No Arabic abstract
Point cloud processing is very challenging, as the diverse shapes formed by irregular points are often indistinguishable. A thorough grasp of the elusive shape requires sufficiently contextual semantic information, yet few works devote to this. Here we propose DensePoint, a general architecture to learn densely contextual representation for point cloud processing. Technically, it extends regular grid CNN to irregular point configuration by generalizing a convolution operator, which holds the permutation invariance of points, and achieves efficient inductive learning of local patterns. Architecturally, it finds inspiration from dense connection mode, to repeatedly aggregate multi-level and multi-scale semantics in a deep hierarchy. As a result, densely contextual information along with rich semantics, can be acquired by DensePoint in an organic manner, making it highly effective. Extensive experiments on challenging benchmarks across four tasks, as well as thorough model analysis, verify DensePoint achieves the state of the arts.
Due to the sparsity and irregularity of the 3D data, approaches that directly process points have become popular. Among all point-based models, Transformer-based models have achieved state-of-the-art performance by fully preserving point interrelation. However, most of them spend high percentage of total time on sparse data accessing (e.g., Farthest Point Sampling (FPS) and neighbor points query), which becomes the computation burden. Therefore, we present a novel 3D Transformer, called Point-Voxel Transformer (PVT) that leverages self-attention computation in points to gather global context features, while performing multi-head self-attention (MSA) computation in voxels to capture local information and reduce the irregular data access. Additionally, to further reduce the cost of MSA computation, we design a cyclic shifted boxing scheme which brings greater efficiency by limiting the MSA computation to non-overlapping local boxes while also preserving cross-box connection. Our method fully exploits the potentials of Transformer architecture, paving the road to efficient and accurate recognition results. Evaluated on classification and segmentation benchmarks, our PVT not only achieves strong accuracy but outperforms previous state-of-the-art Transformer-based models with 9x measured speedup on average. For 3D object detection task, we replace the primitives in Frustrum PointNet with PVT layer and achieve the improvement of 8.6%.
This paper investigates two techniques for developing efficient self-supervised vision transformers (EsViT) for visual representation learning. First, we show through a comprehensive empirical study that multi-stage architectures with sparse self-attentions can significantly reduce modeling complexity but with a cost of losing the ability to capture fine-grained correspondences between image regions. Second, we propose a new pre-training task of region matching which allows the model to capture fine-grained region dependencies and as a result significantly improves the quality of the learned vision representations. Our results show that combining the two techniques, EsViT achieves 81.3% top-1 on the ImageNet linear probe evaluation, outperforming prior arts with around an order magnitude of higher throughput. When transferring to downstream linear classification tasks, EsViT outperforms its supervised counterpart on 17 out of 18 datasets. The code and models will be publicly available.
The prevalence of relation networks in computer vision is in stark contrast to underexplored point-based methods. In this paper, we explore the possibilities of local relation operators and survey their feasibility. We propose a scalable and efficient module, called group relation aggregator. The module computes a feature of a group based on the aggregation of the features of the inner-group points weighted by geometric relations and semantic relations. We adopt this module to design our RPNet. We further verify the expandability of RPNet, in terms of both depth and width, on the tasks of classification and segmentation. Surprisingly, empirical results show that wider RPNet fits for classification, while deeper RPNet works better on segmentation. RPNet achieves state-of-the-art for classification and segmentation on challenging benchmarks. We also compare our local aggregator with PointNet++, with around 30% parameters and 50% computation saving. Finally, we conduct experiments to reveal the robustness of RPNet with regard to rigid transformation and noises.
Exploiting convolutional neural networks for point cloud processing is quite challenging, due to the inherent irregular distribution and discrete shape representation of point clouds. To address these problems, many handcrafted convolution variants have sprung up in recent years. Though with elaborate design, these variants could be far from optimal in sufficiently capturing diverse shapes formed by discrete points. In this paper, we propose PointSeaConv, i.e., a novel differential convolution search paradigm on point clouds. It can work in a purely data-driven manner and thus is capable of auto-creating a group of suitable convolutions for geometric shape modeling. We also propose a joint optimization framework for simultaneous search of internal convolution and external architecture, and introduce epsilon-greedy algorithm to alleviate the effect of discretization error. As a result, PointSeaNet, a deep network that is sufficient to capture geometric shapes at both convolution level and architecture level, can be searched out for point cloud processing. Extensive experiments strongly evidence that our proposed PointSeaNet surpasses current handcrafted deep models on challenging benchmarks across multiple tasks with remarkable margins.
We present a novel and flexible architecture for point cloud segmentation with dual-representation iterative learning. In point cloud processing, different representations have their own pros and cons. Thus, finding suitable ways to represent point cloud data structure while keeping its own internal physical property such as permutation and scale-invariant is a fundamental problem. Therefore, we propose our work, DRINet, which serves as the basic network structure for dual-representation learning with great flexibility at feature transferring and less computation cost, especially for large-scale point clouds. DRINet mainly consists of two modules called Sparse Point-Voxel Feature Extraction and Sparse Voxel-Point Feature Extraction. By utilizing these two modules iteratively, features can be propagated between two different representations. We further propose a novel multi-scale pooling layer for pointwise locality learning to improve context information propagation. Our network achieves state-of-the-art results for point cloud classification and segmentation tasks on several datasets while maintaining high runtime efficiency. For large-scale outdoor scenarios, our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods with a real-time inference speed of 62ms per frame.