FreePoint: Unsupervised Point Cloud Instance Segmentation
This addresses the costly annotation problem for 3D scene understanding applications, representing a significant advance in unsupervised methods rather than an incremental improvement.
The paper tackles unsupervised instance segmentation of point clouds without manual annotations by proposing FreePoint, which generates pseudo labels via a multicut algorithm and trains a model with a two-step strategy, achieving over 18.2% improvement over traditional methods and 5.5% over a concurrent work in AP.
Instance segmentation of point clouds is a crucial task in 3D field with numerous applications that involve localizing and segmenting objects in a scene. However, achieving satisfactory results requires a large number of manual annotations, which is a time-consuming and expensive process. To alleviate dependency on annotations, we propose a novel framework, FreePoint, for underexplored unsupervised class-agnostic instance segmentation on point clouds. In detail, we represent the point features by combining coordinates, colors, and self-supervised deep features. Based on the point features, we perform a bottom-up multicut algorithm to segment point clouds into coarse instance masks as pseudo labels, which are used to train a point cloud instance segmentation model. We propose an id-as-feature strategy at this stage to alleviate the randomness of the multicut algorithm and improve the pseudo labels' quality. During training, we propose a weakly-supervised two-step training strategy and corresponding losses to overcome the inaccuracy of coarse masks. FreePoint has achieved breakthroughs in unsupervised class-agnostic instance segmentation on point clouds and outperformed previous traditional methods by over 18.2% and a competitive concurrent work UnScene3D by 5.5% in AP. Additionally, when used as a pretext task and fine-tuned on S3DIS, FreePoint performs significantly better than existing self-supervised pre-training methods with limited annotations and surpasses CSC by 6.0% in AP with 10% annotation masks.