No Arabic abstract
Image convolutions have been a cornerstone of a great number of deep learning advances in computer vision. The research community is yet to settle on an equivalent operator for sparse, unstructured continuous data like point clouds and event streams however. We present an elegant sparse matrix-based interpretation of the convolution operator for these cases, which is consistent with the mathematical definition of convolution and efficient during training. On benchmark point cloud classification problems we demonstrate networks built with these operations can train an order of magnitude or more faster than top existing methods, whilst maintaining comparable accuracy and requiring a tiny fraction of the memory. We also apply our operator to event stream processing, achieving state-of-the-art results on multiple tasks with streams of hundreds of thousands of events.
We present a network architecture for processing point clouds that directly operates on a collection of points represented as a sparse set of samples in a high-dimensional lattice. Naively applying convolutions on this lattice scales poorly, both in terms of memory and computational cost, as the size of the lattice increases. Instead, our network uses sparse bilateral convolutional layers as building blocks. These layers maintain efficiency by using indexing structures to apply convolutions only on occupied parts of the lattice, and allow flexible specifications of the lattice structure enabling hierarchical and spatially-aware feature learning, as well as joint 2D-3D reasoning. Both point-based and image-based representations can be easily incorporated in a network with such layers and the resulting model can be trained in an end-to-end manner. We present results on 3D segmentation tasks where our approach outperforms existing state-of-the-art techniques.
Recently, there has been a significant interest in performing convolution over irregularly sampled point clouds. Since point clouds are very different from regular raster images, it is imperative to study the generalization of the convolution networks more closely, especially their robustness under variations in scale and rotations of the input data. This paper investigates different variants of PointConv, a convolution network on point clouds, to examine their robustness to input scale and rotation changes. Of the variants we explored, two are novel and generated significant improvements. The first is replacing the multilayer perceptron based weight function with much simpler third degree polynomials, together with a Sobolev norm regularization. Secondly, for 3D datasets, we derive a novel viewpoint-invariant descriptor by utilizing 3D geometric properties as the input to PointConv, in addition to the regular 3D coordinates. We have also explored choices of activation functions, neighborhood, and subsampling methods. Experiments are conducted on the 2D MNIST & CIFAR-10 datasets as well as the 3D SemanticKITTI & ScanNet datasets. Results reveal that on 2D, using third degree polynomials greatly improves PointConvs robustness to scale changes and rotations, even surpassing traditional 2D CNNs for the MNIST dataset. On 3D datasets, the novel viewpoint-invariant descriptor significantly improves the performance as well as robustness of PointConv. We achieve the state-of-the-art semantic segmentation performance on the SemanticKITTI dataset, as well as comparable performance with the current highest framework on the ScanNet dataset among point-based approaches.
In order to achieve better performance for point cloud analysis, many researchers apply deeper neural networks using stacked Multi-Layer-Perceptron (MLP) convolutions over irregular point cloud. However, applying dense MLP convolutions over large amount of points (e.g. autonomous driving application) leads to inefficiency in memory and computation. To achieve high performance but less complexity, we propose a deep-wide neural network, called ShufflePointNet, to exploit fine-grained local features and reduce redundancy in parallel using group convolution and channel shuffle operation. Unlike conventional operation that directly applies MLPs on high-dimensional features of point cloud, our model goes wider by splitting features into groups in advance, and each group with certain smaller depth is only responsible for respective MLP operation, which can reduce complexity and allows to encode more useful information. Meanwhile, we connect communication between groups by shuffling groups in feature channel to capture fine-grained features. We claim that, multi-branch method for wider neural networks is also beneficial to feature extraction for point cloud. We present extensive experiments for shape classification task on ModelNet40 dataset and semantic segmentation task on large scale datasets ShapeNet part, S3DIS and KITTI. We further perform ablation study and compare our model to other state-of-the-art algorithms in terms of complexity and accuracy.
We propose a new method to create compact convolutional neural networks (CNNs) by exploiting sparse convolutions. Different from previous works that learn sparsity in models, we directly employ hand-crafted kernels with regular sparse patterns, which result in the computational gain in practice without sophisticated and dedicated software or hardware. The core of our approach is an efficient network module that linearly combines sparse kernels to yield feature representations as strong as those from regular kernels. We integrate this module into various network architectures and demonstrate its effectiveness on three vision tasks, object classification, localization and detection. For object classification and localization, our approach achieves comparable or better performance than several baselines and related works while providing lower computational costs with fewer parameters (on average, a $2-4times$ reduction of convolutional parameters and computation). For object detection, our approach leads to a VGG-16-based Faster RCNN detector that is 12.4$times$ smaller and about 3$times$ faster than the baseline.
In this paper, we aim at improving the computational efficiency of graph convolutional networks (GCNs) for learning on point clouds. The basic graph convolution that is typically composed of a $K$-nearest neighbor (KNN) search and a multilayer perceptron (MLP) is examined. By mathematically analyzing the operations there, two findings to improve the efficiency of GCNs are obtained. (1) The local geometric structure information of 3D representations propagates smoothly across the GCN that relies on KNN search to gather neighborhood features. This motivates the simplification of multiple KNN searches in GCNs. (2) Shuffling the order of graph feature gathering and an MLP leads to equivalent or similar composite operations. Based on those findings, we optimize the computational procedure in GCNs. A series of experiments show that the optimized networks have reduced computational complexity, decreased memory consumption, and accelerated inference speed while maintaining comparable accuracy for learning on point clouds. Code will be available at url{https://github.com/ofsoundof/EfficientGCN.git}.