Mining Point Cloud Local Structures by Kernel Correlation and Graph Pooling
This work addresses the problem of inefficient local structure exploitation in 3D point cloud analysis for computer vision applications, representing an incremental improvement over PointNet.
The authors tackled the challenge of semantic learning on unordered 3D point clouds by improving PointNet with two new operations: a point-set kernel for local geometric structures and graph pooling for feature aggregation, resulting in better performance on major datasets.
Unlike on images, semantic learning on 3D point clouds using a deep network is challenging due to the naturally unordered data structure. Among existing works, PointNet has achieved promising results by directly learning on point sets. However, it does not take full advantage of a point's local neighborhood that contains fine-grained structural information which turns out to be helpful towards better semantic learning. In this regard, we present two new operations to improve PointNet with a more efficient exploitation of local structures. The first one focuses on local 3D geometric structures. In analogy to a convolution kernel for images, we define a point-set kernel as a set of learnable 3D points that jointly respond to a set of neighboring data points according to their geometric affinities measured by kernel correlation, adapted from a similar technique for point cloud registration. The second one exploits local high-dimensional feature structures by recursive feature aggregation on a nearest-neighbor-graph computed from 3D positions. Experiments show that our network can efficiently capture local information and robustly achieve better performances on major datasets. Our code is available at http://www.merl.com/research/license#KCNet