Lei Zhang

Chenhang He, Ruihuang Li, Guowen Zhang et al.

Window-based transformers excel in large-scale point cloud understanding by capturing context-aware representations with affordable attention computation in a more localized manner. However, the sparse nature of point clouds leads to a significant variance in the number of voxels per window. Existing methods group the voxels in each window into fixed-length sequences through extensive sorting and padding operations, resulting in a non-negligible computational and memory overhead. In this paper, we introduce ScatterFormer, which to the best of our knowledge, is the first to directly apply attention to voxels across different windows as a single sequence. The key of ScatterFormer is a Scattered Linear Attention (SLA) module, which leverages the pre-computation of key-value pairs in linear attention to enable parallel computation on the variable-length voxel sequences divided by windows. Leveraging the hierarchical structure of GPUs and shared memory, we propose a chunk-wise algorithm that reduces the SLA module's latency to less than 1 millisecond on moderate GPUs. Furthermore, we develop a cross-window interaction module that improves the locality and connectivity of voxel features across different windows, eliminating the need for extensive window shifting. Our proposed ScatterFormer demonstrates 73.8 mAP (L2) on the Waymo Open Dataset and 72.4 NDS on the NuScenes dataset, running at an outstanding detection rate of 23 FPS.The code is available at \href{https://github.com/skyhehe123/ScatterFormer}{https://github.com/skyhehe123/ScatterFormer}.

Wei Lian, Lei Zhang

Point matching refers to the process of finding spatial transformation and correspondences between two sets of points. In this paper, we focus on the case that there is only partial overlap between two point sets. Following the approach of the robust point matching method, we model point matching as a mixed linear assignment-least square problem and show that after eliminating the transformation variable, the resulting problem of minimization with respect to point correspondence is a concave optimization problem. Furthermore, this problem has the property that the objective function can be converted into a form with few nonlinear terms via a linear transformation. Based on these properties, we employ the branch-and-bound (BnB) algorithm to optimize the resulting problem where the dimension of the search space is small. To further improve efficiency of the BnB algorithm where computation of the lower bound is the bottleneck, we propose a new lower bounding scheme which has a k-cardinality linear assignment formulation and can be efficiently solved. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of robustness to disturbances and point matching accuracy.