The application of deep learning to 3D point clouds is challenging due to its lack of order. Inspired by the point embeddings of PointNet and the edge embeddings of DGCNNs, we propose three improvements to the task of point cloud analysis. First, we introduce a novel feature-attentive neural network layer, a FAT layer, that combines both global point-based features and local edge-based features in order to generate better embeddings. Second, we find that applying the same attention mechanism across two different forms of feature map aggregation, max pooling and average pooling, gives better performance than either alone. Third, we observe that residual feature reuse in this setting propagates information more effectively between the layers, and makes the network easier to train. Our architecture achieves state-of-the-art results on the task of point cloud classification, as demonstrated on the ModelNet40 dataset, and an extremely competitive performance on the ShapeNet part segmentation challenge.
University of Victoria（维多利亚大学）；Google Research（谷歌研究院）
Many problems in computer vision require dealing with sparse, unordered data in the form of point clouds. Permutation-equivariant networks have become a popular solution-they operate on individual data points with simple perceptrons and extract contextual information with global pooling. This can be achieved with a simple normalization of the feature maps, a global operation that is unaffected by the order. In this paper, we propose Attentive Context Normalization (ACN), a simple yet effective technique to build permutation-equivariant networks robust to outliers. Specifically, we show how to …
Channel-Level Relation to Attentive Aggregation with Neighborhood-Homogeneity Constraint for Point Cloud Analysis
1School of Automation Science；Electrical Engineering, Beihang University, Beijing, China 2Wuhan Leaddo Measuring \& Control Technology, Wuhan, China 3School of Artificial Intelligence, Beihang University, Beijing, China Emails
University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）；Megvii Technology（旷视科技）
Data association is important in the point cloud registration. In this work, we propose to solve the partial-to-partial registration from a new perspective, by introducing multi-level feature interactions between the source and the reference clouds at the feature extraction stage, such that the registration can be realized without the attentions or explicit mask estimation for the overlapping detection as adopted previously. Specifically, we present FINet, a feature interaction-based structure with the capability to enable and strengthen the information associating between the inputs at multip…
Renmin University of China（中国人民大学）；Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）
Point cloud-based large scale place recognition is an important but challenging task for many applications such as Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM). Taking the task as a point cloud retrieval problem, previous methods have made delightful achievements. However, how to deal with catastrophic collapse caused by rotation problems is still under-explored. In this paper, to tackle the issue, we propose a novel Point Cloud-based Rotation-aware Large Scale Place Recognition Network (RPR-Net). In particular, to solve the problem, we propose to learn rotation-invariant features in three ste…
HKUST（香港科技大学）；Alibaba A.I. Labs（阿里巴巴人工智能实验室）；City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学）；Simon Fraser University（西蒙弗雷泽大学）
In this work, we propose an end-to-end framework to learn local multi-view descriptors for 3D point clouds. To adopt a similar multi-view representation, existing studies use hand-crafted viewpoints for rendering in a preprocessing stage, which is detached from the subsequent descriptor learning stage. In our framework, we integrate the multi-view rendering into neural networks by using a differentiable renderer, which allows the viewpoints to be optimizable parameters for capturing more informative local context of interest points. To obtain discriminative descriptors, we also design a soft-v…
Recent works of point clouds show that mulit-frame spatio-temporal modeling outperforms single-frame versions by utilizing cross-frame information. In this paper, we further improve spatio-temporal point cloud feature learning with a flexible module called ASAP considering both attention and structure information across frames, which we find as two important factors for successful segmentation in dynamic point clouds. Firstly, our ASAP module contains a novel attentive temporal embedding layer to fuse the relatively informative local features across frames in a recurrent fashion. Secondly, an …
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Microsoft Research Asia（微软亚洲研究院）
