Daily Papers

Diffusion probabilistic models have achieved remarkable success in text guided image generation. However, generating 3D shapes is still challenging due to the lack of sufficient data containing 3D models along with their descriptions. Moreover, text based descriptions of 3D shapes are inherently ambiguous and lack details. In this paper, we propose a sketch and text guided probabilistic diffusion model for colored point cloud generation that conditions the denoising process jointly with a hand drawn sketch of the object and its textual description. We incrementally diffuse the point coordinates and color values in a joint diffusion process to reach a Gaussian distribution. Colored point cloud generation thus amounts to learning the reverse diffusion process, conditioned by the sketch and text, to iteratively recover the desired shape and color. Specifically, to learn effective sketch-text embedding, our model adaptively aggregates the joint embedding of text prompt and the sketch based on a capsule attention network. Our model uses staged diffusion to generate the shape and then assign colors to different parts conditioned on the appearance prompt while preserving precise shapes from the first stage. This gives our model the flexibility to extend to multiple tasks, such as appearance re-editing and part segmentation. Experimental results demonstrate that our model outperforms recent state-of-the-art in point cloud generation.

Static LiDAR scanners produce accurate, dense, colored point clouds, but often contain obtrusive artifacts which makes them ill-suited for direct display. We propose an efficient method to render photorealistic images of such scans without any expensive preprocessing or training of a scene-specific model. A naive projection of the point cloud to the output view using 1x1 pixels is fast and retains the available detail, but also results in unintelligible renderings as background points leak in between the foreground pixels. The key insight is that these projections can be transformed into a realistic result using a deep convolutional model in the form of a U-Net, and a depth-based heuristic that prefilters the data. The U-Net also handles LiDAR-specific problems such as missing parts due to occlusion, color inconsistencies and varying point densities. We also describe a method to generate synthetic training data to deal with imperfectly-aligned ground truth images. Our method achieves real-time rendering rates using an off-the-shelf GPU and outperforms the state-of-the-art in both speed and quality.

We introduce a diffusion-based framework that performs aligned novel view image and geometry generation via a warping-and-inpainting methodology. Unlike prior methods that require dense posed images or pose-embedded generative models limited to in-domain views, our method leverages off-the-shelf geometry predictors to predict partial geometries viewed from reference images, and formulates novel-view synthesis as an inpainting task for both image and geometry. To ensure accurate alignment between generated images and geometry, we propose cross-modal attention distillation, where attention maps from the image diffusion branch are injected into a parallel geometry diffusion branch during both training and inference. This multi-task approach achieves synergistic effects, facilitating geometrically robust image synthesis as well as well-defined geometry prediction. We further introduce proximity-based mesh conditioning to integrate depth and normal cues, interpolating between point cloud and filtering erroneously predicted geometry from influencing the generation process. Empirically, our method achieves high-fidelity extrapolative view synthesis on both image and geometry across a range of unseen scenes, delivers competitive reconstruction quality under interpolation settings, and produces geometrically aligned colored point clouds for comprehensive 3D completion. Project page is available at https://cvlab-kaist.github.io/MoAI.

A crucial part of any home is the roof over our heads to protect us from the elements. In this paper we present the Zeitview Rooftop Geometry (ZRG) dataset for residential rooftop understanding. ZRG is a large-scale residential rooftop dataset of over 20k properties collected through roof inspections from across the U.S. and contains multiple modalities including high resolution aerial orthomosaics, digital surface models (DSM), colored point clouds, and 3D roof wireframe annotations. We provide an in-depth analysis and perform several experimental baselines including roof outline extraction, monocular height estimation, and planar roof structure extraction, to illustrate a few of the numerous potential applications unlocked by this dataset.

3D Clothing modeling and datasets play crucial role in the entertainment, animation, and digital fashion industries. Existing work often lacks detailed semantic understanding or uses synthetic datasets, lacking realism and personalization. To address this, we first introduce CloSe-D: a novel large-scale dataset containing 3D clothing segmentation of 3167 scans, covering a range of 18 distinct clothing classes. Additionally, we propose CloSe-Net, the first learning-based 3D clothing segmentation model for fine-grained segmentation from colored point clouds. CloSe-Net uses local point features, body-clothing correlation, and a garment-class and point features-based attention module, improving performance over baselines and prior work. The proposed attention module enables our model to learn appearance and geometry-dependent clothing prior from data. We further validate the efficacy of our approach by successfully segmenting publicly available datasets of people in clothing. We also introduce CloSe-T, a 3D interactive tool for refining segmentation labels. Combining the tool with CloSe-T in a continual learning setup demonstrates improved generalization on real-world data. Dataset, model, and tool can be found at https://virtualhumans.mpi-inf.mpg.de/close3dv24/.

The unprecedented advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have created a profound impact on natural language processing but are yet to fully embrace the realm of 3D understanding. This paper introduces PointLLM, a preliminary effort to fill this gap, thereby enabling LLMs to understand point clouds and offering a new avenue beyond 2D visual data. PointLLM processes colored object point clouds with human instructions and generates contextually appropriate responses, illustrating its grasp of point clouds and common sense. Specifically, it leverages a point cloud encoder with a powerful LLM to effectively fuse geometric, appearance, and linguistic information. We collect a novel dataset comprising 660K simple and 70K complex point-text instruction pairs to enable a two-stage training strategy: initially aligning latent spaces and subsequently instruction-tuning the unified model. To rigorously evaluate our model's perceptual abilities and its generalization capabilities, we establish two benchmarks: Generative 3D Object Classification and 3D Object Captioning, assessed through three different methods, including human evaluation, GPT-4/ChatGPT evaluation, and traditional metrics. Experiment results show that PointLLM demonstrates superior performance over existing 2D baselines. Remarkably, in human-evaluated object captioning tasks, PointLLM outperforms human annotators in over 50% of the samples. Codes, datasets, and benchmarks are available at https://github.com/OpenRobotLab/PointLLM .

Human's perception of the visual world is shaped by the stereo processing of 3D information. Understanding how the brain perceives and processes 3D visual stimuli in the real world has been a longstanding endeavor in neuroscience. Towards this goal, we introduce a new neuroscience task: decoding 3D visual perception from EEG signals, a neuroimaging technique that enables real-time monitoring of neural dynamics enriched with complex visual cues. To provide the essential benchmark, we first present EEG-3D, a pioneering dataset featuring multimodal analysis data and extensive EEG recordings from 12 subjects viewing 72 categories of 3D objects rendered in both videos and images. Furthermore, we propose Neuro-3D, a 3D visual decoding framework based on EEG signals. This framework adaptively integrates EEG features derived from static and dynamic stimuli to learn complementary and robust neural representations, which are subsequently utilized to recover both the shape and color of 3D objects through the proposed diffusion-based colored point cloud decoder. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to explore EEG-based 3D visual decoding. Experiments indicate that Neuro-3D not only reconstructs colored 3D objects with high fidelity, but also learns effective neural representations that enable insightful brain region analysis. The dataset and associated code will be made publicly available.

Nowadays, pre-training big models on large-scale datasets has become a crucial topic in deep learning. The pre-trained models with high representation ability and transferability achieve a great success and dominate many downstream tasks in natural language processing and 2D vision. However, it is non-trivial to promote such a pretraining-tuning paradigm to the 3D vision, given the limited training data that are relatively inconvenient to collect. In this paper, we provide a new perspective of leveraging pre-trained 2D knowledge in 3D domain to tackle this problem, tuning pre-trained image models with the novel Point-to-Pixel prompting for point cloud analysis at a minor parameter cost. Following the principle of prompting engineering, we transform point clouds into colorful images with geometry-preserved projection and geometry-aware coloring to adapt to pre-trained image models, whose weights are kept frozen during the end-to-end optimization of point cloud analysis tasks. We conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate that cooperating with our proposed Point-to-Pixel Prompting, better pre-trained image model will lead to consistently better performance in 3D vision. Enjoying prosperous development from image pre-training field, our method attains 89.3% accuracy on the hardest setting of ScanObjectNN, surpassing conventional point cloud models with much fewer trainable parameters. Our framework also exhibits very competitive performance on ModelNet classification and ShapeNet Part Segmentation. Code is available at https://github.com/wangzy22/P2P.

Geometry and color information provided by the point clouds are both crucial for 3D scene understanding. Two pieces of information characterize the different aspects of point clouds, but existing methods lack an elaborate design for the discrimination and relevance. Hence we explore a 3D self-supervised paradigm that can better utilize the relations of point cloud information. Specifically, we propose a universal 3D scene pre-training framework via Geometry-Color Contrast (Point-GCC), which aligns geometry and color information using a Siamese network. To take care of actual application tasks, we design (i) hierarchical supervision with point-level contrast and reconstruct and object-level contrast based on the novel deep clustering module to close the gap between pre-training and downstream tasks; (ii) architecture-agnostic backbone to adapt for various downstream models. Benefiting from the object-level representation associated with downstream tasks, Point-GCC can directly evaluate model performance and the result demonstrates the effectiveness of our methods. Transfer learning results on a wide range of tasks also show consistent improvements across all datasets. e.g., new state-of-the-art object detection results on SUN RGB-D and S3DIS datasets. Codes will be released at https://github.com/Asterisci/Point-GCC.

Accurate 3D object detection and understanding for self-driving cars heavily relies on LiDAR point clouds, necessitating large amounts of labeled data to train. In this work, we introduce an innovative pre-training approach, Grounded Point Colorization (GPC), to bridge the gap between data and labels by teaching the model to colorize LiDAR point clouds, equipping it with valuable semantic cues. To tackle challenges arising from color variations and selection bias, we incorporate color as "context" by providing ground-truth colors as hints during colorization. Experimental results on the KITTI and Waymo datasets demonstrate GPC's remarkable effectiveness. Even with limited labeled data, GPC significantly improves fine-tuning performance; notably, on just 20% of the KITTI dataset, GPC outperforms training from scratch with the entire dataset. In sum, we introduce a fresh perspective on pre-training for 3D object detection, aligning the objective with the model's intended role and ultimately advancing the accuracy and efficiency of 3D object detection for autonomous vehicles.

Point-based interactive colorization techniques allow users to effortlessly colorize grayscale images using user-provided color hints. However, point-based methods often face challenges when different colors are given to semantically similar areas, leading to color intermingling and unsatisfactory results-an issue we refer to as color collapse. The fundamental cause of color collapse is the inadequacy of points for defining the boundaries for each color. To mitigate color collapse, we introduce a lasso tool that can control the scope of each color hint. Additionally, we design a framework that leverages the user-provided lassos to localize the attention masks. The experimental results show that using a single lasso is as effective as applying 4.18 individual color hints and can achieve the desired outcomes in 30% less time than using points alone.

Point cloud analysis (such as 3D segmentation and detection) is a challenging task, because of not only the irregular geometries of many millions of unordered points, but also the great variations caused by depth, viewpoint, occlusion, etc. Current studies put much focus on the adaption of neural networks to the complex geometries of point clouds, but are blind to a fundamental question: how to learn an appropriate point embedding space that is aware of both discriminative semantics and challenging variations? As a response, we propose a clustering based supervised learning scheme for point cloud analysis. Unlike current de-facto, scene-wise training paradigm, our algorithm conducts within-class clustering on the point embedding space for automatically discovering subclass patterns which are latent yet representative across scenes. The mined patterns are, in turn, used to repaint the embedding space, so as to respect the underlying distribution of the entire training dataset and improve the robustness to the variations. Our algorithm is principled and readily pluggable to modern point cloud segmentation networks during training, without extra overhead during testing. With various 3D network architectures (i.e., voxel-based, point-based, Transformer-based, automatically searched), our algorithm shows notable improvements on famous point cloud segmentation datasets (i.e.,2.0-2.6% on single-scan and 2.0-2.2% multi-scan of SemanticKITTI, 1.8-1.9% on S3DIS, in terms of mIoU). Our algorithm also demonstrates utility in 3D detection, showing 2.0-3.4% mAP gains on KITTI.

Perceiving the environment via cameras is crucial for Reinforcement Learning (RL) in robotics. While images are a convenient form of representation, they often complicate extracting important geometric details, especially with varying geometries or deformable objects. In contrast, point clouds naturally represent this geometry and easily integrate color and positional data from multiple camera views. However, while deep learning on point clouds has seen many recent successes, RL on point clouds is under-researched, with only the simplest encoder architecture considered in the literature. We introduce PointPatchRL (PPRL), a method for RL on point clouds that builds on the common paradigm of dividing point clouds into overlapping patches, tokenizing them, and processing the tokens with transformers. PPRL provides significant improvements compared with other point-cloud processing architectures previously used for RL. We then complement PPRL with masked reconstruction for representation learning and show that our method outperforms strong model-free and model-based baselines on image observations in complex manipulation tasks containing deformable objects and variations in target object geometry. Videos and code are available at https://alrhub.github.io/pprl-website

We propose a novel approach to self-supervised learning of point cloud representations by differentiable neural rendering. Motivated by the fact that informative point cloud features should be able to encode rich geometry and appearance cues and render realistic images, we train a point-cloud encoder within a devised point-based neural renderer by comparing the rendered images with real images on massive RGB-D data. The learned point-cloud encoder can be easily integrated into various downstream tasks, including not only high-level tasks like 3D detection and segmentation, but low-level tasks like 3D reconstruction and image synthesis. Extensive experiments on various tasks demonstrate the superiority of our approach compared to existing pre-training methods.

