CorrelationFlow: A Training-Free Geometric Approach for LiDAR Scene Flow Estimation
TL;DR
CorrelationFlow is a new paradigm that reformulates LiDAR scene flow as a correlation maximization problem between Bird's-Eye View (BEV) images, and shows that this classical, model-based approach can match or even surpass the performance of learning-based methods.
Abstract
LiDAR scene flow is the task of estimating point-wise motion from sequential point clouds. It is essential for autonomous driving, as it provides critical information about moving objects and their trajectories. In recent years, unsupervised methods have gained significant traction by eliminating the need for expensive point-wise annotations. However, despite incremental performance improvements, these methods uniformly rely on a single paradigm: training feed-forward networks through optimizing a loss function based on the Chamfer distance, a framework that inherently limits their progression. This paper presents CorrelationFlow, a new paradigm that reformulates LiDAR scene flow as a correlation maximization problem between Bird's-Eye View (BEV) images. Instead of using learnable parameters, our approach employs a chain of image processing operations to solve this problem. The learning-free nature of CorrelationFlow enables strong generalization across diverse domains. This capability is demonstrated by the second-place ranking in the unsupervised track of the Argoverse 2 Scene Flow Challenge at CVPR 2026, which featured a test set spanning five datasets that cover varied vehicle platforms and environments. Our results show that this classical, model-based approach can match or even surpass the performance of learning-based methods, thereby opening a new direction for unsupervised LiDAR scene flow research. The source code will be released.