Spatio-Temporal Gradient Flow for Efficient Motion Estimation in Sparse Point Clouds

With the rapid development of three-dimensional sensors, such as LiDAR, there is an increasing demand for accurate motion estimation from point cloud data in dynamic tasks like autonomous driving and robot navigation. To address the limitations of traditional methods in terms of efficiency and accuracy when handling sparse point clouds containing multiple objects, non-rigid motion, and noise, this paper presents an unsupervised spatio-temporal gradient flow estimation framework, called Spatio-Temporal Gradient Flow (STG-Flow). Unlike traditional methods, this approach does not rely on large labeled datasets or assume rigid-body motion. STG-Flow segments continuous-frame point clouds by combining global density statistics with supervoxel clustering. It then adaptively adjusts clustering parameters using an upper and lower bound filtering mechanism to mitigate the effects of extreme cases. After segmentation, optical flow refinement is applied to each local cluster using spatio-temporal gradient constraints, along with a multi-level robust optimization strategy and domain grouping. This method enhances the stability and accuracy of motion estimation, even under large displacements. Experiments demonstrate that STG-Flow achieves more accurate motion predictions for local object-level motion estimation in sparse scenarios. Its registration accuracy is comparable to the iterative closest point method, while offering approximately ten times higher computational efficiency, showcasing strong real-time performance and robustness.