Recently, graph-based and Transformer-based deep learning networks have demonstrated excellent performances on various point cloud tasks. Most of the existing graph methods are based on static graph, which take a fixed input to establish graph relations. Moreover, many graph methods apply maximization and averaging to aggregate neighboring features, so that only a single neighboring point affects the feature of centroid or different neighboring points have the same influence on the centroid's feature, which ignoring the correlation and difference between points. Most Transformer-based methods extract point cloud features based on global attention and lack the feature learning on local neighbors. To solve the problems of these two types of models, we propose a new feature extraction block named Graph Transformer and construct a 3D point point cloud learning network called GTNet to learn features of point clouds on local and global patterns. Graph Transformer integrates the advantages of graph-based and Transformer-based methods, and consists of Local Transformer and Global Transformer modules. Local Transformer uses a dynamic graph to calculate all neighboring point weights by intra-domain cross-attention with dynamically updated graph relations, so that every neighboring point could affect the features of centroid with different weights; Global Transformer enlarges the receptive field of Local Transformer by a global self-attention. In addition, to avoid the disappearance of the gradient caused by the increasing depth of network, we conduct residual connection for centroid features in GTNet; we also adopt the features of centroid and neighbors to generate the local geometric descriptors in Local Transformer to strengthen the local information learning capability of the model. Finally, we use GTNet for shape classification, part segmentation and semantic segmentation tasks in this paper.
Although Domain Generalization (DG) problem has been fast-growing in the 2D image tasks, its exploration on 3D point cloud data is still insufficient and challenged by more complex and uncertain cross-domain variances with uneven inter-class modality distribution. In this paper, different from previous 2D DG works, we focus on the 3D DG problem and propose a Single-dataset Unified Generalization (SUG) framework that only leverages a single source dataset to alleviate the unforeseen domain differences faced by a well-trained source model. Specifically, we first design a Multi-grained Sub-domain Alignment (MSA) method, which can constrain the learned representations to be domain-agnostic and discriminative, by performing a multi-grained feature alignment process between the splitted sub-domains from the single source dataset. Then, a Sample-level Domain-aware Attention (SDA) strategy is presented, which can selectively enhance easy-to-adapt samples from different sub-domains according to the sample-level inter-domain distance to avoid the negative transfer. Experiments demonstrate that our SUG can boost the generalization ability for unseen target domains, even outperforming the existing unsupervised domain adaptation methods that have to access extensive target domain data. Our code is available at https://github.com/SiyuanHuang95/SUG.
Discovering inter-point connection for efficient high-dimensional feature extraction from point coordinate is a key challenge in processing point cloud. Most existing methods focus on designing efficient local feature extractors while ignoring global connection, or vice versa. In this paper, we design a new Inductive Bias-aided Transformer (IBT) method to learn 3D inter-point relations, which considers both local and global attentions. Specifically, considering local spatial coherence, local feature learning is performed through Relative Position Encoding and Attentive Feature Pooling. We incorporate the learned locality into the Transformer module. The local feature affects value component in Transformer to modulate the relationship between channels of each point, which can enhance self-attention mechanism with locality based channel interaction. We demonstrate its superiority experimentally on classification and segmentation tasks. The code is available at: https://github.com/jiamang/IBT
Point cloud based 3D deep model has wide applications in many applications such as autonomous driving, house robot, and so on. Inspired by the recent prompt learning in natural language processing, this work proposes a novel Multi-view Vision-Prompt Fusion Network (MvNet) for few-shot 3D point cloud classification. MvNet investigates the possibility of leveraging the off-the-shelf 2D pre-trained models to achieve the few-shot classification, which can alleviate the over-dependence issue of the existing baseline models towards the large-scale annotated 3D point cloud data. Specifically, MvNet first encodes a 3D point cloud into multi-view image features for a number of different views. Then, a novel multi-view prompt fusion module is developed to effectively fuse information from different views to bridge the gap between 3D point cloud data and 2D pre-trained models. A set of 2D image prompts can then be derived to better describe the suitable prior knowledge for a large-scale pre-trained image model for few-shot 3D point cloud classification. Extensive experiments on ModelNet, ScanObjectNN, and ShapeNet datasets demonstrate that MvNet achieves new state-of-the-art performance for 3D few-shot point cloud image classification. The source code of this work will be available soon.
