From CAD models to soft point cloud labels: An automatic annotation pipeline for cheaply supervised 3D semantic segmentation

We propose a fully automatic annotation scheme which takes a raw 3D point cloud with a set of fitted CAD models as input, and outputs convincing point-wise labels which can be used as cheap training data for point cloud segmentation. Compared to manual annotations, we show that our automatic labels are accurate while drastically reducing the annotation time, and eliminating the need for manual intervention or dataset-specific parameters. Our labeling pipeline outputs semantic classes and soft point-wise object scores which can either be binarized into standard one-hot-encoded labels, thresholded into weak labels with ambiguous points left unlabeled, or used directly as soft labels during training. We evaluate the label quality and segmentation performance of PointNet++ on a dataset of real industrial point clouds and Scan2CAD, a public dataset of indoor scenes. Our results indicate that reducing supervision in areas which are more difficult to label automatically is beneficial, compared to the conventional approach of naively assigning a hard "best guess" label to every point.