Convolution plays a crucial role in various applications in signal and image processing, analysis and recognition. It is also the main building block of convolution neural networks (CNNs). Designing appropriate convolution neural networks on manifold-structured point clouds can inherit and empower recent advances of CNNs to analyzing and processing point cloud data. However, one of the major challenges is to define a proper way to "sweep" filters through the point cloud as a natural generalization of the planar convolution and to reflect the point cloud's geometry at the same time. In this paper, we consider generalizing convolution by adapting parallel transport on the point cloud. Inspired by a triangulated surface based method [Stefan C. Schonsheck, Bin Dong, and Rongjie Lai, arXiv:1805.07857.], we propose the Narrow-Band Parallel Transport Convolution (NPTC) using a specifically defined connection on a voxelized narrow-band approximation of point cloud data. With that, we further propose a deep convolutional neural network based on NPTC (called NPTC-net) for point cloud classification and segmentation. Comprehensive experiments show that the proposed NPTC-net achieves similar or better results than current state-of-the-art methods on point clouds classification and segmentation.
The newly proposed PTC @cite_15 defines convolution directly on the manifold, while uses tangent planes to transport kernels by a properly chosen parallel transport. PTC can be equivalently cast into the form of ) using the inverse exponential map, and implementation of the proposed parallel transported is realized through choosing specific vector fields @math guided by a Eikonal equation for transforming vectors along geodesic curves on manifolds.
@cite_15
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Deep generative models learn a mapping from a low-dimensional latent space to a high-dimensional data space. Under certain regularity conditions, these models parameterize nonlinear manifolds in the data space. In this paper, we investigate the Riemannian geometry of these generated manifolds. First, we develop efficient algorithms for computing geodesic curves, which provide an intrinsic notion of distance between points on the manifold. Second, we develop an algorithm for parallel translation of a tangent vector along a path on the manifold. We show how parallel translation can be used to generate analogies, i.e., to transport a change in one data point into a semantically similar change of another data point. Our experiments on real image data show that the manifolds learned by deep generative models, while nonlinear, are surprisingly close to zero curvature. The practical implication is that linear paths in the latent space closely approximate geodesics on the generated manifold.