Self-attention modules have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in capturing long-range relationships and improving the performance of point cloud tasks. However, point cloud objects are typically characterized by complex, disordered, and non-Euclidean spatial structures with multiple scales, and their behavior is often dynamic and unpredictable. The current self-attention modules mostly rely on dot product multiplication and dimension alignment among query-key-value features, which cannot adequately capture the multi-scale non-Euclidean structures of point cloud objects. To address these problems, this paper proposes a self-attention plug-in module with its variants, Multi-scale Geometry-aware Transformer (MGT). MGT processes point cloud data with multi-scale local and global geometric information in the following three aspects. At first, the MGT divides point cloud data into patches with multiple scales. Secondly, a local feature extractor based on sphere mapping is proposed to explore the geometry inner each patch and generate a fixed-length representation for each patch. Thirdly, the fixed-length representations are fed into a novel geodesic-based self-attention to capture the global non-Euclidean geometry between patches. Finally, all the modules are integrated into the framework of MGT with an end-to-end training scheme. Experimental results demonstrate that the MGT vastly increases the capability of capturing multi-scale geometry using the self-attention mechanism and achieves strong competitive performance on mainstream point cloud benchmarks.
Due to the emergence of powerful computing resources and large-scale annotated datasets, deep learning has seen wide applications in our daily life. However, most current methods require extensive data collection and retraining when dealing with novel classes never seen before. On the other hand, we humans can quickly recognize new classes by looking at a few samples, which motivates the recent popularity of few-shot learning (FSL) in machine learning communities. Most current FSL approaches work on 2D image domain, however, its implication in 3D perception is relatively under-explored. Not only needs to recognize the unseen examples as in 2D domain, 3D few-shot learning is more challenging with unordered structures, high intra-class variances, and subtle inter-class differences. Moreover, different architectures and learning algorithms make it difficult to study the effectiveness of existing 2D methods when migrating to the 3D domain. In this work, for the first time, we perform systematic and extensive studies of recent 2D FSL and 3D backbone networks for benchmarking few-shot point cloud classification, and we suggest a strong baseline and learning architectures for 3D FSL. Then, we propose a novel plug-and-play component called Cross-Instance Adaptation (CIA) module, to address the high intra-class variances and subtle inter-class differences issues, which can be easily inserted into current baselines with significant performance improvement. Extensive experiments on two newly introduced benchmark datasets, ModelNet40-FS and ShapeNet70-FS, demonstrate the superiority of our proposed network for 3D FSL.
In recent years, research on few-shot learning (FSL) has been fast-growing in the 2D image domain due to the less requirement for labeled training data and greater generalization for novel classes. However, its application in 3D point cloud data is relatively under-explored. Not only need to distinguish unseen classes as in the 2D domain, 3D FSL is more challenging in terms of irregular structures, subtle inter-class differences, and high intra-class variances {when trained on a low number of data.} Moreover, different architectures and learning algorithms make it difficult to study the effectiveness of existing 2D FSL algorithms when migrating to the 3D domain. In this work, for the first time, we perform systematic and extensive investigations of directly applying recent 2D FSL works to 3D point cloud related backbone networks and thus suggest a strong learning baseline for few-shot 3D point cloud classification. Furthermore, we propose a new network, Point-cloud Correlation Interaction (PCIA), with three novel plug-and-play components called Salient-Part Fusion (SPF) module, Self-Channel Interaction Plus (SCI+) module, and Cross-Instance Fusion Plus (CIF+) module to obtain more representative embeddings and improve the feature distinction. These modules can be inserted into most FSL algorithms with minor changes and significantly improve the performance. Experimental results on three benchmark datasets, ModelNet40-FS, ShapeNet70-FS, and ScanObjectNN-FS, demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance for the 3D FSL task. Code and datasets are available at https://github.com/cgye96/A_Closer_Look_At_3DFSL.
