SurFit: Learning to Fit Surfaces Improves Few Shot Learning on Point Clouds

We present SurFit, a simple approach for label efficient learning of 3D shape segmentation networks. SurFit is based on a self-supervised task of decomposing the surface of a 3D shape into geometric primitives. It can be readily applied to existing network architectures for 3D shape segmentation and improves their performance in the few-shot setting, as we demonstrate in the widely used ShapeNet and PartNet benchmarks. SurFit outperforms the prior state-of-the-art in this setting, suggesting that decomposability into primitives is a useful prior for learning representations predictive of semantic parts. We present a number of experiments varying the choice of geometric primitives and downstream tasks to demonstrate the effectiveness of the method.