text: 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.
  @cite_15: Standard convolutional neural networks assume a grid structured input is available and exploit discrete convolutions as their fundamental building blocks. This limits their applicability to many real-world applications. In this paper we propose Parametric Continuous Convolution, a new learnable operator that operates over non-grid structured data. The key idea is to exploit parameterized kernel functions that span the full continuous vector space. This generalization allows us to learn over arbitrary data structures as long as their support relationship is computable. Our experiments show significant improvement over the state-of-the-art in point cloud segmentation of indoor and outdoor scenes, and lidar motion estimation of driving scenes.
summary: are more intuitive and similar to the Euclidean case, and this is one of the reasons why most of the existing works fall into this category. The philosophy behind these methods is that the tangent plane of a @math -dimensional manifold is embedded to a @math -dimensional Euclidean domain where convolution can be easily defined. In this paper, we make the first attempt to interpret some of the existing mesh-based methods in a unified framework. We claim that most of the spatial mesh-based methods can be formulated as Here, @math is a convolution kernel and @math with @math being the size of the kernel. The mapping @math is defined as where @math , @math . For simplicity, we will denote @math . Most of the designs of the existing manifold convolutions focused on the designs of @math . We remark that possible singularities will lead to no convolution operation at those points. These are isolated points on a closed manifold and do not effect experiment results. In addition, singularities from a given vector field can be overcome using several pairs of vector fields and pooling @cite_15 .