Multi-Scale Bidirectional Recurrent Network with Hybrid Correlation for Point Cloud Based Scene Flow Estimation

Scene flow estimation provides the fundamental motion perception of a dynamic scene, which is of practical importance in many computer vision applications. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-scale bidirectional recurrent architecture that iteratively optimizes the coarse-to-fine scene flow estimation. In each resolution scale of estimation, a novel bidirectional gated recurrent unit is proposed to bidirectionally and iteratively augment point features and produce progressively optimized scene flow. The optimization of each iteration is integrated with the hybrid correlation that captures not only local correlation but also semantic correlation for more accurate estimation. Experimental results indicate that our proposed architecture significantly outperforms the existing state-of-the-art approaches on both FlyingThings3D and KITTI benchmarks while maintaining superior time efficiency. Codes and pre-trained models are publicly available at https://github.com/cwc1260/MSBRN.