In this paper, we proposed a novel Style-based Point Generator with Adversarial Rendering (SpareNet) for point cloud completion. Firstly, we present the channel-attentive EdgeConv to fully exploit the local structures as well as the global shape in point features. Secondly, we observe that the concatenation manner used by vanilla foldings limits its potential of generating a complex and faithful shape. Enlightened by the success of StyleGAN, we regard the shape feature as style code that modulates the normalization layers during the folding, which considerably enhances its capability. Thirdly,…
Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）
A novel 3D point cloud learning model for deep LiDAR odometry, named PWCLO-Net, using hierarchical embedding mask optimization is proposed in this paper. In this model, the Pyramid, Warping, and Cost volume (PWC) structure for the LiDAR odometry task is built to refine the estimated pose in a coarse-to-fine approach hierarchically. An attentive cost volume is built to associate two point clouds and obtain embedding motion patterns. Then, a novel trainable embedding mask is proposed to weigh the local motion patterns of all points to regress the overall pose and filter outlier points. The estim…
Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence（穆罕默德·本·扎耶德人工智能大学）；Inception Institute of Artificial Intelligence（起源人工智能研究院）
Most of the existing single-stage and two-stage 3D object detectors are anchor-based methods, while the efficient but challenging anchor-free single-stage 3D object detection is not well investigated. Recent studies on 2D object detection show that the anchor-free methods also are of great potential. However, the unordered and sparse properties of point clouds prevent us from directly leveraging the advanced 2D methods on 3D point clouds. We overcome this by converting the voxel-based sparse 3D feature volumes into the sparse 2D feature maps. We propose an attentive module to fit the sparse fe…
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）
Recently, many approaches have been proposed through single or multiple representations to improve the performance of point cloud semantic segmentation. However, these works do not maintain a good balance among performance, efficiency, and memory consumption. To address these issues, we propose DRINet++ that extends DRINet by enhancing the sparsity and geometric properties of a point cloud with a voxel-as-point principle. To improve efficiency and performance, DRINet++ mainly consists of two modules: Sparse Feature Encoder and Sparse Geometry Feature Enhancement. The Sparse Feature Encoder ext…
Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学）；Beijing Institute of Technology Chongqing Innovation Center（北京理工大学重庆创新中心）
Fine-grained geometry, captured by aggregation of point features in local regions, is crucial for object recognition and scene understanding in point clouds. Nevertheless, existing preeminent point cloud backbones usually incorporate max/average pooling for local feature aggregation, which largely ignores points' positional distribution, leading to inadequate assembling of fine-grained structures. To mitigate this bottleneck, we present an efficient alternative to max pooling, Position Adaptive Pooling (PAPooling), that explicitly models spatial relations among local points using a novel graph…
An efficient 3D point cloud learning architecture, named EfficientLO-Net, for LiDAR odometry is first proposed in this paper. In this architecture, the projection-aware representation of the 3D point cloud is proposed to organize the raw 3D point cloud into an ordered data form to achieve efficiency. The Pyramid, Warping, and Cost volume (PWC) structure for the LiDAR odometry task is built to estimate and refine the pose in a coarse-to-fine approach. A projection-aware attentive cost volume is built to directly associate two discrete point clouds and obtain embedding motion patterns. Then, a t…
Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）
Scene flow represents the 3D motion of every point in the dynamic environments. Like the optical flow that represents the motion of pixels in 2D images, 3D motion representation of scene flow benefits many applications, such as autonomous driving and service robot. This paper studies the problem of scene flow estimation from two consecutive 3D point clouds. In this paper, a novel hierarchical neural network with double attention is proposed for learning the correlation of point features in adjacent frames and refining scene flow from coarse to fine layer by layer. The proposed network has a ne…
Mila, Quebec AI Institute（米拉魁北克人工智能研究所）；Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems（马克斯·普朗克智能系统研究所）；AWS AI（亚马逊云科技人工智能）；Polytechnique Montréal（蒙特利尔理工学院）；Meta AI；Université de Montréal（蒙特利尔大学）