Point clouds provide a flexible geometric representation suitable for countless applications in computer graphics; they also comprise the raw output of most 3D data acquisition devices. While hand-designed features on point clouds have long been proposed in graphics and vision, however, the recent overwhelming success of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for image analysis suggests the value of adapting insight from CNN to the point cloud world. Point clouds inherently lack topological information so designing a model to recover topology can enrich the representation power of point clouds. To this end, we propose a new neural network module dubbed EdgeConv suitable for CNN-based high-level tasks on point clouds including classification and segmentation. EdgeConv acts on graphs dynamically computed in each layer of the network. It is differentiable and can be plugged into existing architectures. Compared to existing modules operating in extrinsic space or treating each point independently, EdgeConv has several appealing properties: It incorporates local neighborhood information; it can be stacked applied to learn global shape properties; and in multi-layer systems affinity in feature space captures semantic characteristics over potentially long distances in the original embedding. We show the performance of our model on standard benchmarks including ModelNet40, ShapeNetPart, and S3DIS.

The irregularity and permutation invariance of point cloud data pose challenges for effective learning. Conventional methods for addressing this issue involve converting raw point clouds to intermediate representations such as 3D voxel grids or range images. While such intermediate representations solve the problem of permutation invariance, they can result in significant loss of information. Approaches that do learn on raw point clouds either have trouble in resolving neighborhood relationships between points or are too complicated in their formulation. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to representing point clouds as a locality preserving 1D ordering induced by the Hilbert space-filling curve. We also introduce Point2Point, a neural architecture that can effectively learn on Hilbert-sorted point clouds. We show that Point2Point shows competitive performance on point cloud segmentation and generation tasks. Finally, we show the performance of Point2Point on Spatio-temporal Occupancy prediction from Point clouds.

3D perception, especially point cloud classification, has achieved substantial progress. However, in real-world deployment, point cloud corruptions are inevitable due to the scene complexity, sensor inaccuracy, and processing imprecision. In this work, we aim to rigorously benchmark and analyze point cloud classification under corruptions. To conduct a systematic investigation, we first provide a taxonomy of common 3D corruptions and identify the atomic corruptions. Then, we perform a comprehensive evaluation on a wide range of representative point cloud models to understand their robustness and generalizability. Our benchmark results show that although point cloud classification performance improves over time, the state-of-the-art methods are on the verge of being less robust. Based on the obtained observations, we propose several effective techniques to enhance point cloud classifier robustness. We hope our comprehensive benchmark, in-depth analysis, and proposed techniques could spark future research in robust 3D perception.

In this paper we address the task of finding representative subsets of points in a 3D point cloud by means of a point-wise ordering. Only a few works have tried to address this challenging vision problem, all with the help of hard to obtain point and cloud labels. Different from these works, we introduce the task of point-wise ordering in 3D point clouds through self-supervision, which we call self-ordering. We further contribute the first end-to-end trainable network that learns a point-wise ordering in a self-supervised fashion. It utilizes a novel differentiable point scoring-sorting strategy and it constructs an hierarchical contrastive scheme to obtain self-supervision signals. We extensively ablate the method and show its scalability and superior performance even compared to supervised ordering methods on multiple datasets and tasks including zero-shot ordering of point clouds from unseen categories.

Registration of distant outdoor LiDAR point clouds is crucial to extending the 3D vision of collaborative autonomous vehicles, and yet is challenging due to small overlapping area and a huge disparity between observed point densities. In this paper, we propose Group-wise Contrastive Learning (GCL) scheme to extract density-invariant geometric features to register distant outdoor LiDAR point clouds. We mark through theoretical analysis and experiments that, contrastive positives should be independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.), in order to train densityinvariant feature extractors. We propose upon the conclusion a simple yet effective training scheme to force the feature of multiple point clouds in the same spatial location (referred to as positive groups) to be similar, which naturally avoids the sampling bias introduced by a pair of point clouds to conform with the i.i.d. principle. The resulting fully-convolutional feature extractor is more powerful and density-invariant than state-of-the-art methods, improving the registration recall of distant scenarios on KITTI and nuScenes benchmarks by 40.9% and 26.9%, respectively. Code is available at https://github.com/liuQuan98/GCL.

In this paper, we question whether we have a reliable self-supervised point cloud model that can be used for diverse 3D tasks via simple linear probing, even with limited data and minimal computation. We find that existing 3D self-supervised learning approaches fall short when evaluated on representation quality through linear probing. We hypothesize that this is due to what we term the "geometric shortcut", which causes representations to collapse to low-level spatial features. This challenge is unique to 3D and arises from the sparse nature of point cloud data. We address it through two key strategies: obscuring spatial information and enhancing the reliance on input features, ultimately composing a Sonata of 140k point clouds through self-distillation. Sonata is simple and intuitive, yet its learned representations are strong and reliable: zero-shot visualizations demonstrate semantic grouping, alongside strong spatial reasoning through nearest-neighbor relationships. Sonata demonstrates exceptional parameter and data efficiency, tripling linear probing accuracy (from 21.8% to 72.5%) on ScanNet and nearly doubling performance with only 1% of the data compared to previous approaches. Full fine-tuning further advances SOTA across both 3D indoor and outdoor perception tasks.

We present the P^3 dataset, a large-scale multimodal benchmark for building vectorization, constructed from aerial LiDAR point clouds, high-resolution aerial imagery, and vectorized 2D building outlines, collected across three continents. The dataset contains over 10 billion LiDAR points with decimeter-level accuracy and RGB images at a ground sampling distance of 25 centimeter. While many existing datasets primarily focus on the image modality, P^3 offers a complementary perspective by also incorporating dense 3D information. We demonstrate that LiDAR point clouds serve as a robust modality for predicting building polygons, both in hybrid and end-to-end learning frameworks. Moreover, fusing aerial LiDAR and imagery further improves accuracy and geometric quality of predicted polygons. The P^3 dataset is publicly available, along with code and pretrained weights of three state-of-the-art models for building polygon prediction at https://github.com/raphaelsulzer/PixelsPointsPolygons .

3D Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation (PCSS) is attracting increasing interest, due to its applicability in remote sensing, computer vision and robotics, and due to the new possibilities offered by deep learning techniques. In order to provide a needed up-to-date review of recent developments in PCSS, this article summarizes existing studies on this topic. Firstly, we outline the acquisition and evolution of the 3D point cloud from the perspective of remote sensing and computer vision, as well as the published benchmarks for PCSS studies. Then, traditional and advanced techniques used for Point Cloud Segmentation (PCS) and PCSS are reviewed and compared. Finally, important issues and open questions in PCSS studies are discussed.

Point cloud segmentation is a fundamental task in 3D vision that serves a wide range of applications. Although great progresses have been made these years, its practical usability is still limited by the availability of training data. Existing approaches cannot make full use of multiple datasets on hand due to the label mismatch among different datasets. In this paper, we propose a principled approach that supports learning from heterogeneous datasets with different label sets. Our idea is to utilize a pre-trained language model to embed discrete labels to a continuous latent space with the help of their label names. This unifies all labels of different datasets, so that joint training is doable. Meanwhile, classifying points in the continuous 3D space by their vocabulary tokens significantly increase the generalization ability of the model in comparison with existing approaches that have fixed decoder architecture. Besides, we also integrate prompt learning in our framework to alleviate data shifts among different data sources. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art by a large margin.

We present Topological Point Cloud Clustering (TPCC), a new method to cluster points in an arbitrary point cloud based on their contribution to global topological features. TPCC synthesizes desirable features from spectral clustering and topological data analysis and is based on considering the spectral properties of a simplicial complex associated to the considered point cloud. As it is based on considering sparse eigenvector computations, TPCC is similarly easy to interpret and implement as spectral clustering. However, by focusing not just on a single matrix associated to a graph created from the point cloud data, but on a whole set of Hodge-Laplacians associated to an appropriately constructed simplicial complex, we can leverage a far richer set of topological features to characterize the data points within the point cloud and benefit from the relative robustness of topological techniques against noise. We test the performance of TPCC on both synthetic and real-world data and compare it with classical spectral clustering.

Point cloud registration has seen significant advancements with the application of deep learning techniques. However, existing approaches often overlook the potential of integrating radiometric information from RGB images. This limitation reduces their effectiveness in aligning point clouds pairs, especially in regions where geometric data alone is insufficient. When used effectively, radiometric information can enhance the registration process by providing context that is missing from purely geometric data. In this paper, we propose CoFF, a novel Cross-modal Feature Fusion method that utilizes both point cloud geometry and RGB images for pairwise point cloud registration. Assuming that the co-registration between point clouds and RGB images is available, CoFF explicitly addresses the challenges where geometric information alone is unclear, such as in regions with symmetric similarity or planar structures, through a two-stage fusion of 3D point cloud features and 2D image features. It incorporates a cross-modal feature fusion module that assigns pixel-wise image features to 3D input point clouds to enhance learned 3D point features, and integrates patch-wise image features with superpoint features to improve the quality of coarse matching. This is followed by a coarse-to-fine matching module that accurately establishes correspondences using the fused features. We extensively evaluate CoFF on four common datasets: 3DMatch, 3DLoMatch, IndoorLRS, and the recently released ScanNet++ datasets. In addition, we assess CoFF on specific subset datasets containing geometrically ambiguous cases. Our experimental results demonstrate that CoFF achieves state-of-the-art registration performance across all benchmarks, including remarkable registration recalls of 95.9% and 81.6% on the widely-used 3DMatch and 3DLoMatch datasets, respectively...(Truncated to fit arXiv abstract length)

One of the main challenges in LiDAR-based 3D object detection is that the sensors often fail to capture the complete spatial information about the objects due to long distance and occlusion. Two-stage detectors with point cloud completion approaches tackle this problem by adding more points to the regions of interest (RoIs) with a pre-trained network. However, these methods generate dense point clouds of objects for all region proposals, assuming that objects always exist in the RoIs. This leads to the indiscriminate point generation for incorrect proposals as well. Motivated by this, we propose Point Generation R-CNN (PG-RCNN), a novel end-to-end detector that generates semantic surface points of foreground objects for accurate detection. Our method uses a jointly trained RoI point generation module to process the contextual information of RoIs and estimate the complete shape and displacement of foreground objects. For every generated point, PG-RCNN assigns a semantic feature that indicates the estimated foreground probability. Extensive experiments show that the point clouds generated by our method provide geometrically and semantically rich information for refining false positive and misaligned proposals. PG-RCNN achieves competitive performance on the KITTI benchmark, with significantly fewer parameters than state-of-the-art models. The code is available at https://github.com/quotation2520/PG-RCNN.

In recent years, there has been a significant increase in the utilization of deep learning methods, particularly convolutional neural networks (CNNs), which have emerged as the dominant approach in various domains that involve structured grid data, such as picture analysis and processing. Nevertheless, the exponential growth in the utilization of LiDAR and 3D sensors across many domains has resulted in an increased need for the analysis of 3D point clouds. The utilization of 3D point clouds is crucial in various applications, including object recognition and segmentation, as they offer a spatial depiction of things within a three-dimensional environment. In contrast to photos, point clouds exhibit sparsity and lack a regular grid, hence posing distinct processing and computational issues.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have excelled in 2D image-text comprehension and image generation, but their understanding of the 3D world is notably deficient, limiting progress in 3D language understanding and generation. To solve this problem, we introduce GPT4Point, an innovative groundbreaking point-language multimodal model designed specifically for unified 3D object understanding and generation within the MLLM framework. GPT4Point as a powerful 3D MLLM seamlessly can execute a variety of point-text reference tasks such as point-cloud captioning and Q&A. Additionally, GPT4Point is equipped with advanced capabilities for controllable 3D generation, it can get high-quality results through a low-quality point-text feature maintaining the geometric shapes and colors. To support the expansive needs of 3D object-text pairs, we develop Pyramid-XL, a point-language dataset annotation engine. It constructs a large-scale database over 1M objects of varied text granularity levels from the Objaverse-XL dataset, essential for training GPT4Point. A comprehensive benchmark has been proposed to evaluate 3D point-language understanding capabilities. In extensive evaluations, GPT4Point has demonstrated superior performance in understanding and generation.

Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) allow a drastic expansion of the visibility range and decrease occlusions for autonomous driving. To obtain accurate detections, detailed labeled sensor data for training is required. Unfortunately, high-quality 3D labels of LiDAR point clouds from the infrastructure perspective of an intersection are still rare. Therefore, we provide the A9 Intersection Dataset, which consists of labeled LiDAR point clouds and synchronized camera images. Here, we recorded the sensor output from two roadside cameras and LiDARs mounted on intersection gantry bridges. The point clouds were labeled in 3D by experienced annotators. Furthermore, we provide calibration data between all sensors, which allow the projection of the 3D labels into the camera images and an accurate data fusion. Our dataset consists of 4.8k images and point clouds with more than 57.4k manually labeled 3D boxes. With ten object classes, it has a high diversity of road users in complex driving maneuvers, such as left and right turns, overtaking, and U-turns. In experiments, we provided multiple baselines for the perception tasks. Overall, our dataset is a valuable contribution to the scientific community to perform complex 3D camera-LiDAR roadside perception tasks. Find data, code, and more information at https://a9-dataset.com.

Point cloud registration is a task to estimate the rigid transformation between two unaligned scans, which plays an important role in many computer vision applications. Previous learning-based works commonly focus on supervised registration, which have limitations in practice. Recently, with the advance of inexpensive RGB-D sensors, several learning-based works utilize RGB-D data to achieve unsupervised registration. However, most of existing unsupervised methods follow a cascaded design or fuse RGB-D data in a unidirectional manner, which do not fully exploit the complementary information in the RGB-D data. To leverage the complementary information more effectively, we propose a network implementing multi-scale bidirectional fusion between RGB images and point clouds generated from depth images. By bidirectionally fusing visual and geometric features in multi-scales, more distinctive deep features for correspondence estimation can be obtained, making our registration more accurate. Extensive experiments on ScanNet and 3DMatch demonstrate that our method achieves new state-of-the-art performance. Code will be released at https://github.com/phdymz/PointMBF

Recently, state space models have exhibited strong global modeling capabilities and linear computational complexity in contrast to transformers. This research focuses on applying such architecture to more efficiently and effectively model point cloud data globally with linear computational complexity. In particular, for the first time, we demonstrate that Mamba-based point cloud methods can outperform previous methods based on transformer or multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs). To enable Mamba to process 3-D point cloud data more effectively, we propose a novel Consistent Traverse Serialization method to convert point clouds into 1-D point sequences while ensuring that neighboring points in the sequence are also spatially adjacent. Consistent Traverse Serialization yields six variants by permuting the order of x, y, and z coordinates, and the synergistic use of these variants aids Mamba in comprehensively observing point cloud data. Furthermore, to assist Mamba in handling point sequences with different orders more effectively, we introduce point prompts to inform Mamba of the sequence's arrangement rules. Finally, we propose positional encoding based on spatial coordinate mapping to inject positional information into point cloud sequences more effectively. Point Cloud Mamba surpasses the state-of-the-art (SOTA) point-based method PointNeXt and achieves new SOTA performance on the ScanObjectNN, ModelNet40, ShapeNetPart, and S3DIS datasets. It is worth mentioning that when using a more powerful local feature extraction module, our PCM achieves 79.6 mIoU on S3DIS, significantly surpassing the previous SOTA models, DeLA and PTv3, by 5.5 mIoU and 4.9 mIoU, respectively.

