Feature Learning for Scene Flow Estimation from LIDAR

Abstract

To perform tasks in dynamic environments, many mobile robots must estimate the motion in the surrounding world. Recently, techniques have been developed to estimate scene flow directly from LIDAR scans, relying on hand-designed features. In this work, we build an encoding network to learn features from an occupancy grid. The network is trained so that these features are discriminative in finding matching or non-matching locations between successive timesteps. This learned feature space is then leveraged to estimate scene flow. We evaluate our method on the KITTI dataset and demonstrate performance that improves upon the accuracy of the current state-of-the-art. We provide an implementation of our method at https://github.com/aushani/flsf.