MSECNet: Accurate and Robust Normal Estimation for 3D Point Clouds by Multi-Scale Edge Conditioning

Estimating surface normals from 3D point clouds is critical for various applications, including surface reconstruction and rendering. While existing methods for normal estimation perform well in regions where normals change slowly, they tend to fail where normals vary rapidly. To address this issue, we propose a novel approach called MSECNet, which improves estimation in normal varying regions by treating normal variation modeling as an edge detection problem. MSECNet consists of a backbone network and a multi-scale edge conditioning (MSEC) stream. The MSEC stream achieves robust edge detection through multi-scale feature fusion and adaptive edge detection. The detected edges are then combined with the output of the backbone network using the edge conditioning module to produce edge-aware representations. Extensive experiments show that MSECNet outperforms existing methods on both synthetic (PCPNet) and real-world (SceneNN) datasets while running significantly faster. We also conduct various analyses to investigate the contribution of each component in the MSEC stream. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in surface reconstruction.

Interpretable Edge Enhancement and Suppression Learning for 3D Point Cloud Segmentation

3D point clouds can flexibly represent continuous surfaces and can be used for various applications; however, the lack of structural information makes point cloud recognition challenging. Recent edge-aware methods mainly use edge information as an extra feature that describes local structures to facilitate learning. Although these methods show that incorporating edges into the network design is beneficial, they generally lack interpretability, making users wonder how exactly edges help. To shed light on this issue, in this study, we propose the Diffusion Unit (DU) that handles edges in an interpretable manner while providing decent improvement. Our method is interpretable in three ways. First, we theoretically show that DU learns to perform task-beneficial edge enhancement and suppression. Second, we experimentally observe and verify the edge enhancement and suppression behavior. Third, we empirically demonstrate that this behavior contributes to performance improvement. Extensive experiments performed on challenging benchmarks verify the superiority of DU in terms of both interpretability and performance gain. Specifically, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in object part segmentation using ShapeNet part and scene segmentation using S3DIS. Our source code will be released at https://github.com/martianxiu/DiffusionUnit.

Enhancing Local Geometry Learning for 3D Point Cloud via Decoupling Convolution

Modeling the local surface geometry is challenging in 3D point cloud understanding due to the lack of connectivity information. Most prior works model local geometry using various convolution operations. We observe that the convolution can be equivalently decomposed as a weighted combination of a local and a global component. With this observation, we explicitly decouple these two components so that the local one can be enhanced and facilitate the learning of local surface geometry. Specifically, we propose Laplacian Unit (LU), a simple yet effective architectural unit that can enhance the learning of local geometry. Extensive experiments demonstrate that networks equipped with LUs achieve competitive or superior performance on typical point cloud understanding tasks. Moreover, through establishing connections between the mean curvature flow, a further investigation of LU based on curvatures is made to interpret the adaptive smoothing and sharpening effect of LU. The code will be available.

Enhancing Local Feature Learning Using Diffusion for 3D Point Cloud Understanding

Learning point clouds is challenging due to the lack of connectivity information, i.e., edges. Although existing edge-aware methods can improve the performance by modeling edges, how edges contribute to the improvement is unclear. In this study, we propose a method that automatically learns to enhance/suppress edges while keeping the its working mechanism clear. First, we theoretically figure out how edge enhancement/suppression works. Second, we experimentally verify the edge enhancement/suppression behavior. Third, we empirically show that this behavior improves performance. In general, we observe that the proposed method achieves competitive performance in point cloud classification and segmentation tasks.

Enhancing Local Feature Learning for 3D Point Cloud Processing using Unary-Pairwise Attention

We present a simple but effective attention named the unary-pairwise attention (UPA) for modeling the relationship between 3D point clouds. Our idea is motivated by the analysis that the standard self-attention (SA) that operates globally tends to produce almost the same attention maps for different query positions, revealing difficulties for learning query-independent and query-dependent information jointly. Therefore, we reformulate the SA and propose query-independent (Unary) and query-dependent (Pairwise) components to facilitate the learning of both terms. In contrast to the SA, the UPA ensures query dependence via operating locally. Extensive experiments show that the UPA outperforms the SA consistently on various point cloud understanding tasks including shape classification, part segmentation, and scene segmentation. Moreover, simply equipping the popular PointNet++ method with the UPA even outperforms or is on par with the state-of-the-art attention-based approaches. In addition, the UPA systematically boosts the performance of both standard and modern networks when it is integrated into them as a compositional module.