Object detection in point clouds is an important aspect of many robotics applications such as autonomous driving. In this paper we consider the problem of encoding a point cloud into a format appropriate for a downstream detection pipeline. Recent literature suggests two types of encoders; fixed encoders tend to be fast but sacrifice accuracy, while encoders that are learned from data are more accurate, but slower. In this work we propose PointPillars, a novel encoder which utilizes PointNets to learn a representation of point clouds organized in vertical columns (pillars). While the encoded features can be used with any standard 2D convolutional detection architecture, we further propose a lean downstream network. Extensive experimentation shows that PointPillars outperforms previous encoders with respect to both speed and accuracy by a large margin. Despite only using lidar, our full detection pipeline significantly outperforms the state of the art, even among fusion methods, with respect to both the 3D and bird's eye view KITTI benchmarks. This detection performance is achieved while running at 62 Hz: a 2 - 4 fold runtime improvement. A faster version of our method matches the state of the art at 105 Hz. These benchmarks suggest that PointPillars is an appropriate encoding for object detection in point clouds.

We present the Dayton Annotated LiDAR Earth Scan (DALES) data set, a new large-scale aerial LiDAR data set with over a half-billion hand-labeled points spanning 10 square kilometers of area and eight object categories. Large annotated point cloud data sets have become the standard for evaluating deep learning methods. However, most of the existing data sets focus on data collected from a mobile or terrestrial scanner with few focusing on aerial data. Point cloud data collected from an Aerial Laser Scanner (ALS) presents a new set of challenges and applications in areas such as 3D urban modeling and large-scale surveillance. DALES is the most extensive publicly available ALS data set with over 400 times the number of points and six times the resolution of other currently available annotated aerial point cloud data sets. This data set gives a critical number of expert verified hand-labeled points for the evaluation of new 3D deep learning algorithms, helping to expand the focus of current algorithms to aerial data. We describe the nature of our data, annotation workflow, and provide a benchmark of current state-of-the-art algorithm performance on the DALES data set.

Point-based representations have recently gained popularity in novel view synthesis, for their unique advantages, e.g., intuitive geometric representation, simple manipulation, and faster convergence. However, based on our observation, these point-based neural re-rendering methods are only expected to perform well under ideal conditions and suffer from noisy, patchy points and unbounded scenes, which are challenging to handle but defacto common in real applications. To this end, we revisit one such influential method, known as Neural Point-based Graphics (NPBG), as our baseline, and propose Robust Point-based Graphics (RPBG). We in-depth analyze the factors that prevent NPBG from achieving satisfactory renderings on generic datasets, and accordingly reform the pipeline to make it more robust to varying datasets in-the-wild. Inspired by the practices in image restoration, we greatly enhance the neural renderer to enable the attention-based correction of point visibility and the inpainting of incomplete rasterization, with only acceptable overheads. We also seek for a simple and lightweight alternative for environment modeling and an iterative method to alleviate the problem of poor geometry. By thorough evaluation on a wide range of datasets with different shooting conditions and camera trajectories, RPBG stably outperforms the baseline by a large margin, and exhibits its great robustness over state-of-the-art NeRF-based variants. Code available at https://github.com/QT-Zhu/RPBG.

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.

We tackle the novel class discovery in point cloud segmentation, which discovers novel classes based on the semantic knowledge of seen classes. Existing work proposes an online point-wise clustering method with a simplified equal class-size constraint on the novel classes to avoid degenerate solutions. However, the inherent imbalanced distribution of novel classes in point clouds typically violates the equal class-size constraint. Moreover, point-wise clustering ignores the rich spatial context information of objects, which results in less expressive representation for semantic segmentation. To address the above challenges, we propose a novel self-labeling strategy that adaptively generates high-quality pseudo-labels for imbalanced classes during model training. In addition, we develop a dual-level representation that incorporates regional consistency into the point-level classifier learning, reducing noise in generated segmentation. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on two widely used datasets, SemanticKITTI and SemanticPOSS, and the results show our method outperforms the state of the art by a large margin.

With the recent availability and affordability of commercial depth sensors and 3D scanners, an increasing number of 3D (i.e., RGBD, point cloud) datasets have been publicized to facilitate research in 3D computer vision. However, existing datasets either cover relatively small areas or have limited semantic annotations. Fine-grained understanding of urban-scale 3D scenes is still in its infancy. In this paper, we introduce SensatUrban, an urban-scale UAV photogrammetry point cloud dataset consisting of nearly three billion points collected from three UK cities, covering 7.6 km^2. Each point in the dataset has been labelled with fine-grained semantic annotations, resulting in a dataset that is three times the size of the previous existing largest photogrammetric point cloud dataset. In addition to the more commonly encountered categories such as road and vegetation, urban-level categories including rail, bridge, and river are also included in our dataset. Based on this dataset, we further build a benchmark to evaluate the performance of state-of-the-art segmentation algorithms. In particular, we provide a comprehensive analysis and identify several key challenges limiting urban-scale point cloud understanding. The dataset is available at http://point-cloud-analysis.cs.ox.ac.uk.

Labelling point clouds fully is highly time-consuming and costly. As larger point cloud datasets with billions of points become more common, we ask whether the full annotation is even necessary, demonstrating that existing baselines designed under a fully annotated assumption only degrade slightly even when faced with 1% random point annotations. However, beyond this point, e.g., at 0.1% annotations, segmentation accuracy is unacceptably low. We observe that, as point clouds are samples of the 3D world, the distribution of points in a local neighborhood is relatively homogeneous, exhibiting strong semantic similarity. Motivated by this, we propose a new weak supervision method to implicitly augment highly sparse supervision signals. Extensive experiments demonstrate the proposed Semantic Query Network (SQN) achieves promising performance on seven large-scale open datasets under weak supervision schemes, while requiring only 0.1% randomly annotated points for training, greatly reducing annotation cost and effort. The code is available at https://github.com/QingyongHu/SQN.

Dynamic radiance fields have emerged as a promising approach for generating novel views from a monocular video. However, previous methods enforce the geometric consistency to dynamic radiance fields only between adjacent input frames, making it difficult to represent the global scene geometry and degenerates at the viewpoint that is spatio-temporally distant from the input camera trajectory. To solve this problem, we introduce point-based dynamic radiance fields (Point-DynRF), a novel framework where the global geometric information and the volume rendering process are trained by neural point clouds and dynamic radiance fields, respectively. Specifically, we reconstruct neural point clouds directly from geometric proxies and optimize both radiance fields and the geometric proxies using our proposed losses, allowing them to complement each other. We validate the effectiveness of our method with experiments on the NVIDIA Dynamic Scenes Dataset and several causally captured monocular video clips.

Point-, voxel-, and range-views are three representative forms of point clouds. All of them have accurate 3D measurements but lack color and texture information. RGB images are a natural complement to these point cloud views and fully utilizing the comprehensive information of them benefits more robust perceptions. In this paper, we present a unified multi-modal LiDAR segmentation network, termed UniSeg, which leverages the information of RGB images and three views of the point cloud, and accomplishes semantic segmentation and panoptic segmentation simultaneously. Specifically, we first design the Learnable cross-Modal Association (LMA) module to automatically fuse voxel-view and range-view features with image features, which fully utilize the rich semantic information of images and are robust to calibration errors. Then, the enhanced voxel-view and range-view features are transformed to the point space,where three views of point cloud features are further fused adaptively by the Learnable cross-View Association module (LVA). Notably, UniSeg achieves promising results in three public benchmarks, i.e., SemanticKITTI, nuScenes, and Waymo Open Dataset (WOD); it ranks 1st on two challenges of two benchmarks, including the LiDAR semantic segmentation challenge of nuScenes and panoptic segmentation challenges of SemanticKITTI. Besides, we construct the OpenPCSeg codebase, which is the largest and most comprehensive outdoor LiDAR segmentation codebase. It contains most of the popular outdoor LiDAR segmentation algorithms and provides reproducible implementations. The OpenPCSeg codebase will be made publicly available at https://github.com/PJLab-ADG/PCSeg.

We present a probabilistic model for point cloud generation, which is fundamental for various 3D vision tasks such as shape completion, upsampling, synthesis and data augmentation. Inspired by the diffusion process in non-equilibrium thermodynamics, we view points in point clouds as particles in a thermodynamic system in contact with a heat bath, which diffuse from the original distribution to a noise distribution. Point cloud generation thus amounts to learning the reverse diffusion process that transforms the noise distribution to the distribution of a desired shape. Specifically, we propose to model the reverse diffusion process for point clouds as a Markov chain conditioned on certain shape latent. We derive the variational bound in closed form for training and provide implementations of the model. Experimental results demonstrate that our model achieves competitive performance in point cloud generation and auto-encoding. The code is available at https://github.com/luost26/diffusion-point-cloud.

Existing fully-supervised point cloud segmentation methods suffer in the dynamic testing environment with emerging new classes. Few-shot point cloud segmentation algorithms address this problem by learning to adapt to new classes at the sacrifice of segmentation accuracy for the base classes, which severely impedes its practicality. This largely motivates us to present the first attempt at a more practical paradigm of generalized few-shot point cloud segmentation, which requires the model to generalize to new categories with only a few support point clouds and simultaneously retain the capability to segment base classes. We propose the geometric words to represent geometric components shared between the base and novel classes, and incorporate them into a novel geometric-aware semantic representation to facilitate better generalization to the new classes without forgetting the old ones. Moreover, we introduce geometric prototypes to guide the segmentation with geometric prior knowledge. Extensive experiments on S3DIS and ScanNet consistently illustrate the superior performance of our method over baseline methods. Our code is available at: https://github.com/Pixie8888/GFS-3DSeg_GWs.

Pre-trained point cloud models have found extensive applications in 3D understanding tasks like object classification and part segmentation. However, the prevailing strategy of full fine-tuning in downstream tasks leads to large per-task storage overhead for model parameters, which limits the efficiency when applying large-scale pre-trained models. Inspired by the recent success of visual prompt tuning (VPT), this paper attempts to explore prompt tuning on pre-trained point cloud models, to pursue an elegant balance between performance and parameter efficiency. We find while instance-agnostic static prompting, e.g. VPT, shows some efficacy in downstream transfer, it is vulnerable to the distribution diversity caused by various types of noises in real-world point cloud data. To conquer this limitation, we propose a novel Instance-aware Dynamic Prompt Tuning (IDPT) strategy for pre-trained point cloud models. The essence of IDPT is to develop a dynamic prompt generation module to perceive semantic prior features of each point cloud instance and generate adaptive prompt tokens to enhance the model's robustness. Notably, extensive experiments demonstrate that IDPT outperforms full fine-tuning in most tasks with a mere 7% of the trainable parameters, providing a promising solution to parameter-efficient learning for pre-trained point cloud models. Code is available at https://github.com/zyh16143998882/ICCV23-IDPT.

We propose SeedAL, a method to seed active learning for efficient annotation of 3D point clouds for semantic segmentation. Active Learning (AL) iteratively selects relevant data fractions to annotate within a given budget, but requires a first fraction of the dataset (a 'seed') to be already annotated to estimate the benefit of annotating other data fractions. We first show that the choice of the seed can significantly affect the performance of many AL methods. We then propose a method for automatically constructing a seed that will ensure good performance for AL. Assuming that images of the point clouds are available, which is common, our method relies on powerful unsupervised image features to measure the diversity of the point clouds. It selects the point clouds for the seed by optimizing the diversity under an annotation budget, which can be done by solving a linear optimization problem. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach compared to random seeding and existing methods on both the S3DIS and SemanticKitti datasets. Code is available at https://github.com/nerminsamet/seedal.

Although various 3D datasets with different functions and scales have been proposed recently, it remains challenging for individuals to complete the whole pipeline of large-scale data collection, sanitization, and annotation. Moreover, the created datasets usually suffer from extremely imbalanced class distribution or partial low-quality data samples. Motivated by this, we explore the procedurally synthetic 3D data generation paradigm to equip individuals with the full capability of creating large-scale annotated photogrammetry point clouds. Specifically, we introduce a synthetic aerial photogrammetry point clouds generation pipeline that takes full advantage of open geospatial data sources and off-the-shelf commercial packages. Unlike generating synthetic data in virtual games, where the simulated data usually have limited gaming environments created by artists, the proposed pipeline simulates the reconstruction process of the real environment by following the same UAV flight pattern on different synthetic terrain shapes and building densities, which ensure similar quality, noise pattern, and diversity with real data. In addition, the precise semantic and instance annotations can be generated fully automatically, avoiding the expensive and time-consuming manual annotation. Based on the proposed pipeline, we present a richly-annotated synthetic 3D aerial photogrammetry point cloud dataset, termed STPLS3D, with more than 16 km^2 of landscapes and up to 18 fine-grained semantic categories. For verification purposes, we also provide a parallel dataset collected from four areas in the real environment. Extensive experiments conducted on our datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and quality of the proposed synthetic dataset.

