Efficient Instance Motion-Aware Point Cloud Scene Prediction

Abstract

Point cloud prediction (PCP) aims to forecast future 3D point clouds of scenes by leveraging sequential historical LiDAR scans, offering a promising avenue to enhance the perceptual capabilities of autonomous systems. However, existing methods mostly adopt an end-to-end approach without explicitly modeling moving instances, limiting their effectiveness in dynamic real-world environments. In this paper, we propose IMPNet, a novel instance motion-aware network for future point cloud scene prediction. Unlike prior works, IMPNet explicitly incorporates motion and instance-level information to enhance PCP accuracy. Specifically, we extract appearance and motion features from range images and residual images using a dual-branch convolutional network and fuse them via a motion attention block. Our framework further integrates a motion head for identifying moving objects and an instance-assisted training strategy to improve instance-wise point cloud predictions. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets demonstrate that our proposed network achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in PCP with superior predictive accuracy and robust generalization across diverse driving scenarios. Our method has been released at https://github.com/nubot-nudt/IMPNet.