SegGroup: Seg-Level Supervision for 3D Instance and Semantic Segmentation

Most existing point cloud instance and semantic segmentation methods heavily rely on strong supervision signals, which require point-level labels for every point in the scene. However, strong supervision suffers from large annotation cost, arousing the need to study efficient annotating. In this paper, we propose a new form of weak supervision signal, namely seg-level labels, for point cloud instance and semantic segmentation. Based on the widely-used over-segmentation as pre-processor, we only annotate one point for each instance to obtain seg-level labels. We further design a segment grouping network (SegGroup) to generate pseudo point-level labels by hierarchically grouping the unlabeled segments into the relevant nearby labeled segments, so that existing methods can directly consume the pseudo labels for training. Experimental results show that our SegGroup achieves comparable results with the fully annotated point-level supervised methods on both point cloud instance and semantic segmentation tasks and outperforms the recent scene-level and subcloud-level supervised methods significantly.