When navigating in urban environments, many of the objects that need to be tracked and avoided are heavily occluded. Planning and tracking using these partial scans can be challenging. The aim of this work is to learn to complete these partial point clouds, giving us a full understanding of the object's geometry using only partial observations. Previous methods achieve this with the help of complete, ground-truth annotations of the target objects, which are available only for simulated datasets. However, such ground truth is unavailable for real-world LiDAR data. In this work, we present a self-supervised point cloud completion algorithm, PointPnCNet, which is trained only on partial scans without assuming access to complete, ground-truth annotations. Our method achieves this via inpainting. We remove a portion of the input data and train the network to complete the missing region. As it is difficult to determine which regions were occluded in the initial cloud and which were synthetically removed, our network learns to complete the full cloud, including the missing regions in the initial partial cloud. We show that our method outperforms previous unsupervised and weakly-supervised methods on both the synthetic dataset, ShapeNet, and real-world LiDAR dataset, Semantic KITTI.

The increasing demand for virtual reality applications has highlighted the significance of crafting immersive 3D assets. We present a text-to-3D 360^{circ} scene generation pipeline that facilitates the creation of comprehensive 360^{circ} scenes for in-the-wild environments in a matter of minutes. Our approach utilizes the generative power of a 2D diffusion model and prompt self-refinement to create a high-quality and globally coherent panoramic image. This image acts as a preliminary "flat" (2D) scene representation. Subsequently, it is lifted into 3D Gaussians, employing splatting techniques to enable real-time exploration. To produce consistent 3D geometry, our pipeline constructs a spatially coherent structure by aligning the 2D monocular depth into a globally optimized point cloud. This point cloud serves as the initial state for the centroids of 3D Gaussians. In order to address invisible issues inherent in single-view inputs, we impose semantic and geometric constraints on both synthesized and input camera views as regularizations. These guide the optimization of Gaussians, aiding in the reconstruction of unseen regions. In summary, our method offers a globally consistent 3D scene within a 360^{circ} perspective, providing an enhanced immersive experience over existing techniques. Project website at: http://dreamscene360.github.io/

Zero-shot point cloud segmentation aims to make deep models capable of recognizing novel objects in point cloud that are unseen in the training phase. Recent trends favor the pipeline which transfers knowledge from seen classes with labels to unseen classes without labels. They typically align visual features with semantic features obtained from word embedding by the supervision of seen classes' annotations. However, point cloud contains limited information to fully match with semantic features. In fact, the rich appearance information of images is a natural complement to the textureless point cloud, which is not well explored in previous literature. Motivated by this, we propose a novel multi-modal zero-shot learning method to better utilize the complementary information of point clouds and images for more accurate visual-semantic alignment. Extensive experiments are performed in two popular benchmarks, i.e., SemanticKITTI and nuScenes, and our method outperforms current SOTA methods with 52% and 49% improvement on average for unseen class mIoU, respectively.

In recent times, the generation of 3D assets from text prompts has shown impressive results. Both 2D and 3D diffusion models can generate decent 3D objects based on prompts. 3D diffusion models have good 3D consistency, but their quality and generalization are limited as trainable 3D data is expensive and hard to obtain. 2D diffusion models enjoy strong abilities of generalization and fine generation, but the 3D consistency is hard to guarantee. This paper attempts to bridge the power from the two types of diffusion models via the recent explicit and efficient 3D Gaussian splatting representation. A fast 3D generation framework, named as \name, is proposed, where the 3D diffusion model provides point cloud priors for initialization and the 2D diffusion model enriches the geometry and appearance. Operations of noisy point growing and color perturbation are introduced to enhance the initialized Gaussians. Our \name can generate a high-quality 3D instance within 25 minutes on one GPU, much faster than previous methods, while the generated instances can be directly rendered in real time. Demos and code are available at https://taoranyi.com/gaussiandreamer/.

Recent advancements in vision-language pre-training (e.g. CLIP) have shown that vision models can benefit from language supervision. While many models using language modality have achieved great success on 2D vision tasks, the joint representation learning of 3D point cloud with text remains under-explored due to the difficulty of 3D-Text data pair acquisition and the irregularity of 3D data structure. In this paper, we propose a novel Text4Point framework to construct language-guided 3D point cloud models. The key idea is utilizing 2D images as a bridge to connect the point cloud and the language modalities. The proposed Text4Point follows the pre-training and fine-tuning paradigm. During the pre-training stage, we establish the correspondence of images and point clouds based on the readily available RGB-D data and use contrastive learning to align the image and point cloud representations. Together with the well-aligned image and text features achieved by CLIP, the point cloud features are implicitly aligned with the text embeddings. Further, we propose a Text Querying Module to integrate language information into 3D representation learning by querying text embeddings with point cloud features. For fine-tuning, the model learns task-specific 3D representations under informative language guidance from the label set without 2D images. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model shows consistent improvement on various downstream tasks, such as point cloud semantic segmentation, instance segmentation, and object detection. The code will be available here: https://github.com/LeapLabTHU/Text4Point

A key step in any scanning-based asset creation workflow is to convert unordered point clouds to a surface. Classical methods (e.g., Poisson reconstruction) start to degrade in the presence of noisy and partial scans. Hence, deep learning based methods have recently been proposed to produce complete surfaces, even from partial scans. However, such data-driven methods struggle to generalize to new shapes with large geometric and topological variations. We present Points2Surf, a novel patch-based learning framework that produces accurate surfaces directly from raw scans without normals. Learning a prior over a combination of detailed local patches and coarse global information improves generalization performance and reconstruction accuracy. Our extensive comparison on both synthetic and real data demonstrates a clear advantage of our method over state-of-the-art alternatives on previously unseen classes (on average, Points2Surf brings down reconstruction error by 30\% over SPR and by 270\%+ over deep learning based SotA methods) at the cost of longer computation times and a slight increase in small-scale topological noise in some cases. Our source code, pre-trained model, and dataset are available on: https://github.com/ErlerPhilipp/points2surf

Point cloud completion aims to recover the complete shape based on a partial observation. Existing methods require either complete point clouds or multiple partial observations of the same object for learning. In contrast to previous approaches, we present Partial2Complete (P2C), the first self-supervised framework that completes point cloud objects using training samples consisting of only a single incomplete point cloud per object. Specifically, our framework groups incomplete point clouds into local patches as input and predicts masked patches by learning prior information from different partial objects. We also propose Region-Aware Chamfer Distance to regularize shape mismatch without limiting completion capability, and devise the Normal Consistency Constraint to incorporate a local planarity assumption, encouraging the recovered shape surface to be continuous and complete. In this way, P2C no longer needs multiple observations or complete point clouds as ground truth. Instead, structural cues are learned from a category-specific dataset to complete partial point clouds of objects. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on both synthetic ShapeNet data and real-world ScanNet data, showing that P2C produces comparable results to methods trained with complete shapes, and outperforms methods learned with multiple partial observations. Code is available at https://github.com/CuiRuikai/Partial2Complete.

The scale diversity of point cloud data presents significant challenges in developing unified representation learning techniques for 3D vision. Currently, there are few unified 3D models, and no existing pre-training method is equally effective for both object- and scene-level point clouds. In this paper, we introduce UniPre3D, the first unified pre-training method that can be seamlessly applied to point clouds of any scale and 3D models of any architecture. Our approach predicts Gaussian primitives as the pre-training task and employs differentiable Gaussian splatting to render images, enabling precise pixel-level supervision and end-to-end optimization. To further regulate the complexity of the pre-training task and direct the model's focus toward geometric structures, we integrate 2D features from pre-trained image models to incorporate well-established texture knowledge. We validate the universal effectiveness of our proposed method through extensive experiments across a variety of object- and scene-level tasks, using diverse point cloud models as backbones. Code is available at https://github.com/wangzy22/UniPre3D.

This paper presents a parameter-efficient prompt tuning method, named PPT, to adapt a large multi-modal model for 3D point cloud understanding. Existing strategies are quite expensive in computation and storage, and depend on time-consuming prompt engineering. We address the problems from three aspects. Firstly, a PromptLearner module is devised to replace hand-crafted prompts with learnable contexts to automate the prompt tuning process. Then, we lock the pre-trained backbone instead of adopting the full fine-tuning paradigm to substantially improve the parameter efficiency. Finally, a lightweight PointAdapter module is arranged near target tasks to enhance prompt tuning for 3D point cloud understanding. Comprehensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate the superior parameter and data efficiency of the proposed method.Meanwhile, we obtain new records on 4 public datasets and multiple 3D tasks, i.e., point cloud recognition, few-shot learning, and part segmentation. The implementation is available at https://github.com/auniquesun/PPT.

Recent advancements in self-supervised learning in the point cloud domain have demonstrated significant potential. However, these methods often suffer from drawbacks, including lengthy pre-training time, the necessity of reconstruction in the input space, or the necessity of additional modalities. In order to address these issues, we introduce Point-JEPA, a joint embedding predictive architecture designed specifically for point cloud data. To this end, we introduce a sequencer that orders point cloud patch embeddings to efficiently compute and utilize their proximity based on the indices during target and context selection. The sequencer also allows shared computations of the patch embeddings' proximity between context and target selection, further improving the efficiency. Experimentally, our method achieves competitive results with state-of-the-art methods while avoiding the reconstruction in the input space or additional modality.

There is a growing number of tasks that work directly on point clouds. As the size of the point cloud grows, so do the computational demands of these tasks. A possible solution is to sample the point cloud first. Classic sampling approaches, such as farthest point sampling (FPS), do not consider the downstream task. A recent work showed that learning a task-specific sampling can improve results significantly. However, the proposed technique did not deal with the non-differentiability of the sampling operation and offered a workaround instead. We introduce a novel differentiable relaxation for point cloud sampling that approximates sampled points as a mixture of points in the primary input cloud. Our approximation scheme leads to consistently good results on classification and geometry reconstruction applications. We also show that the proposed sampling method can be used as a front to a point cloud registration network. This is a challenging task since sampling must be consistent across two different point clouds for a shared downstream task. In all cases, our approach outperforms existing non-learned and learned sampling alternatives. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/itailang/SampleNet.

Label-efficient LiDAR-based 3D object detection is currently dominated by weakly/semi-supervised methods. Instead of exclusively following one of them, we propose MixSup, a more practical paradigm simultaneously utilizing massive cheap coarse labels and a limited number of accurate labels for Mixed-grained Supervision. We start by observing that point clouds are usually textureless, making it hard to learn semantics. However, point clouds are geometrically rich and scale-invariant to the distances from sensors, making it relatively easy to learn the geometry of objects, such as poses and shapes. Thus, MixSup leverages massive coarse cluster-level labels to learn semantics and a few expensive box-level labels to learn accurate poses and shapes. We redesign the label assignment in mainstream detectors, which allows them seamlessly integrated into MixSup, enabling practicality and universality. We validate its effectiveness in nuScenes, Waymo Open Dataset, and KITTI, employing various detectors. MixSup achieves up to 97.31% of fully supervised performance, using cheap cluster annotations and only 10% box annotations. Furthermore, we propose PointSAM based on the Segment Anything Model for automated coarse labeling, further reducing the annotation burden. The code is available at https://github.com/BraveGroup/PointSAM-for-MixSup.

Many colour maps provided by vendors have highly uneven perceptual contrast over their range. It is not uncommon for colour maps to have perceptual flat spots that can hide a feature as large as one tenth of the total data range. Colour maps may also have perceptual discontinuities that induce the appearance of false features. Previous work in the design of perceptually uniform colour maps has mostly failed to recognise that CIELAB space is only designed to be perceptually uniform at very low spatial frequencies. The most important factor in designing a colour map is to ensure that the magnitude of the incremental change in perceptual lightness of the colours is uniform. The specific requirements for linear, diverging, rainbow and cyclic colour maps are developed in detail. To support this work two test images for evaluating colour maps are presented. The use of colour maps in combination with relief shading is considered and the conditions under which colour can enhance or disrupt relief shading are identified. Finally, a set of new basis colours for the construction of ternary images are presented. Unlike the RGB primaries these basis colours produce images whereby the salience of structures are consistent irrespective of the assignment of basis colours to data channels.

This paper advocates the use of implicit surface representation in autoencoder-based self-supervised 3D representation learning. The most popular and accessible 3D representation, i.e., point clouds, involves discrete samples of the underlying continuous 3D surface. This discretization process introduces sampling variations on the 3D shape, making it challenging to develop transferable knowledge of the true 3D geometry. In the standard autoencoding paradigm, the encoder is compelled to encode not only the 3D geometry but also information on the specific discrete sampling of the 3D shape into the latent code. This is because the point cloud reconstructed by the decoder is considered unacceptable unless there is a perfect mapping between the original and the reconstructed point clouds. This paper introduces the Implicit AutoEncoder (IAE), a simple yet effective method that addresses the sampling variation issue by replacing the commonly-used point-cloud decoder with an implicit decoder. The implicit decoder reconstructs a continuous representation of the 3D shape, independent of the imperfections in the discrete samples. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed IAE achieves state-of-the-art performance across various self-supervised learning benchmarks.

Point clouds are often the default choice for many applications as they exhibit more flexibility and efficiency than volumetric data. Nevertheless, their unorganized nature -- points are stored in an unordered way -- makes them less suited to be processed by deep learning pipelines. In this paper, we propose a method for 3D object completion and classification based on point clouds. We introduce a new way of organizing the extracted features based on their activations, which we name soft pooling. For the decoder stage, we propose regional convolutions, a novel operator aimed at maximizing the global activation entropy. Furthermore, inspired by the local refining procedure in Point Completion Network (PCN), we also propose a patch-deforming operation to simulate deconvolutional operations for point clouds. This paper proves that our regional activation can be incorporated in many point cloud architectures like AtlasNet and PCN, leading to better performance for geometric completion. We evaluate our approach on different 3D tasks such as object completion and classification, achieving state-of-the-art accuracy.

