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_16: Feature descriptors play a crucial role in a wide range of geometry analysis and processing applications, including shape correspondence, retrieval, and segmentation. In this paper, we introduce Geodesic Convolutional Neural Networks (GCNN), a generalization of the convolutional neural networks (CNN) paradigm to non-Euclidean manifolds. Our construction is based on a local geodesic system of polar coordinates to extract "patches", which are then passed through a cascade of filters and linear and non-linear operators. The coefficients of the filters and linear combination weights are optimization variables that are learned to minimize a task-specific cost function. We use ShapeNet to learn invariant shape features, allowing to achieve state-of-the-art performance in problems such as shape description, retrieval, and correspondence.
  @cite_8: Convolutional neural networks have achieved extraordinary results in many computer vision and pattern recognition applications; however, their adoption in the computer graphics and geometry processing communities is limited due to the non-Euclidean structure of their data. In this paper, we propose Anisotropic Convolutional Neural Network (ACNN), a generalization of classical CNNs to non-Euclidean domains, where classical convolutions are replaced by projections over a set of oriented anisotropic diffusion kernels. We use ACNNs to effectively learn intrinsic dense correspondences between deformable shapes, a fundamental problem in geometry processing, arising in a wide variety of applications. We tested ACNNs performance in very challenging settings, achieving state-of-the-art results on some of the most difficult recent correspondence benchmarks.
summary: For example, GCNN @cite_16 and ACNN @cite_8 construct a local geodesic polar coordinate system on a manifold, formulating the convolution as @math where @math is a local interpolation function with interpolation domain an isotropic disc for GCNN and an anisotropic ellipse for ACNN. A local geodesic polar coordinate system on a manifold can also be transformed to a 2-dimensional planar coordinate system on its tangent plane. Such transformation is the mapping @math which is defined by the inverse exponential map: @math with @math being a point in the local geodesic polar coordinate system at @math with coordinates @math . With this, we can easily interpret ACNN within the framework of ). Indeed, ACNN essentially chooses @math as the directions of the principal curvature at point @math . For GCNN, on the other hand, it avoids choosing a specific vector field on the manifold by taking max-pooling among all possible directions of @math at each point. Such definition of convolution, however, ignores the correspondence of the convolution kernels at different locations.