D datasets show that PCSTracker achieves the best accuracy in long-term scene flow estimation and maintains real-time performance at 32.5 FPS, while demonstrating superior 3D motion understanding compared to RGB-D-based approaches.