3D cars are commonly used in self-driving systems, virtual/augmented reality, and games. However, existing 3D car datasets are either synthetic or low-quality, presenting a significant gap toward the high-quality real-world 3D car datasets and limiting their applications in practical scenarios. In this paper, we propose the first large-scale 3D real car dataset, termed 3DRealCar, offering three distinctive features. (1) High-Volume: 2,500 cars are meticulously scanned by 3D scanners, obtaining car images and point clouds with real-world dimensions; (2) High-Quality: Each car is captured in an average of 200 dense, high-resolution 360-degree RGB-D views, enabling high-fidelity 3D reconstruction; (3) High-Diversity: The dataset contains various cars from over 100 brands, collected under three distinct lighting conditions, including reflective, standard, and dark. Additionally, we offer detailed car parsing maps for each instance to promote research in car parsing tasks. Moreover, we remove background point clouds and standardize the car orientation to a unified axis for the reconstruction only on cars without background and controllable rendering. We benchmark 3D reconstruction results with state-of-the-art methods across each lighting condition in 3DRealCar. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the standard lighting condition part of 3DRealCar can be used to produce a large number of high-quality 3D cars, improving various 2D and 3D tasks related to cars. Notably, our dataset brings insight into the fact that recent 3D reconstruction methods face challenges in reconstructing high-quality 3D cars under reflective and dark lighting conditions. red{https://xiaobiaodu.github.io/3drealcar/{Our dataset is available here.}}

We present a novel differentiable point-based rendering framework for material and lighting decomposition from multi-view images, enabling editing, ray-tracing, and real-time relighting of the 3D point cloud. Specifically, a 3D scene is represented as a set of relightable 3D Gaussian points, where each point is additionally associated with a normal direction, BRDF parameters, and incident lights from different directions. To achieve robust lighting estimation, we further divide incident lights of each point into global and local components, as well as view-dependent visibilities. The 3D scene is optimized through the 3D Gaussian Splatting technique while BRDF and lighting are decomposed by physically-based differentiable rendering. Moreover, we introduce an innovative point-based ray-tracing approach based on the bounding volume hierarchy for efficient visibility baking, enabling real-time rendering and relighting of 3D Gaussian points with accurate shadow effects. Extensive experiments demonstrate improved BRDF estimation and novel view rendering results compared to state-of-the-art material estimation approaches. Our framework showcases the potential to revolutionize the mesh-based graphics pipeline with a relightable, traceable, and editable rendering pipeline solely based on point cloud. Project page:https://nju-3dv.github.io/projects/Relightable3DGaussian/.

As a fundamental problem in computer vision, 3D object detection is experiencing rapid growth. To extract the point-wise features from the irregularly and sparsely distributed points, previous methods usually take a feature grouping module to aggregate the point features to an object candidate. However, these methods have not yet leveraged the surface geometry of foreground objects to enhance grouping and 3D box generation. In this paper, we propose the RBGNet framework, a voting-based 3D detector for accurate 3D object detection from point clouds. In order to learn better representations of object shape to enhance cluster features for predicting 3D boxes, we propose a ray-based feature grouping module, which aggregates the point-wise features on object surfaces using a group of determined rays uniformly emitted from cluster centers. Considering the fact that foreground points are more meaningful for box estimation, we design a novel foreground biased sampling strategy in downsample process to sample more points on object surfaces and further boost the detection performance. Our model achieves state-of-the-art 3D detection performance on ScanNet V2 and SUN RGB-D with remarkable performance gains. Code will be available at https://github.com/Haiyang-W/RBGNet.

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.

This paper proposes a new method to infer keypoints from arbitrary object categories in practical scenarios where point cloud data (PCD) are noisy, down-sampled and arbitrarily rotated. Our proposed model adheres to the following principles: i) keypoints inference is fully unsupervised (no annotation given), ii) keypoints position error should be low and resilient to PCD perturbations (robustness), iii) keypoints should not change their indexes for the intra-class objects (semantic coherence), iv) keypoints should be close to or proximal to PCD surface (compactness). We achieve these desiderata by proposing a new self-supervised training strategy for keypoints estimation that does not assume any a priori knowledge of the object class, and a model architecture with coupled auxiliary losses that promotes the desired keypoints properties. We compare the keypoints estimated by the proposed approach with those of the state-of-the-art unsupervised approaches. The experiments show that our approach outperforms by estimating keypoints with improved coverage (+9.41%) while being semantically consistent (+4.66%) that best characterizes the object's 3D shape for downstream tasks. Code and data are available at: https://github.com/IITPAVIS/SC3K

Point clouds are naturally sparse, while image pixels are dense. The inconsistency limits feature fusion from both modalities for point-wise scene flow estimation. Previous methods rarely predict scene flow from the entire point clouds of the scene with one-time inference due to the memory inefficiency and heavy overhead from distance calculation and sorting involved in commonly used farthest point sampling, KNN, and ball query algorithms for local feature aggregation. To mitigate these issues in scene flow learning, we regularize raw points to a dense format by storing 3D coordinates in 2D grids. Unlike the sampling operation commonly used in existing works, the dense 2D representation 1) preserves most points in the given scene, 2) brings in a significant boost of efficiency, and 3) eliminates the density gap between points and pixels, allowing us to perform effective feature fusion. We also present a novel warping projection technique to alleviate the information loss problem resulting from the fact that multiple points could be mapped into one grid during projection when computing cost volume. Sufficient experiments demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our method, outperforming the prior-arts on the FlyingThings3D and KITTI dataset.

Point cloud sampling is a less explored research topic for this data representation. The most commonly used sampling methods are still classical random sampling and farthest point sampling. With the development of neural networks, various methods have been proposed to sample point clouds in a task-based learning manner. However, these methods are mostly generative-based, rather than selecting points directly using mathematical statistics. Inspired by the Canny edge detection algorithm for images and with the help of the attention mechanism, this paper proposes a non-generative Attention-based Point cloud Edge Sampling method (APES), which captures salient points in the point cloud outline. Both qualitative and quantitative experimental results show the superior performance of our sampling method on common benchmark tasks.

Semantic segmentation of point clouds usually requires exhausting efforts of human annotations, hence it attracts wide attention to the challenging topic of learning from unlabeled or weaker forms of annotations. In this paper, we take the first attempt for fully unsupervised semantic segmentation of point clouds, which aims to delineate semantically meaningful objects without any form of annotations. Previous works of unsupervised pipeline on 2D images fails in this task of point clouds, due to: 1) Clustering Ambiguity caused by limited magnitude of data and imbalanced class distribution; 2) Irregularity Ambiguity caused by the irregular sparsity of point cloud. Therefore, we propose a novel framework, PointDC, which is comprised of two steps that handle the aforementioned problems respectively: Cross-Modal Distillation (CMD) and Super-Voxel Clustering (SVC). In the first stage of CMD, multi-view visual features are back-projected to the 3D space and aggregated to a unified point feature to distill the training of the point representation. In the second stage of SVC, the point features are aggregated to super-voxels and then fed to the iterative clustering process for excavating semantic classes. PointDC yields a significant improvement over the prior state-of-the-art unsupervised methods, on both the ScanNet-v2 (+18.4 mIoU) and S3DIS (+11.5 mIoU) semantic segmentation benchmarks.

3D surface reconstruction from point clouds is a key step in areas such as content creation, archaeology, digital cultural heritage, and engineering. Current approaches either try to optimize a non-data-driven surface representation to fit the points, or learn a data-driven prior over the distribution of commonly occurring surfaces and how they correlate with potentially noisy point clouds. Data-driven methods enable robust handling of noise and typically either focus on a global or a local prior, which trade-off between robustness to noise on the global end and surface detail preservation on the local end. We propose PPSurf as a method that combines a global prior based on point convolutions and a local prior based on processing local point cloud patches. We show that this approach is robust to noise while recovering surface details more accurately than the current state-of-the-art. Our source code, pre-trained model and dataset are available at: https://github.com/cg-tuwien/ppsurf

In the literature, it has been shown that the evolution of the known explicit 3D surface to the target one can be learned from 2D images using the instantaneous flow field, where the known and target 3D surfaces may largely differ in topology. We are interested in capturing 4D shapes whose topology changes largely over time. We encounter that the straightforward extension of the existing 3D-based method to the desired 4D case performs poorly. In this work, we address the challenges in extending 3D neural evolution to 4D under large topological changes by proposing two novel modifications. More precisely, we introduce (i) a new architecture to discretize and encode the deformation and learn the SDF and (ii) a technique to impose the temporal consistency. (iii) Also, we propose a rendering scheme for color prediction based on Gaussian splatting. Furthermore, to facilitate learning directly from 2D images, we propose a learning framework that can disentangle the geometry and appearance from RGB images. This method of disentanglement, while also useful for the 4D evolution problem that we are concentrating on, is also novel and valid for static scenes. Our extensive experiments on various data provide awesome results and, most importantly, open a new approach toward reconstructing challenging scenes with significant topological changes and deformations. Our source code and the dataset are publicly available at https://github.com/insait-institute/N4DE.

Three-dimensional objects are commonly represented as 3D boxes in a point-cloud. This representation mimics the well-studied image-based 2D bounding-box detection but comes with additional challenges. Objects in a 3D world do not follow any particular orientation, and box-based detectors have difficulties enumerating all orientations or fitting an axis-aligned bounding box to rotated objects. In this paper, we instead propose to represent, detect, and track 3D objects as points. Our framework, CenterPoint, first detects centers of objects using a keypoint detector and regresses to other attributes, including 3D size, 3D orientation, and velocity. In a second stage, it refines these estimates using additional point features on the object. In CenterPoint, 3D object tracking simplifies to greedy closest-point matching. The resulting detection and tracking algorithm is simple, efficient, and effective. CenterPoint achieved state-of-the-art performance on the nuScenes benchmark for both 3D detection and tracking, with 65.5 NDS and 63.8 AMOTA for a single model. On the Waymo Open Dataset, CenterPoint outperforms all previous single model method by a large margin and ranks first among all Lidar-only submissions. The code and pretrained models are available at https://github.com/tianweiy/CenterPoint.

This paper proposes a general solution to enable point cloud recognition models to handle distribution shifts at test time. Unlike prior methods, which rely heavily on training data (often inaccessible during online inference) and are limited to recognizing a fixed set of point cloud classes predefined during training, we explore a more practical and challenging scenario: adapting the model solely based on online test data to recognize both previously seen classes and novel, unseen classes at test time. To this end, we develop Point-Cache, a hierarchical cache model that captures essential clues of online test samples, particularly focusing on the global structure of point clouds and their local-part details. Point-Cache, which serves as a rich 3D knowledge base, is dynamically managed to prioritize the inclusion of high-quality samples. Designed as a plug-and-play module, our method can be flexibly integrated into large multimodal 3D models to support open-vocabulary point cloud recognition. Notably, our solution operates with efficiency comparable to zero-shot inference, as it is entirely training-free. Point-Cache demonstrates substantial gains across 8 challenging benchmarks and 4 representative large 3D models, highlighting its effectiveness. Code is available at https://github.com/auniquesun/Point-Cache.

Semantic parsing of large-scale 3D point clouds is an important research topic in computer vision and remote sensing fields. Most existing approaches utilize hand-crafted features for each modality independently and combine them in a heuristic manner. They often fail to consider the consistency and complementary information among features adequately, which makes them difficult to capture high-level semantic structures. The features learned by most of the current deep learning methods can obtain high-quality image classification results. However, these methods are hard to be applied to recognize 3D point clouds due to unorganized distribution and various point density of data. In this paper, we propose a 3DCNN-DQN-RNN method which fuses the 3D convolutional neural network (CNN), Deep Q-Network (DQN) and Residual recurrent neural network (RNN) for an efficient semantic parsing of large-scale 3D point clouds. In our method, an eye window under control of the 3D CNN and DQN can localize and segment the points of the object class efficiently. The 3D CNN and Residual RNN further extract robust and discriminative features of the points in the eye window, and thus greatly enhance the parsing accuracy of large-scale point clouds. Our method provides an automatic process that maps the raw data to the classification results. It also integrates object localization, segmentation and classification into one framework. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art point cloud classification methods.

Deep neural networks are prone to adversarial examples that maliciously alter the network's outcome. Due to the increasing popularity of 3D sensors in safety-critical systems and the vast deployment of deep learning models for 3D point sets, there is a growing interest in adversarial attacks and defenses for such models. So far, the research has focused on the semantic level, namely, deep point cloud classifiers. However, point clouds are also widely used in a geometric-related form that includes encoding and reconstructing the geometry. In this work, we are the first to consider the problem of adversarial examples at a geometric level. In this setting, the question is how to craft a small change to a clean source point cloud that leads, after passing through an autoencoder model, to the reconstruction of a different target shape. Our attack is in sharp contrast to existing semantic attacks on 3D point clouds. While such works aim to modify the predicted label by a classifier, we alter the entire reconstructed geometry. Additionally, we demonstrate the robustness of our attack in the case of defense, where we show that remnant characteristics of the target shape are still present at the output after applying the defense to the adversarial input. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/itailang/geometric_adv.

We present a Non-parametric Network for 3D point cloud analysis, Point-NN, which consists of purely non-learnable components: farthest point sampling (FPS), k-nearest neighbors (k-NN), and pooling operations, with trigonometric functions. Surprisingly, it performs well on various 3D tasks, requiring no parameters or training, and even surpasses existing fully trained models. Starting from this basic non-parametric model, we propose two extensions. First, Point-NN can serve as a base architectural framework to construct Parametric Networks by simply inserting linear layers on top. Given the superior non-parametric foundation, the derived Point-PN exhibits a high performance-efficiency trade-off with only a few learnable parameters. Second, Point-NN can be regarded as a plug-and-play module for the already trained 3D models during inference. Point-NN captures the complementary geometric knowledge and enhances existing methods for different 3D benchmarks without re-training. We hope our work may cast a light on the community for understanding 3D point clouds with non-parametric methods. Code is available at https://github.com/ZrrSkywalker/Point-NN.

