LeaF: Learning Frames for 4D Point Cloud Sequence Understanding

We focus on learning descriptive geometry and motion features from 4D point cloud sequences in this work. Existing works usually develop generic 4D learning tools without leveraging the prior that a 4D sequence comes from a single 3D scene with local dynamics. Based on this observation, we propose to learn region-wise coordinate frames that transform together with the underlying geometry. With such frames, we can factorize geometry and motion to facilitate a feature-space geometric reconstruction for more effective 4D learning. To learn such region frames, we develop a rotation equivariant network with a frame stabilization strategy. To leverage such frames for better spatial-temporal feature learning, we develop a frame-guided 4D learning scheme. Experiments show that this approach significantly outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods on a wide range of 4D understanding benchmarks.