2022/02/26 by Zhiyuan Zhang, Zhang, Zhiyuan, Binh‐Son Hua +3 · 4 citations
Earth and Planetary Sciences · Engineering · #3D Shape Modeling and Analysis #3D Surveying and Cultural Heritage #Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) #Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Robotics and Sensor-Based Localization
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2202.13094
openalex publication_date 2022/02/26 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
3D point clouds deep learning is a promising field of research that allows a neural network to learn features of point clouds directly, making it a robust tool for solving 3D scene understanding tasks. While recent works show that point cloud convolutions can be invariant to translation and point permutation, investigations of the rotation invariance property for point cloud convolution has been so far scarce. Some existing methods perform point cloud convolutions with rotation-invariant features, existing methods generally do not perform as well as translation-invariant only counterpart. In this work, we argue that a key reason is that compared to point coordinates, rotation-invariant features consumed by point cloud convolution are not as distinctive. To address this problem, we propose a simple yet effective convolution operator that enhances feature distinction by designing powerful rotation invariant features from the local regions. We consider the relationship between the point of interest and its neighbors as well as the internal relationship of the neighbors to largely improve the feature descriptiveness. Our network architecture can capture both local and global context by simply tuning the neighborhood size in each convolution layer. We conduct several experiments on synthetic and real-world point cloud classifications, part segmentation, and shape retrieval to evaluate our method, which achieves the state-of-the-art accuracy under challenging rotations.