We present Point-BERT, a new paradigm for learning Transformers to generalize the concept of BERT to 3D point cloud. Inspired by BERT, we devise a Masked Point Modeling (MPM) task to pre-train point cloud Transformers. Specifically, we first divide a point cloud into several local point patches, and a point cloud Tokenizer with a discrete Variational AutoEncoder (dVAE) is designed to generate discrete point tokens containing meaningful local information. Then, we randomly mask out some patches of input point clouds and feed them into the backbone Transformers. The pre-training objective is to recover the original point tokens at the masked locations under the supervision of point tokens obtained by the Tokenizer. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed BERT-style pre-training strategy significantly improves the performance of standard point cloud Transformers. Equipped with our pre-training strategy, we show that a pure Transformer architecture attains 93.8% accuracy on ModelNet40 and 83.1% accuracy on the hardest setting of ScanObjectNN, surpassing carefully designed point cloud models with much fewer hand-made designs. We also demonstrate that the representations learned by Point-BERT transfer well to new tasks and domains, where our models largely advance the state-of-the-art of few-shot point cloud classification task. The code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/lulutang0608/Point-BERT

Visual localization is the task of estimating a 6-DoF camera pose of a query image within a provided 3D reference map. Thanks to recent advances in various 3D sensors, 3D point clouds are becoming a more accurate and affordable option for building the reference map, but research to match the points of 3D point clouds with pixels in 2D images for visual localization remains challenging. Existing approaches that jointly learn 2D-3D feature matching suffer from low inliers due to representational differences between the two modalities, and the methods that bypass this problem into classification have an issue of poor refinement. In this work, we propose EP2P-Loc, a novel large-scale visual localization method that mitigates such appearance discrepancy and enables end-to-end training for pose estimation. To increase the number of inliers, we propose a simple algorithm to remove invisible 3D points in the image, and find all 2D-3D correspondences without keypoint detection. To reduce memory usage and search complexity, we take a coarse-to-fine approach where we extract patch-level features from 2D images, then perform 2D patch classification on each 3D point, and obtain the exact corresponding 2D pixel coordinates through positional encoding. Finally, for the first time in this task, we employ a differentiable PnP for end-to-end training. In the experiments on newly curated large-scale indoor and outdoor benchmarks based on 2D-3D-S and KITTI, we show that our method achieves the state-of-the-art performance compared to existing visual localization and image-to-point cloud registration methods.

We present PointInfinity, an efficient family of point cloud diffusion models. Our core idea is to use a transformer-based architecture with a fixed-size, resolution-invariant latent representation. This enables efficient training with low-resolution point clouds, while allowing high-resolution point clouds to be generated during inference. More importantly, we show that scaling the test-time resolution beyond the training resolution improves the fidelity of generated point clouds and surfaces. We analyze this phenomenon and draw a link to classifier-free guidance commonly used in diffusion models, demonstrating that both allow trading off fidelity and variability during inference. Experiments on CO3D show that PointInfinity can efficiently generate high-resolution point clouds (up to 131k points, 31 times more than Point-E) with state-of-the-art quality.

Point cloud streaming is increasingly getting popular, evolving into the norm for interactive service delivery and the future Metaverse. However, the substantial volume of data associated with point clouds presents numerous challenges, particularly in terms of high bandwidth consumption and large storage capacity. Despite various solutions proposed thus far, with a focus on point cloud compression, upsampling, and completion, these reconstruction-related methods continue to fall short in delivering high fidelity point cloud output. As a solution, in DiffPMAE, we propose an effective point cloud reconstruction architecture. Inspired by self-supervised learning concepts, we combine Masked Auto-Encoding and Diffusion Model mechanism to remotely reconstruct point cloud data. By the nature of this reconstruction process, DiffPMAE can be extended to many related downstream tasks including point cloud compression, upsampling and completion. Leveraging ShapeNet-55 and ModelNet datasets with over 60000 objects, we validate the performance of DiffPMAE exceeding many state-of-the-art methods in-terms of auto-encoding and downstream tasks considered.

With their meaningful geometry and their omnipresence in the 3D world, edges are extremely useful primitives in computer vision. 3D edges comprise of lines and curves, and methods to reconstruct them use either multi-view images or point clouds as input. State-of-the-art image-based methods first learn a 3D edge point cloud then fit 3D edges to it. The edge point cloud is obtained by learning a 3D neural implicit edge field from which the 3D edge points are sampled on a specific level set (0 or 1). However, such methods present two important drawbacks: i) it is not realistic to sample points on exact level sets due to float imprecision and training inaccuracies. Instead, they are sampled within a range of levels so the points do not lie accurately on the 3D edges and require further processing. ii) Such implicit representations are computationally expensive and require long training times. In this paper, we address these two limitations and propose a 3D edge mapping that is simpler, more efficient, and preserves accuracy. Our method learns explicitly the 3D edge points and their edge direction hence bypassing the need for point sampling. It casts a 3D edge point as the center of a 3D Gaussian and the edge direction as the principal axis of the Gaussian. Such a representation has the advantage of being not only geometrically meaningful but also compatible with the efficient training optimization defined in Gaussian Splatting. Results show that the proposed method produces edges as accurate and complete as the state-of-the-art while being an order of magnitude faster. Code is released at https://github.com/kunalchelani/EdgeGaussians.

In this work, we study 3D object detection from RGB-D data in both indoor and outdoor scenes. While previous methods focus on images or 3D voxels, often obscuring natural 3D patterns and invariances of 3D data, we directly operate on raw point clouds by popping up RGB-D scans. However, a key challenge of this approach is how to efficiently localize objects in point clouds of large-scale scenes (region proposal). Instead of solely relying on 3D proposals, our method leverages both mature 2D object detectors and advanced 3D deep learning for object localization, achieving efficiency as well as high recall for even small objects. Benefited from learning directly in raw point clouds, our method is also able to precisely estimate 3D bounding boxes even under strong occlusion or with very sparse points. Evaluated on KITTI and SUN RGB-D 3D detection benchmarks, our method outperforms the state of the art by remarkable margins while having real-time capability.

In this paper we explore the recent topic of point cloud completion, guided by an auxiliary image. We show how it is possible to effectively combine the information from the two modalities in a localized latent space, thus avoiding the need for complex point cloud reconstruction methods from single views used by the state-of-the-art. We also investigate a novel weakly-supervised setting where the auxiliary image provides a supervisory signal to the training process by using a differentiable renderer on the completed point cloud to measure fidelity in the image space. Experiments show significant improvements over state-of-the-art supervised methods for both unimodal and multimodal completion. We also show the effectiveness of the weakly-supervised approach which outperforms a number of supervised methods and is competitive with the latest supervised models only exploiting point cloud information.

LiDAR point clouds often contain motion-induced distortions, degrading the accuracy of object appearances in the captured data. In this paper, we first characterize the underlying reasons for the point cloud distortion and show that this is present in public datasets. We find that this distortion is more pronounced in high-speed environments such as highways, as well as in multi-LiDAR configurations, a common setup for heavy vehicles. Previous work has dealt with point cloud distortion from the ego-motion but fails to consider distortion from the motion of other objects. We therefore introduce a novel undistortion pipeline, HiMo, that leverages scene flow estimation for object motion compensation, correcting the depiction of dynamic objects. We further propose an extension of a state-of-the-art self-supervised scene flow method. Due to the lack of well-established motion distortion metrics in the literature, we also propose two metrics for compensation performance evaluation: compensation accuracy at a point level and shape similarity on objects. To demonstrate the efficacy of our method, we conduct extensive experiments on the Argoverse 2 dataset and a new real-world dataset. Our new dataset is collected from heavy vehicles equipped with multi-LiDARs and on highways as opposed to mostly urban settings in the existing datasets. The source code, including all methods and the evaluation data, will be provided upon publication. See https://kin-zhang.github.io/HiMo for more details.

Point-cloud data collected in real-world applications are often incomplete. Data is typically missing due to objects being observed from partial viewpoints, which only capture a specific perspective or angle. Additionally, data can be incomplete due to occlusion and low-resolution sampling. Existing completion approaches rely on datasets of predefined objects to guide the completion of noisy and incomplete, point clouds. However, these approaches perform poorly when tested on Out-Of-Distribution (OOD) objects, that are poorly represented in the training dataset. Here we leverage recent advances in text-guided image generation, which lead to major breakthroughs in text-guided shape generation. We describe an approach called SDS-Complete that uses a pre-trained text-to-image diffusion model and leverages the text semantics of a given incomplete point cloud of an object, to obtain a complete surface representation. SDS-Complete can complete a variety of objects using test-time optimization without expensive collection of 3D information. We evaluate SDS Complete on incomplete scanned objects, captured by real-world depth sensors and LiDAR scanners. We find that it effectively reconstructs objects that are absent from common datasets, reducing Chamfer loss by 50% on average compared with current methods. Project page: https://sds-complete.github.io/

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) for 3D point cloud recognition are vulnerable to adversarial examples, threatening their practical deployment. Despite the many research endeavors have been made to tackle this issue in recent years, the diversity of adversarial examples on 3D point clouds makes them more challenging to defend against than those on 2D images. For examples, attackers can generate adversarial examples by adding, shifting, or removing points. Consequently, existing defense strategies are hard to counter unseen point cloud adversarial examples. In this paper, we first establish a comprehensive, and rigorous point cloud adversarial robustness benchmark to evaluate adversarial robustness, which can provide a detailed understanding of the effects of the defense and attack methods. We then collect existing defense tricks in point cloud adversarial defenses and then perform extensive and systematic experiments to identify an effective combination of these tricks. Furthermore, we propose a hybrid training augmentation methods that consider various types of point cloud adversarial examples to adversarial training, significantly improving the adversarial robustness. By combining these tricks, we construct a more robust defense framework achieving an average accuracy of 83.45\% against various attacks, demonstrating its capability to enabling robust learners. Our codebase are open-sourced on: https://github.com/qiufan319/benchmark_pc_attack.git.

Impressive performance on point cloud semantic segmentation has been achieved by fully-supervised methods with large amounts of labelled data. As it is labour-intensive to acquire large-scale point cloud data with point-wise labels, many attempts have been made to explore learning 3D point cloud segmentation with limited annotations. Active learning is one of the effective strategies to achieve this purpose but is still under-explored. The most recent methods of this kind measure the uncertainty of each pre-divided region for manual labelling but they suffer from redundant information and require additional efforts for region division. This paper aims at addressing this issue by developing a hierarchical point-based active learning strategy. Specifically, we measure the uncertainty for each point by a hierarchical minimum margin uncertainty module which considers the contextual information at multiple levels. Then, a feature-distance suppression strategy is designed to select important and representative points for manual labelling. Besides, to better exploit the unlabelled data, we build a semi-supervised segmentation framework based on our active strategy. Extensive experiments on the S3DIS and ScanNetV2 datasets demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves 96.5% and 100% performance of fully-supervised baseline with only 0.07% and 0.1% training data, respectively, outperforming the state-of-the-art weakly-supervised and active learning methods. The code will be available at https://github.com/SmiletoE/HPAL.

Real-time detection and prediction of extreme weather protect human lives and infrastructure. Traditional methods rely on numerical threshold setting and manual interpretation of weather heatmaps with Geographic Information Systems (GIS), which can be slow and error-prone. Our research redefines Extreme Weather Events Detection (EWED) by framing it as a Visual Question Answering (VQA) problem, thereby introducing a more precise and automated solution. Leveraging Vision-Language Models (VLM) to simultaneously process visual and textual data, we offer an effective aid to enhance the analysis process of weather heatmaps. Our initial assessment of general-purpose VLMs (e.g., GPT-4-Vision) on EWED revealed poor performance, characterized by low accuracy and frequent hallucinations due to inadequate color differentiation and insufficient meteorological knowledge. To address these challenges, we introduce ClimateIQA, the first meteorological VQA dataset, which includes 8,760 wind gust heatmaps and 254,040 question-answer pairs covering four question types, both generated from the latest climate reanalysis data. We also propose Sparse Position and Outline Tracking (SPOT), an innovative technique that leverages OpenCV and K-Means clustering to capture and depict color contours in heatmaps, providing ClimateIQA with more accurate color spatial location information. Finally, we present Climate-Zoo, the first meteorological VLM collection, which adapts VLMs to meteorological applications using the ClimateIQA dataset. Experiment results demonstrate that models from Climate-Zoo substantially outperform state-of-the-art general VLMs, achieving an accuracy increase from 0% to over 90% in EWED verification. The datasets and models in this study are publicly available for future climate science research: https://github.com/AlexJJJChen/Climate-Zoo.

In this paper we propose a novel point cloud generator that is able to reconstruct and generate 3D point clouds composed of semantic parts. Given a latent representation of the target 3D model, the generation starts from a single point and gets expanded recursively to produce the high-resolution point cloud via a sequence of point expansion stages. During the recursive procedure of generation, we not only obtain the coarse-to-fine point clouds for the target 3D model from every expansion stage, but also unsupervisedly discover the semantic segmentation of the target model according to the hierarchical/parent-child relation between the points across expansion stages. Moreover, the expansion modules and other elements used in our recursive generator are mostly sharing weights thus making the overall framework light and efficient. Extensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate that our proposed point cloud generator has comparable or even superior performance on both generation and reconstruction tasks in comparison to various baselines, as well as provides the consistent co-segmentation among 3D instances of the same object class.