Data organization via forming local regions is an integral part of deep learning networks that process 3D point clouds in a hierarchical manner. At each level, the point cloud is sampled to extract representative points and these points are used to be centers of local regions. The organization of local regions is of considerable importance since it determines the location and size of the receptive field at a particular layer of feature aggregation. In this paper, we present two local region-learning modules: Center Shift Module to infer the appropriate shift for each center point, and Radius Update Module to alter the radius of each local region. The parameters of the modules are learned through optimizing the loss associated with the particular task within an end-to-end network. We present alternatives for these modules through various ways of modeling the interactions of the features and locations of 3D points in the point cloud. We integrated both modules independently and together to the PointNet++ and PointCNN object classification architectures, and demonstrated that the modules contributed to a significant increase in classification accuracy for the ScanObjectNN data set consisting of scans of real-world objects. Our further experiments on ShapeNet data set showed that the modules are also effective on 3D CAD models.
Robust point cloud classification is crucial for real-world applications, as consumer-type 3D sensors often yield partial and noisy data, degraded by various artifacts. In this work we propose a general ensemble framework, based on partial point cloud sampling. Each ensemble member is exposed to only partial input data. Three sampling strategies are used jointly, two local ones, based on patches and curves, and a global one of random sampling. We demonstrate the robustness of our method to various local and global degradations. We show that our framework significantly improves the robustness of top classification netowrks by a large margin. Our experimental setting uses the recently introduced ModelNet-C database by Ren et al.[24], where we reach SOTA both on unaugmented and on augmented data. Our unaugmented mean Corruption Error (mCE) is 0.64 (current SOTA is 0.86) and 0.50 for augmented data (current SOTA is 0.57). We analyze and explain these remarkable results through diversity analysis. Our code is available at: https://github.com/yossilevii100/EPiC
Although 3D point cloud classification neural network models have been widely used, the in-depth interpretation of the activation of the neurons and layers is still a challenge. We propose a novel approach, named Relevance Flow, to interpret the hidden semantics of 3D point cloud classification neural networks. It delivers the class Relevance to the activated neurons in the intermediate layers in a back-propagation manner, and associates the activation of neurons with the input points to visualize the hidden semantics of each layer. Specially, we reveal that the 3D point cloud classification neural network has learned the plane-level and part-level hidden semantics in the intermediate layers, and utilize the normal and IoU to evaluate the consistency of both levels' hidden semantics. Besides, by using the hidden semantics, we generate the adversarial attack samples to attack 3D point cloud classifiers. Experiments show that our proposed method reveals the hidden semantics of the 3D point cloud classification neural network on ModelNet40 and ShapeNet, which can be used for the unsupervised point cloud part segmentation without labels and attacking the 3D point cloud classifiers.
Recently, there have been some attempts of Transformer in 3D point cloud classification. In order to reduce computations, most existing methods focus on local spatial attention, but ignore their content and fail to establish relationships between distant but relevant points. To overcome the limitation of local spatial attention, we propose a point content-based Transformer architecture, called PointConT for short. It exploits the locality of points in the feature space (content-based), which clusters the sampled points with similar features into the same class and computes the self-attention within each class, thus enabling an effective trade-off between capturing long-range dependencies and computational complexity. We further introduce an Inception feature aggregator for point cloud classification, which uses parallel structures to aggregate high-frequency and low-frequency information in each branch separately. Extensive experiments show that our PointConT model achieves a remarkable performance on point cloud shape classification. Especially, our method exhibits 90.3% Top-1 accuracy on the hardest setting of ScanObjectNN. Source code of this paper is available at https://github.com/yahuiliu99/PointConT.
Point cloud classification is an essential component in many security-critical applications such as autonomous driving and augmented reality. However, point cloud classifiers are vulnerable to adversarially perturbed point clouds. Existing certified defenses against adversarial point clouds suffer from a key limitation: their certified robustness guarantees are probabilistic, i.e., they produce an incorrect certified robustness guarantee with some probability. In this work, we propose a general framework, namely PointCert, that can transform an arbitrary point cloud classifier to be certifiably robust against adversarial point clouds with deterministic guarantees. PointCert certifiably predicts the same label for a point cloud when the number of arbitrarily added, deleted, and/or modified points is less than a threshold. Moreover, we propose multiple methods to optimize the certified robustness guarantees of PointCert in three application scenarios. We systematically evaluate PointCert on ModelNet and ScanObjectNN benchmark datasets. Our results show that PointCert substantially outperforms state-of-the-art certified defenses even though their robustness guarantees are probabilistic.