Recent work has seen the development of general purpose neural architectures that can be trained to perform tasks across diverse data modalities. General purpose models typically make few assumptions about the underlying data-structure and are known to perform well in the large-data regime. At the same time, there has been growing interest in modular neural architectures that represent the data using sparsely interacting modules. These models can be more robust out-of-distribution, computationally efficient, and capable of sample-efficient adaptation to new data. However, they tend to make dom…
PersonalTailor: Personalizing 2D Pattern Design from 3D Garment Point Clouds
University of Tokyo（东京大学）；Surrey Institute for People-Centred Artificial Intelligence（萨里以人为本人工智能研究院）；University of Surrey（萨里大学）；Reichman University（赖希曼大学）
Efficiently and accurately detecting people from 3D point cloud data is of great importance in many robotic and autonomous driving applications. This fundamental perception task is still very challenging due to (i) significant deformations of human body pose and gesture over time and (ii) point cloud sparsity and scarcity for pedestrian class objects. Recent efficient 3D object detection approaches rely on pillar features to detect objects from point cloud data. However, these pillar features do not carry sufficient expressive representations to deal with all the aforementioned challenges in d…
Generative modeling of set-structured data, such as point clouds, requires reasoning over local and global structures at various scales. However, adopting multi-scale frameworks for ordinary sequential data to a set-structured data is nontrivial as it should be invariant to the permutation of its elements. In this paper, we propose SetVAE, a hierarchical variational autoencoder for sets. Motivated by recent progress in set encoding, we build SetVAE upon attentive modules that first partition the set and project the partition back to the original cardinality. Exploiting this module, our hierarc…
This paper introduces Attentive Implicit Representation Networks (AIR-Nets), a simple, but highly effective architecture for 3D reconstruction from point clouds. Since representing 3D shapes in a local and modular fashion increases generalization and reconstruction quality, AIR-Nets encode an input point cloud into a set of local latent vectors anchored in 3D space, which locally describe the object's geometry, as well as a global latent description, enforcing global consistency. Our model is the first grid-free, encoder-based approach that locally describes an implicit function. The vector at…
Current LiDAR-only 3D detection methods inevitably suffer from the sparsity of point clouds. Many multi-modal methods are proposed to alleviate this issue, while different representations of images and point clouds make it difficult to fuse them, resulting in suboptimal performance. In this paper, we present a novel multi-modal framework SFD (Sparse Fuse Dense), which utilizes pseudo point clouds generated from depth completion to tackle the issues mentioned above. Different from prior works, we propose a new RoI fusion strategy 3D-GAF (3D Grid-wise Attentive Fusion) to make fuller use of info…
Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；Fabu Inc.（法布公司）；Alibaba-Zhejiang University Joint Institute of Frontier Technologies（阿里巴巴-浙江大学前沿技术联合研究院）
LIDAR point clouds and RGB-images are both extremely essential for 3D object detection. So many state-of-the-art 3D detection algorithms dedicate in fusing these two types of data effectively. However, their fusion methods based on Birds Eye View (BEV) or voxel format are not accurate. In this paper, we propose a novel fusion approach named Point-based Attentive Cont-conv Fusion(PACF) module, which fuses multi-sensor features directly on 3D points. Except for continuous convolution, we additionally add a Point-Pooling and an Attentive Aggregation to make the fused features more expressive. Mor…
Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学）；Baidu Research（百度研究院）；Inception Institute of Artificial Intelligence（人工智能起源研究所）；National Engineering Laboratory of Deep Learning Technology and Application（深度学习技术及应用国家工程实验室）；University of Kentucky（肯塔基大学）
Existing LiDAR-based 3D object detectors usually focus on the single-frame detection, while ignoring the spatiotemporal information in consecutive point cloud frames. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end online 3D video object detector that operates on point cloud sequences. The proposed model comprises a spatial feature encoding component and a spatiotemporal feature aggregation component. In the former component, a novel Pillar Message Passing Network (PMPNet) is proposed to encode each discrete point cloud frame. It adaptively collects information for a pillar node from its neighbors by …
