P2P: Tuning Pre-trained Image Models for Point Cloud Analysis with Point-to-Pixel Prompting
This work addresses the problem of limited 3D training data for researchers and practitioners in 3D vision by enabling efficient transfer of 2D pre-trained knowledge, though it is incremental in leveraging existing prompting techniques.
The paper tackles the challenge of applying pre-trained 2D image models to 3D point cloud analysis by introducing Point-to-Pixel Prompting, which transforms point clouds into images for tuning with frozen pre-trained weights, achieving 89.3% accuracy on ScanObjectNN with fewer parameters.
Nowadays, pre-training big models on large-scale datasets has become a crucial topic in deep learning. The pre-trained models with high representation ability and transferability achieve a great success and dominate many downstream tasks in natural language processing and 2D vision. However, it is non-trivial to promote such a pretraining-tuning paradigm to the 3D vision, given the limited training data that are relatively inconvenient to collect. In this paper, we provide a new perspective of leveraging pre-trained 2D knowledge in 3D domain to tackle this problem, tuning pre-trained image models with the novel Point-to-Pixel prompting for point cloud analysis at a minor parameter cost. Following the principle of prompting engineering, we transform point clouds into colorful images with geometry-preserved projection and geometry-aware coloring to adapt to pre-trained image models, whose weights are kept frozen during the end-to-end optimization of point cloud analysis tasks. We conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate that cooperating with our proposed Point-to-Pixel Prompting, better pre-trained image model will lead to consistently better performance in 3D vision. Enjoying prosperous development from image pre-training field, our method attains 89.3% accuracy on the hardest setting of ScanObjectNN, surpassing conventional point cloud models with much fewer trainable parameters. Our framework also exhibits very competitive performance on ModelNet classification and ShapeNet Part Segmentation. Code is available at https://github.com/wangzy22/P2P.