LSANet: Feature Learning on Point Sets by Local Spatial Attention

Directly learning features from the point cloud has become an active research direction in 3D understanding. Existing learning-based methods usually construct local regions from the point cloud and extract the corresponding features using shared Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) and max pooling. However, most of these processes do not adequately take the spatial distribution of the point cloud into account, limiting the ability to perceive fine-grained patterns. We design a novel Local Spatial Attention (LSA) module to adaptively generate attention maps according to the spatial distribution of local regions. The feature learning process which integrates with these attention maps can effectively capture the local geometric structure. We further propose the Spatial Feature Extractor (SFE), which constructs a branch architecture, to aggregate the spatial information with associated features in each layer of the network better.The experiments show that our network, named LSANet, can achieve on par or better performance than the state-of-the-art methods when evaluating on the challenging benchmark datasets. The source code is available at https://github.com/LinZhuoChen/LSANet.