3D semantic scene labeling is a fundamental task for Autonomous Driving. Recent work shows the capability of Deep Neural Networks in labeling 3D point sets provided by sensors like LiDAR, and Radar. Imbalanced distribution of classes in the dataset is one of the challenges that face 3D semantic scene labeling task. This leads to misclassifying for the non-dominant classes which suffer from two main problems: a) rare appearance in the dataset, and b) few sensor points reflected from one object of these classes. This paper proposes a Weighted Self-Incremental Transfer Learning as a generalized methodology that solves the imbalanced training dataset problems. It re-weights the components of the loss function computed from individual classes based on their frequencies in the training dataset, and applies Self-Incremental Transfer Learning by running the Neural Network model on non-dominant classes first, then dominant classes one-by-one are added. The experimental results introduce a new 3D point cloud semantic segmentation benchmark for KITTI dataset.
Recent approaches convert the 3D point cloud into different representation before feeding it into a Deep Neural Network @cite_11 @cite_16 . This is because 3D point cloud points are not in a structured format, so they transformed the data into 3D regular voxel-grids @cite_11 @cite_16 . This representation results in having unnecessarily volumes of data which lead to heavy computations. Other approaches use 3D point cloud points directly as an input to the Deep Neural Network @cite_1 @cite_12 . PointNet @cite_1 is a unified architecture that takes point cloud points directly with the ground truth point wise labels as inputs. However, it fails in capturing and extracting local structure features for complex sparse 3D points in the scene. As an extension for PointNet architecture to solve its issues, PointNet++ @cite_12 is introduced to have the ability of extracting deep local features. However, based on our experimental results, PointNet++ also suffers from misclassifying imbalanced point cloud datasets.
@cite_16 @cite_1 @cite_12 @cite_11
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Unlike images which are represented in regular dense grids, 3D point clouds are irregular and unordered, hence applying convolution on them can be difficult. In this paper, we extend the dynamic filter to a new convolution operation, named PointConv. PointConv can be applied on point clouds to build deep convolutional networks. We treat convolution kernels as nonlinear functions of the local coordinates of 3D points comprised of weight and density functions. With respect to a given point, the weight functions are learned with multi-layer perceptron networks and density functions through kernel density estimation. The most important contribution of this work is a novel reformulation proposed for efficiently computing the weight functions, which allowed us to dramatically scale up the network and significantly improve its performance. The learned convolution kernel can be used to compute translation-invariant and permutation-invariant convolution on any point set in the 3D space. Besides, PointConv can also be used as deconvolution operators to propagate features from a subsampled point cloud back to its original resolution. Experiments on ModelNet40, ShapeNet, and ScanNet show that deep convolutional neural networks built on PointConv are able to achieve state-of-the-art on challenging semantic segmentation benchmarks on 3D point clouds. Besides, our experiments converting CIFAR-10 into a point cloud showed that networks built on PointConv can match the performance of convolutional networks in 2D images of a similar structure. Point cloud is an important type of geometric data structure. Due to its irregular format, most researchers transform such data to regular 3D voxel grids or collections of images. This, however, renders data unnecessarily voluminous and causes issues. In this paper, we design a novel type of neural network that directly consumes point clouds and well respects the permutation invariance of points in the input. Our network, named PointNet, provides a unified architecture for applications ranging from object classification, part segmentation, to scene semantic parsing. Though simple, PointNet is highly efficient and effective. Empirically, it shows strong performance on par or even better than state of the art. Theoretically, we provide analysis towards understanding of what the network has learnt and why the network is robust with respect to input perturbation and corruption. Point cloud is an important type of geometric data structure. Due to its irregular format, most researchers transform such data to regular 3D voxel grids or collections of images. This, however, renders data unnecessarily voluminous and causes issues. In this paper, we design a novel type of neural network that directly consumes point clouds, which well respects the permutation invariance of points in the input. Our network, named PointNet, provides a unified architecture for applications ranging from object classification, part segmentation, to scene semantic parsing. Though simple, PointNet is highly efficient and effective. Empirically, it shows strong performance on par or even better than state of the art. Theoretically, we provide analysis towards understanding of what the network has learnt and why the network is robust with respect to input perturbation and corruption. Accurate detection of objects in 3D point clouds is a central problem in many applications, such as autonomous navigation, housekeeping robots, and augmented virtual reality. To interface a highly sparse LiDAR point cloud with a region proposal network (RPN), most existing efforts have focused on hand-crafted feature representations, for example, a bird's eye view projection. In this work, we remove the need of manual feature engineering for 3D point clouds and propose VoxelNet, a generic 3D detection network that unifies feature extraction and bounding box prediction into a single stage, end-to-end trainable deep network. Specifically, VoxelNet divides a point cloud into equally spaced 3D voxels and transforms a group of points within each voxel into a unified feature representation through the newly introduced voxel feature encoding (VFE) layer. In this way, the point cloud is encoded as a descriptive volumetric representation, which is then connected to a RPN to generate detections. Experiments on the KITTI car detection benchmark show that VoxelNet outperforms the state-of-the-art LiDAR based 3D detection methods by a large margin. Furthermore, our network learns an effective discriminative representation of objects with various geometries, leading to encouraging results in 3D detection of pedestrians and cyclists, based on only LiDAR.