LiDAR-based 3D point cloud recognition has benefited various applications. Without specially considering the LiDAR point distribution, most current methods suffer from information disconnection and limited receptive field, especially for the sparse distant points. In this work, we study the varying-sparsity distribution of LiDAR points and present SphereFormer to directly aggregate information from dense close points to the sparse distant ones. We design radial window self-attention that partitions the space into multiple non-overlapping narrow and long windows. It overcomes the disconnection issue and enlarges the receptive field smoothly and dramatically, which significantly boosts the performance of sparse distant points. Moreover, to fit the narrow and long windows, we propose exponential splitting to yield fine-grained position encoding and dynamic feature selection to increase model representation ability. Notably, our method ranks 1st on both nuScenes and SemanticKITTI semantic segmentation benchmarks with 81.9% and 74.8% mIoU, respectively. Also, we achieve the 3rd place on nuScenes object detection benchmark with 72.8% NDS and 68.5% mAP. Code is available at https://github.com/dvlab-research/SphereFormer.git.

Recent approaches representing 3D objects and scenes using Gaussian splats show increased rendering speed across a variety of platforms and devices. While rendering such representations is indeed extremely efficient, storing and transmitting them is often prohibitively expensive. To represent large-scale scenes, one often needs to store millions of 3D Gaussians, occupying gigabytes of disk space. This poses a very practical limitation, prohibiting widespread adoption.Several solutions have been proposed to strike a balance between disk size and rendering quality, noticeably reducing the visual quality. In this work, we propose a new representation that dramatically reduces the hard drive footprint while featuring similar or improved quality when compared to the standard 3D Gaussian splats. When compared to other compact solutions, ours offers higher quality renderings with significantly reduced storage, being able to efficiently run on a mobile device in real-time. Our key observation is that nearby points in the scene can share similar representations. Hence, only a small ratio of 3D points needs to be stored. We introduce an approach to identify such points which are called parent points. The discarded points called children points along with attributes can be efficiently predicted by tiny MLPs.

3D semantic segmentation plays a critical role in urban modelling, enabling detailed understanding and mapping of city environments. In this paper, we introduce Turin3D: a new aerial LiDAR dataset for point cloud semantic segmentation covering an area of around 1.43 km2 in the city centre of Turin with almost 70M points. We describe the data collection process and compare Turin3D with others previously proposed in the literature. We did not fully annotate the dataset due to the complexity and time-consuming nature of the process; however, a manual annotation process was performed on the validation and test sets, to enable a reliable evaluation of the proposed techniques. We first benchmark the performances of several point cloud semantic segmentation models, trained on the existing datasets, when tested on Turin3D, and then improve their performances by applying a semi-supervised learning technique leveraging the unlabelled training set. The dataset will be publicly available to support research in outdoor point cloud segmentation, with particular relevance for self-supervised and semi-supervised learning approaches given the absence of ground truth annotations for the training set.

Robust point cloud classification is crucial for real-world applications, as consumer-type 3D sensors often yield partial and noisy data, degraded by various artifacts. In this work we propose a general ensemble framework, based on partial point cloud sampling. Each ensemble member is exposed to only partial input data. Three sampling strategies are used jointly, two local ones, based on patches and curves, and a global one of random sampling. We demonstrate the robustness of our method to various local and global degradations. We show that our framework significantly improves the robustness of top classification netowrks by a large margin. Our experimental setting uses the recently introduced ModelNet-C database by Ren et al.[24], where we reach SOTA both on unaugmented and on augmented data. Our unaugmented mean Corruption Error (mCE) is 0.64 (current SOTA is 0.86) and 0.50 for augmented data (current SOTA is 0.57). We analyze and explain these remarkable results through diversity analysis. Our code is available at: https://github.com/yossilevii100/EPiC

Segmenting or detecting objects in sparse Lidar point clouds are two important tasks in autonomous driving to allow a vehicle to act safely in its 3D environment. The best performing methods in 3D semantic segmentation or object detection rely on a large amount of annotated data. Yet annotating 3D Lidar data for these tasks is tedious and costly. In this context, we propose a self-supervised pre-training method for 3D perception models that is tailored to autonomous driving data. Specifically, we leverage the availability of synchronized and calibrated image and Lidar sensors in autonomous driving setups for distilling self-supervised pre-trained image representations into 3D models. Hence, our method does not require any point cloud nor image annotations. The key ingredient of our method is the use of superpixels which are used to pool 3D point features and 2D pixel features in visually similar regions. We then train a 3D network on the self-supervised task of matching these pooled point features with the corresponding pooled image pixel features. The advantages of contrasting regions obtained by superpixels are that: (1) grouping together pixels and points of visually coherent regions leads to a more meaningful contrastive task that produces features well adapted to 3D semantic segmentation and 3D object detection; (2) all the different regions have the same weight in the contrastive loss regardless of the number of 3D points sampled in these regions; (3) it mitigates the noise produced by incorrect matching of points and pixels due to occlusions between the different sensors. Extensive experiments on autonomous driving datasets demonstrate the ability of our image-to-Lidar distillation strategy to produce 3D representations that transfer well on semantic segmentation and object detection tasks.

In this paper we introduce a novel family of attributed graphs for the purpose of shape discrimination. Our graphs typically arise from variations on the Mapper graph construction, which is an approximation of the Reeb graph for point cloud data. Our attributions enrich these constructions with (persistent) homology in ways that are provably stable, thereby recording extra topological information that is typically lost in these graph constructions. We provide experiments which illustrate the use of these invariants for shape representation and classification. In particular, we obtain competitive shape classification results when using our topologically attributed graphs as inputs to a simple graph neural network classifier.

The pre-training architectures of large language models encompass various types, including autoencoding models, autoregressive models, and encoder-decoder models. We posit that any modality can potentially benefit from a large language model, as long as it undergoes vector quantization to become discrete tokens. Inspired by GLM, we propose a General Point Model (GPM) which seamlessly integrates autoencoding and autoregressive tasks in point cloud transformer. This model is versatile, allowing fine-tuning for downstream point cloud representation tasks, as well as unconditional and conditional generation tasks. GPM enhances masked prediction in autoencoding through various forms of mask padding tasks, leading to improved performance in point cloud understanding. Additionally, GPM demonstrates highly competitive results in unconditional point cloud generation tasks, even exhibiting the potential for conditional generation tasks by modifying the input's conditional information. Compared to models like Point-BERT, MaskPoint and PointMAE, our GPM achieves superior performance in point cloud understanding tasks. Furthermore, the integration of autoregressive and autoencoding within the same transformer underscores its versatility across different downstream tasks.

Autonomous vehicles drive millions of miles on the road each year. Under such circumstances, deployed machine learning models are prone to failure both in seemingly normal situations and in the presence of outliers. However, in the training phase, they are only evaluated on small validation and test sets, which are unable to reveal model failures due to their limited scenario coverage. While it is difficult and expensive to acquire large and representative labeled datasets for evaluation, large-scale unlabeled datasets are typically available. In this work, we introduce label-free model failure detection for lidar-based point cloud segmentation, taking advantage of the abundance of unlabeled data available. We leverage different data characteristics by training a supervised and self-supervised stream for the same task to detect failure modes. We perform a large-scale qualitative analysis and present LidarCODA, the first publicly available dataset with labeled anomalies in real-world lidar data, for an extensive quantitative analysis.

In this paper, we propose a simple and general framework for self-supervised point cloud representation learning. Human beings understand the 3D world by extracting two levels of information and establishing the relationship between them. One is the global shape of an object, and the other is the local structures of it. However, few existing studies in point cloud representation learning explored how to learn both global shapes and local-to-global relationships without a specified network architecture. Inspired by how human beings understand the world, we utilize knowledge distillation to learn both global shape information and the relationship between global shape and local structures. At the same time, we combine contrastive learning with knowledge distillation to make the teacher network be better updated. Our method achieves the state-of-the-art performance on linear classification and multiple other downstream tasks. Especially, we develop a variant of ViT for 3D point cloud feature extraction, which also achieves comparable results with existing backbones when combined with our framework, and visualization of the attention maps show that our model does understand the point cloud by combining the global shape information and multiple local structural information, which is consistent with the inspiration of our representation learning method. Our code will be released soon.

3D visual grounding aims to locate the referred target object in 3D point cloud scenes according to a free-form language description. Previous methods mostly follow a two-stage paradigm, i.e., language-irrelevant detection and cross-modal matching, which is limited by the isolated architecture. In such a paradigm, the detector needs to sample keypoints from raw point clouds due to the inherent properties of 3D point clouds (irregular and large-scale), to generate the corresponding object proposal for each keypoint. However, sparse proposals may leave out the target in detection, while dense proposals may confuse the matching model. Moreover, the language-irrelevant detection stage can only sample a small proportion of keypoints on the target, deteriorating the target prediction. In this paper, we propose a 3D Single-Stage Referred Point Progressive Selection (3D-SPS) method, which progressively selects keypoints with the guidance of language and directly locates the target. Specifically, we propose a Description-aware Keypoint Sampling (DKS) module to coarsely focus on the points of language-relevant objects, which are significant clues for grounding. Besides, we devise a Target-oriented Progressive Mining (TPM) module to finely concentrate on the points of the target, which is enabled by progressive intra-modal relation modeling and inter-modal target mining. 3D-SPS bridges the gap between detection and matching in the 3D visual grounding task, localizing the target at a single stage. Experiments demonstrate that 3D-SPS achieves state-of-the-art performance on both ScanRefer and Nr3D/Sr3D datasets.

Rapid progress in 3D semantic segmentation is inseparable from the advances of deep network models, which highly rely on large-scale annotated data for training. To address the high cost and challenges of 3D point-level labeling, we present a method for semi-supervised point cloud semantic segmentation to adopt unlabeled point clouds in training to boost the model performance. Inspired by the recent contrastive loss in self-supervised tasks, we propose the guided point contrastive loss to enhance the feature representation and model generalization ability in semi-supervised setting. Semantic predictions on unlabeled point clouds serve as pseudo-label guidance in our loss to avoid negative pairs in the same category. Also, we design the confidence guidance to ensure high-quality feature learning. Besides, a category-balanced sampling strategy is proposed to collect positive and negative samples to mitigate the class imbalance problem. Extensive experiments on three datasets (ScanNet V2, S3DIS, and SemanticKITTI) show the effectiveness of our semi-supervised method to improve the prediction quality with unlabeled data.

In this work, we tackle the task of point cloud denoising through a novel framework that adapts Diffusion Schr\"odinger bridges to points clouds. Unlike previous approaches that predict point-wise displacements from point features or learned noise distributions, our method learns an optimal transport plan between paired point clouds. Experiments on object datasets like PU-Net and real-world datasets such as ScanNet++ and ARKitScenes show that P2P-Bridge achieves significant improvements over existing methods. While our approach demonstrates strong results using only point coordinates, we also show that incorporating additional features, such as color information or point-wise DINOv2 features, further enhances the performance. Code and pretrained models are available at https://p2p-bridge.github.io.

High dynamic range (HDR) novel view synthesis (NVS) aims to create photorealistic images from novel viewpoints using HDR imaging techniques. The rendered HDR images capture a wider range of brightness levels containing more details of the scene than normal low dynamic range (LDR) images. Existing HDR NVS methods are mainly based on NeRF. They suffer from long training time and slow inference speed. In this paper, we propose a new framework, High Dynamic Range Gaussian Splatting (HDR-GS), which can efficiently render novel HDR views and reconstruct LDR images with a user input exposure time. Specifically, we design a Dual Dynamic Range (DDR) Gaussian point cloud model that uses spherical harmonics to fit HDR color and employs an MLP-based tone-mapper to render LDR color. The HDR and LDR colors are then fed into two Parallel Differentiable Rasterization (PDR) processes to reconstruct HDR and LDR views. To establish the data foundation for the research of 3D Gaussian splatting-based methods in HDR NVS, we recalibrate the camera parameters and compute the initial positions for Gaussian point clouds. Experiments demonstrate that our HDR-GS surpasses the state-of-the-art NeRF-based method by 3.84 and 1.91 dB on LDR and HDR NVS while enjoying 1000x inference speed and only requiring 6.3% training time.

An essential prerequisite for unleashing the potential of supervised deep learning algorithms in the area of 3D scene understanding is the availability of large-scale and richly annotated datasets. However, publicly available datasets are either in relative small spatial scales or have limited semantic annotations due to the expensive cost of data acquisition and data annotation, which severely limits the development of fine-grained semantic understanding in the context of 3D point clouds. In this paper, we present an urban-scale photogrammetric point cloud dataset with nearly three billion richly annotated points, which is three times the number of labeled points than the existing largest photogrammetric point cloud dataset. Our dataset consists of large areas from three UK cities, covering about 7.6 km^2 of the city landscape. In the dataset, each 3D point is labeled as one of 13 semantic classes. We extensively evaluate the performance of state-of-the-art algorithms on our dataset and provide a comprehensive analysis of the results. In particular, we identify several key challenges towards urban-scale point cloud understanding. The dataset is available at https://github.com/QingyongHu/SensatUrban.

3D point clouds play a pivotal role in outdoor scene perception, especially in the context of autonomous driving. Recent advancements in 3D LiDAR segmentation often focus intensely on the spatial positioning and distribution of points for accurate segmentation. However, these methods, while robust in variable conditions, encounter challenges due to sole reliance on coordinates and point intensity, leading to poor isometric invariance and suboptimal segmentation. To tackle this challenge, our work introduces Range-Aware Pointwise Distance Distribution (RAPiD) features and the associated RAPiD-Seg architecture. Our RAPiD features exhibit rigid transformation invariance and effectively adapt to variations in point density, with a design focus on capturing the localized geometry of neighboring structures. They utilize inherent LiDAR isotropic radiation and semantic categorization for enhanced local representation and computational efficiency, while incorporating a 4D distance metric that integrates geometric and surface material reflectivity for improved semantic segmentation. To effectively embed high-dimensional RAPiD features, we propose a double-nested autoencoder structure with a novel class-aware embedding objective to encode high-dimensional features into manageable voxel-wise embeddings. Additionally, we propose RAPiD-Seg which incorporates a channel-wise attention fusion and two effective RAPiD-Seg variants, further optimizing the embedding for enhanced performance and generalization. Our method outperforms contemporary LiDAR segmentation work in terms of mIoU on SemanticKITTI (76.1) and nuScenes (83.6) datasets.