Semantic segmentation of building facade is significant in various applications, such as urban building reconstruction and damage assessment. As there is a lack of 3D point clouds datasets related to the fine-grained building facade, we construct the first large-scale building facade point clouds benchmark dataset for semantic segmentation. The existing methods of semantic segmentation cannot fully mine the local neighborhood information of point clouds. Addressing this problem, we propose a learnable attention module that learns Dual Local Attention features, called DLA in this paper. The pro…
Varying density of point clouds increases the difficulty of 3D detection. In this paper, we present a context-aware dynamic network (CADNet) to capture the variance of density by considering both point context and semantic context. Point-level contexts are generated from original point clouds to enlarge the effective receptive filed. They are extracted around the voxelized pillars based on our extended voxelization method and processed with the context encoder in parallel with the pillar features. With a large perception range, we are able to capture the variance of features for potential obje…
Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）
Transformer models have achieved promising performances in point cloud segmentation. However, most existing attention schemes provide the same feature learning paradigm for all points equally and overlook the enormous difference in size among scene objects. In this paper, we propose the Size-Aware Transformer (SAT) that can tailor effective receptive fields for objects of different sizes. Our SAT achieves size-aware learning via two steps: introduce multi-scale features to each attention layer and allow each point to choose its attentive fields adaptively. It contains two key designs: the Mult…
Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；Lomonosov Moscow State University（罗蒙诺索夫莫斯科国立大学）；MBZUAI（穆罕默德·本·扎耶德人工智能大学）；IIAI
Most existing point cloud based 3D object detectors focus on the tasks of classification and box regression. However, another bottleneck in this area is achieving an accurate detection confidence for the Non-Maximum Suppression (NMS) post-processing. In this paper, we add a 3D IoU prediction branch to the regular classification and regression branches. The predicted IoU is used as the detection confidence for NMS. In order to obtain a more accurate IoU prediction, we propose a 3D IoU-Net with IoU sensitive feature learning and an IoU alignment operation. To obtain a perspective-invariant predi…
Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学）；Inception Institute of Artificial Intelligence（起源人工智能研究院）；King Abdullah University of Science and Technology（阿卜杜拉国王科技大学）；Indiana University（印第安纳大学）；University of Kentucky（肯塔基大学）
Previous works for LiDAR-based 3D object detection mainly focus on the single-frame paradigm. In this paper, we propose to detect 3D objects by exploiting temporal information in multiple frames, i.e., the point cloud videos. We empirically categorize the temporal information into short-term and long-term patterns. To encode the short-term data, we present a Grid Message Passing Network (GMPNet), which considers each grid (i.e., the grouped points) as a node and constructs a k-NN graph with the neighbor grids. To update features for a grid, GMPNet iteratively collects information from its neig…
Cloud-Aware SAR Fusion for Enhanced Optical Sensing in Space Missions
Institute of Aerospace and System Engineering, National Taipei University of Technology, Taipei, Taiwan（航空航天工程研究所，台北科技大学，台北，台湾）；Department of Information Technology, Ho Chi Minh City University of Education, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam（信息技术系，胡志明市教育大学，胡志明市，越南）
We address the problem of 3D object detection, that is, estimating 3D object bounding boxes from point clouds. 3D object detection methods exploit either voxel-based or point-based features to represent 3D objects in a scene. Voxel-based features are efficient to extract, while they fail to preserve fine-grained 3D structures of objects. Point-based features, on the other hand, represent the 3D structures more accurately, but extracting these features is computationally expensive. We introduce in this paper a novel single-stage 3D detection method having the merit of both voxel-based and point…
We present Hybrid Voxel Network (HVNet), a novel one-stage unified network for point cloud based 3D object detection for autonomous driving. Recent studies show that 2D voxelization with per voxel PointNet style feature extractor leads to accurate and efficient detector for large 3D scenes. Since the size of the feature map determines the computation and memory cost, the size of the voxel becomes a parameter that is hard to balance. A smaller voxel size gives a better performance, especially for small objects, but a longer inference time. A larger voxel can cover the same area with a smaller f…
