Pengdi Huang

Pengdi Huang, Liqiang Lin, Kai Xu et al.

Autonomous 3D acquisition of outdoor environments poses special challenges. Different from indoor scenes, where the room space is delineated by clear boundaries and separations (e.g., walls and furniture), an outdoor environment is spacious and unbounded (thinking of a campus). Therefore, unlike for indoor scenes where the scanning effort is mainly devoted to the discovery of boundary surfaces, scanning an open and unbounded area requires actively delimiting the extent of scanning region and dynamically planning a traverse path within that region. Thus, for outdoor scenes, we formulate the planning of an energy-efficient autonomous scanning through a discrete-continuous optimization of robot scanning paths. The discrete optimization computes a topological map, through solving an online traveling sales problem (Online TSP), which determines the scanning goals and paths on-the-fly. The dynamic goals are determined as a collection of visit sites with high reward of visibility-to-unknown. A visit graph is constructed via connecting the visit sites with edges weighted by traversing cost. This topological map evolves as the robot scans via deleting outdated sites that are either visited or become rewardless and inserting newly discovered ones. The continuous part optimizes the traverse paths geometrically between two neighboring visit sites via maximizing the information gain of scanning along the paths. The discrete and continuous processes alternate until the traverse cost of the current graph exceeds the remaining energy capacity of the robot. Our approach is evaluated with both synthetic and field tests, demonstrating its effectiveness and advantages over alternatives. The project is at http://vcc.szu.edu.cn/research/2020/Husky, and the codes are available at https://github.com/alualu628628/Autonomous-Outdoor-Scanning-via-Online-Topological-and-Geometric-Path-Optimization.

Pengdi Huang, Liqiang Lin, Fuyou Xue et al.

Without a shape-aware response, it is hard to characterize the 3D geometry of a point cloud efficiently with a compact set of kernels. In this paper, we advocate the use of Hausdorff distance as a shape-aware distance measure for calculating point convolutional responses. The technique we present, coined Hausdorff Point Convolution (HPC), is shape-aware. We show that HPC constitutes a powerful point feature learning with a rather compact set of only four types of geometric priors as kernels. We further develop a HPC-based deep neural network (HPC-DNN). Task-specific learning can be achieved by tuning the network weights for combining the shortest distances between input and kernel point sets. We also realize hierarchical feature learning by designing a multi-kernel HPC for multi-scale feature encoding. Extensive experiments demonstrate that HPC-DNN outperforms strong point convolution baselines (e.g., KPConv), achieving 2.8% mIoU performance boost on S3DIS and 1.5% on SemanticKITTI for semantic segmentation task.

Liqiang Lin, Pengdi Huang, Chi-Wing Fu et al.

We present a novel attention-based mechanism to learn enhanced point features for point cloud processing tasks, e.g., classification and segmentation. Unlike prior works, which were trained to optimize the weights of a pre-selected set of attention points, our approach learns to locate the best attention points to maximize the performance of a specific task, e.g., point cloud classification. Importantly, we advocate the use of single attention point to facilitate semantic understanding in point feature learning. Specifically, we formulate a new and simple convolution, which combines convolutional features from an input point and its corresponding learned attention point, or LAP, for short. Our attention mechanism can be easily incorporated into state-of-the-art point cloud classification and segmentation networks. Extensive experiments on common benchmarks such as ModelNet40, ShapeNetPart, and S3DIS all demonstrate that our LAP-enabled networks consistently outperform the respective original networks, as well as other competitive alternatives, which employ multiple attention points, either pre-selected or learned under our LAP framework.