Point cloud data plays an essential role in robotics and self-driving applications. Yet, annotating point cloud data is time-consuming and nontrivial while they enable learning discriminative 3D representations that empower downstream tasks, such as classification and segmentation. Recently, contrastive learning-based frameworks have shown promising results for learning 3D representations in a self-supervised manner. However, existing contrastive learning methods cannot precisely encode and associate structural features and search the higher dimensional augmentation space efficiently. In this paper, we present CLR-GAM, a novel contrastive learning-based framework with Guided Augmentation (GA) for efficient dynamic exploration strategy and Guided Feature Mapping (GFM) for similar structural feature association between augmented point clouds. We empirically demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on both simulated and real-world 3D point cloud datasets for three different downstream tasks, i.e., 3D point cloud classification, few-shot learning, and object part segmentation.
Many point cloud classification methods are developed under the assumption that all point clouds in the dataset are well aligned with the canonical axes so that the 3D Cartesian point coordinates can be employed to learn features. When input point clouds are not aligned, the classification performance drops significantly. In this work, we focus on a mathematically transparent point cloud classification method called PointHop, analyze its reason for failure due to pose variations, and solve the problem by replacing its pose dependent modules with rotation invariant counterparts. The proposed method is named SO(3)-Invariant PointHop (or S3I-PointHop in short). We also significantly simplify the PointHop pipeline using only one single hop along with multiple spatial aggregation techniques. The idea of exploiting more spatial information is novel. Experiments on the ModelNet40 dataset demonstrate the superiority of S3I-PointHop over traditional PointHop-like methods.
With recent success of deep learning in 2D visual recognition, deep learning-based 3D point cloud analysis has received increasing attention from the community, especially due to the rapid development of autonomous driving technologies. However, most existing methods directly learn point features in the spatial domain, leaving the local structures in the spectral domain poorly investigated. In this paper, we introduce a new method, PointWavelet, to explore local graphs in the spectral domain via a learnable graph wavelet transform. Specifically, we first introduce the graph wavelet transform to form multi-scale spectral graph convolution to learn effective local structural representations. To avoid the time-consuming spectral decomposition, we then devise a learnable graph wavelet transform, which significantly accelerates the overall training process. Extensive experiments on four popular point cloud datasets, ModelNet40, ScanObjectNN, ShapeNet-Part, and S3DIS, demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method on point cloud classification and segmentation.
Existing point cloud learning methods aggregate features from neighbouring points relying on constructing graph in the spatial domain, which results in feature update for each point based on spatially-fixed neighbours throughout layers. In this paper, we propose a dynamic feature aggregation (DFA) method that can transfer information by constructing local graphs in the feature domain without spatial constraints. By finding k-nearest neighbors in the feature domain, we perform relative position encoding and semantic feature encoding to explore latent position and feature similarity information, respectively, so that rich local features can be learned. At the same time, we also learn low-dimensional global features from the original point cloud for enhancing feature representation. Between DFA layers, we dynamically update the constructed local graph structure, so that we can learn richer information, which greatly improves adaptability and efficiency. We demonstrate the superiority of our method by conducting extensive experiments on point cloud classification and segmentation tasks. Implementation code is available: https://github.com/jiamang/DFA.
