IHNet: Iterative Hierarchical Network Guided by High-Resolution Estimated Information for Scene Flow Estimation

Scene flow estimation, which predicts the 3D displacements of point clouds, is a fundamental task in autonomous driving. Most methods have adopted a coarse-to-fine structure to balance computational efficiency with accuracy, particularly when handling large displacements. However, inaccuracies in the initial coarse layer’s scene flow estimates may accumulate, leading to incorrect final estimates. To alleviate this, we introduce a novel Iterative Hierarchical Network——IHNet. This approach circulates high-resolution estimated information (scene flow and feature) from the preceding iteration back to the low-resolution layer of the current iteration. Serving as a guide, the high-resolution estimated scene flow, instead of initializing the scene flow from zero, provides a more precise center for low-resolution layer to identify matches. Meanwhile, the decoder’s feature at the high-resolution layer can contribute essential movement information. Furthermore, based on the recurrent structure, we design a resampling scheme to enhance the correspondence between points across two consecutive frames. By employing the previous estimated scene flow to fine-tune the target frame’s coordinates, we can significantly reduce the correspondence discrepancy between two frame points, a problem often caused by point sparsity. Following this adjustment, we continue to estimate the scene flow using the newly updated coordinates, along with the reencoded feature. Our approach outperforms the recent state-of-the-art method WSAFlowNet by 20.1% on FlyingThings3D and 56.0% on KITTI scene flow datasets according to EPE3D metric. The code is available at https://github.com/wangyunlhr/IHNet.