Divide and Conquer: 3D Point Cloud Instance Segmentation With Point-Wise Binarization

Instance segmentation on point clouds is crucially important for 3D scene understanding. Distance clustering is commonly used in state-of-the-art methods (SOTAs), which is typically effective but does not perform well in segmenting adjacent objects with the same semantic label (especially when they share neighboring points). Due to the uneven distribution of offset points, these existing methods can hardly cluster all instance points. To this end, we design a novel divide and conquer strategy and propose an end-to-end network named PBNet that binarizes each point and clusters them separately to segment instances. PBNet divides offset instance points into two categories: high and low density points (HPs vs.LPs), which are then conquered separately. Adjacent objects can be clearly separated by removing LPs, and then be completed and refined by assigning LPs via a neighbor voting method. To further reduce clustering errors, we develop an iterative merging algorithm based on mean size to aggregate fragment instances. Experiments on ScanNetV2 and S3DIS datasets indicate the superiority of our model. In particular, PBNet achieves so far the best AP50 and AP25 on the ScanNetV2 official benchmark challenge (Validation Set) while demonstrating high efficiency.