With advances in deep learning model training strategies, the training of Point cloud classification methods is significantly improving. For example, PointNeXt, which adopts prominent training techniques and InvResNet layers into PointNet++, achieves over 7% improvement on the real-world ScanObjectNN dataset. However, most of these models use point coordinates features of neighborhood points mapped to higher dimensional space while ignoring the neighborhood point features computed before feeding to the network layers. In this paper, we revisit the PointNeXt model to study the usage and benefit of such neighborhood point features. We train and evaluate PointNeXt on ModelNet40 (synthetic), ScanObjectNN (real-world), and a recent large-scale, real-world grocery dataset, i.e., 3DGrocery100. In addition, we provide an additional inference strategy of weight averaging the top two checkpoints of PointNeXt to improve classification accuracy. Together with the abovementioned ideas, we gain 0.5%, 1%, 4.8%, 3.4%, and 1.6% overall accuracy on the PointNeXt model with real-world datasets, ScanObjectNN (hardest variant), 3DGrocery100's Apple10, Fruits, Vegetables, and Packages subsets, respectively. We also achieve a comparable 0.2% accuracy gain on ModelNet40.
Existing multi-view-based point cloud classification methods only utilize multiple views of point clouds and discard the point clouds from further processing. Among these methods, the Simple View model demonstrates that features from six orthogonal perspective projections of a point cloud achieved comparable 3D classification. However, points on the local structures overlap in these projections resulting in the loss of structural information. Also, we found that the performance of Simple View degrades at lower projection resolutions. We propose the use of neighbor projections along with object projections to learn finer local structural information. In this paper, we introduce SimpleView++ to concatenate features from the combined orthogonal perspective projections at object and neighbor levels with encoded features from the point cloud. We evaluated Simple-View++ using ModelNet40 and ScanObjectNN benchmark datasets. Our idea to use neighbor views broadly applies to other existing view-based methods. For example, neighbor views improve the results of MVTN by 2% on the hardest variant of ScanObjectNN. Our experiments also validate that neighbor view features considerably enhance classification accuracy at lower resolutions.
In many practical applications, 3D point cloud analysis requires rotation invariance. In this paper, we present a learnable descriptor invariant under 3D rotations and reflections, i.e., the O(3) actions, utilizing the recently introduced steerable 3D spherical neurons and vector neurons. Specifically, we propose an embedding of the 3D spherical neurons into 4D vector neurons, which leverages end-to-end training of the model. In our approach, we perform TetraTransform--an equivariant embedding of the 3D input into 4D, constructed from the steerable neurons--and extract deeper O(3)-equivariant features using vector neurons. This integration of the TetraTransform into the VN-DGCNN framework, termed TetraSphere, negligibly increases the number of parameters by less than 0.0002%. TetraSphere sets a new state-of-the-art performance classifying randomly rotated real-world object scans of the challenging subsets of ScanObjectNN. Additionally, TetraSphere outperforms all equivariant methods on randomly rotated synthetic data: classifying objects from ModelNet40 and segmenting parts of the ShapeNet shapes. Thus, our results reveal the practical value of steerable 3D spherical neurons for learning in 3D Euclidean space. The code is available at https://github.com/pavlo-melnyk/tetrasphere.
Point cloud completion, as the upstream procedure of 3D recognition and segmentation, has become an essential part of many tasks such as navigation and scene understanding. While various point cloud completion models have demonstrated their powerful capabilities, their robustness against adversarial attacks, which have been proven to be fatally malicious towards deep neural networks, remains unknown. In addition, existing attack approaches towards point cloud classifiers cannot be applied to the completion models due to different output forms and attack purposes. In order to evaluate the robustness of the completion models, we propose PointCA, the first adversarial attack against 3D point cloud completion models. PointCA can generate adversarial point clouds that maintain high similarity with the original ones, while being completed as another object with totally different semantic information. Specifically, we minimize the representation discrepancy between the adversarial example and the target point set to jointly explore the adversarial point clouds in the geometry space and the feature space. Furthermore, to launch a stealthier attack, we innovatively employ the neighbourhood density information to tailor the perturbation constraint, leading to geometry-aware and distribution-adaptive modifications for each point. Extensive experiments against different premier point cloud completion networks show that PointCA can cause a performance degradation from 77.9% to 16.7%, with the structure chamfer distance kept below 0.01. We conclude that existing completion models are severely vulnerable to adversarial examples, and state-of-the-art defenses for point cloud classification will be partially invalid when applied to incomplete and uneven point cloud data.