Recently, the self-supervised learning framework data2vec has shown inspiring performance for various modalities using a masked student-teacher approach. However, it remains open whether such a framework generalizes to the unique challenges of 3D point clouds. To answer this question, we extend data2vec to the point cloud domain and report encouraging results on several downstream tasks. In an in-depth analysis, we discover that the leakage of positional information reveals the overall object shape to the student even under heavy masking and thus hampers data2vec to learn strong representations for point clouds. We address this 3D-specific shortcoming by proposing point2vec, which unleashes the full potential of data2vec-like pre-training on point clouds. Our experiments show that point2vec outperforms other self-supervised methods on shape classification and few-shot learning on ModelNet40 and ScanObjectNN, while achieving competitive results on part segmentation on ShapeNetParts. These results suggest that the learned representations are strong and transferable, highlighting point2vec as a promising direction for self-supervised learning of point cloud representations.

Instance segmentation on point clouds is crucially important for 3D scene understanding. Most SOTAs adopt distance clustering, which is typically effective but does not perform well in segmenting adjacent objects with the same semantic label (especially when they share neighboring points). Due to the uneven distribution of offset points, these existing methods can hardly cluster all instance points. To this end, we design a novel divide-and-conquer strategy named PBNet that binarizes each point and clusters them separately to segment instances. Our binary clustering divides offset instance points into two categories: high and low density points (HPs vs. LPs). Adjacent objects can be clearly separated by removing LPs, and then be completed and refined by assigning LPs via a neighbor voting method. To suppress potential over-segmentation, we propose to construct local scenes with the weight mask for each instance. As a plug-in, the proposed binary clustering can replace the traditional distance clustering and lead to consistent performance gains on many mainstream baselines. A series of experiments on ScanNetV2 and S3DIS datasets indicate the superiority of our model. In particular, PBNet ranks first on the ScanNetV2 official benchmark challenge, achieving the highest mAP.

Few prior works study deep learning on point sets. PointNet by Qi et al. is a pioneer in this direction. However, by design PointNet does not capture local structures induced by the metric space points live in, limiting its ability to recognize fine-grained patterns and generalizability to complex scenes. In this work, we introduce a hierarchical neural network that applies PointNet recursively on a nested partitioning of the input point set. By exploiting metric space distances, our network is able to learn local features with increasing contextual scales. With further observation that point sets are usually sampled with varying densities, which results in greatly decreased performance for networks trained on uniform densities, we propose novel set learning layers to adaptively combine features from multiple scales. Experiments show that our network called PointNet++ is able to learn deep point set features efficiently and robustly. In particular, results significantly better than state-of-the-art have been obtained on challenging benchmarks of 3D point clouds.

The unsupervised 3D object detection is to accurately detect objects in unstructured environments with no explicit supervisory signals. This task, given sparse LiDAR point clouds, often results in compromised performance for detecting distant or small objects due to the inherent sparsity and limited spatial resolution. In this paper, we are among the early attempts to integrate LiDAR data with 2D images for unsupervised 3D detection and introduce a new method, dubbed LiDAR-2D Self-paced Learning (LiSe). We argue that RGB images serve as a valuable complement to LiDAR data, offering precise 2D localization cues, particularly when scarce LiDAR points are available for certain objects. Considering the unique characteristics of both modalities, our framework devises a self-paced learning pipeline that incorporates adaptive sampling and weak model aggregation strategies. The adaptive sampling strategy dynamically tunes the distribution of pseudo labels during training, countering the tendency of models to overfit easily detected samples, such as nearby and large-sized objects. By doing so, it ensures a balanced learning trajectory across varying object scales and distances. The weak model aggregation component consolidates the strengths of models trained under different pseudo label distributions, culminating in a robust and powerful final model. Experimental evaluations validate the efficacy of our proposed LiSe method, manifesting significant improvements of +7.1% AP_{BEV} and +3.4% AP_{3D} on nuScenes, and +8.3% AP_{BEV} and +7.4% AP_{3D} on Lyft compared to existing techniques.

Object discovery is a core task in computer vision. While fast progresses have been made in supervised object detection, its unsupervised counterpart remains largely unexplored. With the growth of data volume, the expensive cost of annotations is the major limitation hindering further study. Therefore, discovering objects without annotations has great significance. However, this task seems impractical on still-image or point cloud alone due to the lack of discriminative information. Previous studies underlook the crucial temporal information and constraints naturally behind multi-modal inputs. In this paper, we propose 4D unsupervised object discovery, jointly discovering objects from 4D data -- 3D point clouds and 2D RGB images with temporal information. We present the first practical approach for this task by proposing a ClusterNet on 3D point clouds, which is jointly iteratively optimized with a 2D localization network. Extensive experiments on the large-scale Waymo Open Dataset suggest that the localization network and ClusterNet achieve competitive performance on both class-agnostic 2D object detection and 3D instance segmentation, bridging the gap between unsupervised methods and full supervised ones. Codes and models will be made available at https://github.com/Robertwyq/LSMOL.

Masked point modeling has become a promising scheme of self-supervised pre-training for point clouds. Existing methods reconstruct either the original points or related features as the objective of pre-training. However, considering the diversity of downstream tasks, it is necessary for the model to have both low- and high-level representation modeling capabilities to capture geometric details and semantic contexts during pre-training. To this end, M^3CS is proposed to enable the model with the above abilities. Specifically, with masked point cloud as input, M^3CS introduces two decoders to predict masked representations and the original points simultaneously. While an extra decoder doubles parameters for the decoding process and may lead to overfitting, we propose siamese decoders to keep the amount of learnable parameters unchanged. Further, we propose an online codebook projecting continuous tokens into discrete ones before reconstructing masked points. In such way, we can enforce the decoder to take effect through the combinations of tokens rather than remembering each token. Comprehensive experiments show that M^3CS achieves superior performance at both classification and segmentation tasks, outperforming existing methods.

We propose a fully automatic annotation scheme that takes a raw 3D point cloud with a set of fitted CAD models as input and outputs convincing point-wise labels that can be used as cheap training data for point cloud segmentation. Compared with manual annotations, we show that our automatic labels are accurate while drastically reducing the annotation time and eliminating the need for manual intervention or dataset-specific parameters. Our labeling pipeline outputs semantic classes and soft point-wise object scores, which can either be binarized into standard one-hot-encoded labels, thresholded into weak labels with ambiguous points left unlabeled, or used directly as soft labels during training. We evaluate the label quality and segmentation performance of PointNet++ on a dataset of real industrial point clouds and Scan2CAD, a public dataset of indoor scenes. Our results indicate that reducing supervision in areas that are more difficult to label automatically is beneficial compared with the conventional approach of naively assigning a hard "best guess" label to every point.

In this work, we propose SAM3D, a novel framework that is able to predict masks in 3D point clouds by leveraging the Segment-Anything Model (SAM) in RGB images without further training or finetuning. For a point cloud of a 3D scene with posed RGB images, we first predict segmentation masks of RGB images with SAM, and then project the 2D masks into the 3D points. Later, we merge the 3D masks iteratively with a bottom-up merging approach. At each step, we merge the point cloud masks of two adjacent frames with the bidirectional merging approach. In this way, the 3D masks predicted from different frames are gradually merged into the 3D masks of the whole 3D scene. Finally, we can optionally ensemble the result from our SAM3D with the over-segmentation results based on the geometric information of the 3D scenes. Our approach is experimented with ScanNet dataset and qualitative results demonstrate that our SAM3D achieves reasonable and fine-grained 3D segmentation results without any training or finetuning of SAM.

Most 3D Gaussian Splatting (3D-GS) based methods for urban scenes initialize 3D Gaussians directly with 3D LiDAR points, which not only underutilizes LiDAR data capabilities but also overlooks the potential advantages of fusing LiDAR with camera data. In this paper, we design a novel tightly coupled LiDAR-Camera Gaussian Splatting (TCLC-GS) to fully leverage the combined strengths of both LiDAR and camera sensors, enabling rapid, high-quality 3D reconstruction and novel view RGB/depth synthesis. TCLC-GS designs a hybrid explicit (colorized 3D mesh) and implicit (hierarchical octree feature) 3D representation derived from LiDAR-camera data, to enrich the properties of 3D Gaussians for splatting. 3D Gaussian's properties are not only initialized in alignment with the 3D mesh which provides more completed 3D shape and color information, but are also endowed with broader contextual information through retrieved octree implicit features. During the Gaussian Splatting optimization process, the 3D mesh offers dense depth information as supervision, which enhances the training process by learning of a robust geometry. Comprehensive evaluations conducted on the Waymo Open Dataset and nuScenes Dataset validate our method's state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance. Utilizing a single NVIDIA RTX 3090 Ti, our method demonstrates fast training and achieves real-time RGB and depth rendering at 90 FPS in resolution of 1920x1280 (Waymo), and 120 FPS in resolution of 1600x900 (nuScenes) in urban scenarios.

Machine learning for point clouds has been attracting much attention, with many applications in various fields, such as shape recognition and material science. For enhancing the accuracy of such machine learning methods, it is often effective to incorporate global topological features, which are typically extracted by persistent homology. In the calculation of persistent homology for a point cloud, we choose a filtration for the point cloud, an increasing sequence of spaces. Since the performance of machine learning methods combined with persistent homology is highly affected by the choice of a filtration, we need to tune it depending on data and tasks. In this paper, we propose a framework that learns a filtration adaptively with the use of neural networks. In order to make the resulting persistent homology isometry-invariant, we develop a neural network architecture with such invariance. Additionally, we show a theoretical result on a finite-dimensional approximation of filtration functions, which justifies the proposed network architecture. Experimental results demonstrated the efficacy of our framework in several classification tasks.

We present a new method for real-time non-rigid dense correspondence between point clouds based on structured shape construction. Our method, termed Deep Point Correspondence (DPC), requires a fraction of the training data compared to previous techniques and presents better generalization capabilities. Until now, two main approaches have been suggested for the dense correspondence problem. The first is a spectral-based approach that obtains great results on synthetic datasets but requires mesh connectivity of the shapes and long inference processing time while being unstable in real-world scenarios. The second is a spatial approach that uses an encoder-decoder framework to regress an ordered point cloud for the matching alignment from an irregular input. Unfortunately, the decoder brings considerable disadvantages, as it requires a large amount of training data and struggles to generalize well in cross-dataset evaluations. DPC's novelty lies in its lack of a decoder component. Instead, we use latent similarity and the input coordinates themselves to construct the point cloud and determine correspondence, replacing the coordinate regression done by the decoder. Extensive experiments show that our construction scheme leads to a performance boost in comparison to recent state-of-the-art correspondence methods. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/dvirginz/DPC.

The development of 2D foundation models for image segmentation has been significantly advanced by the Segment Anything Model (SAM). However, achieving similar success in 3D models remains a challenge due to issues such as non-unified data formats, lightweight models, and the scarcity of labeled data with diverse masks. To this end, we propose a 3D promptable segmentation model (Point-SAM) focusing on point clouds. Our approach utilizes a transformer-based method, extending SAM to the 3D domain. We leverage part-level and object-level annotations and introduce a data engine to generate pseudo labels from SAM, thereby distilling 2D knowledge into our 3D model. Our model outperforms state-of-the-art models on several indoor and outdoor benchmarks and demonstrates a variety of applications, such as 3D annotation. Codes and demo can be found at https://github.com/zyc00/Point-SAM.

We present a unified framework capable of solving a broad range of 3D tasks. Our approach features a stateful recurrent model that continuously updates its state representation with each new observation. Given a stream of images, this evolving state can be used to generate metric-scale pointmaps (per-pixel 3D points) for each new input in an online fashion. These pointmaps reside within a common coordinate system, and can be accumulated into a coherent, dense scene reconstruction that updates as new images arrive. Our model, called CUT3R (Continuous Updating Transformer for 3D Reconstruction), captures rich priors of real-world scenes: not only can it predict accurate pointmaps from image observations, but it can also infer unseen regions of the scene by probing at virtual, unobserved views. Our method is simple yet highly flexible, naturally accepting varying lengths of images that may be either video streams or unordered photo collections, containing both static and dynamic content. We evaluate our method on various 3D/4D tasks and demonstrate competitive or state-of-the-art performance in each. Project Page: https://cut3r.github.io/

Point cloud analysis is challenging due to the irregularity of the point cloud data structure. Existing works typically employ the ad-hoc sampling-grouping operation of PointNet++, followed by sophisticated local and/or global feature extractors for leveraging the 3D geometry of the point cloud. Unfortunately, the sampling-grouping operations do not address the point cloud's irregularity, whereas the intricate local and/or global feature extractors led to poor computational efficiency. In this paper, we introduce a novel DualNorm module after the sampling-grouping operation to effectively and efficiently address the irregularity issue. The DualNorm module consists of Point Normalization, which normalizes the grouped points to the sampled points, and Reverse Point Normalization, which normalizes the sampled points to the grouped points. The proposed framework, PointNorm, utilizes local mean and global standard deviation to benefit from both local and global features while maintaining a faithful inference speed. Experiments show that we achieved excellent accuracy and efficiency on ModelNet40 classification, ScanObjectNN classification, ShapeNetPart Part Segmentation, and S3DIS Semantic Segmentation. Code is available at https://github.com/ShenZheng2000/PointNorm-for-Point-Cloud-Analysis.

Recently, the community has made tremendous progress in developing effective methods for point cloud video understanding that learn from massive amounts of labeled data. However, annotating point cloud videos is usually notoriously expensive. Moreover, training via one or only a few traditional tasks (e.g., classification) may be insufficient to learn subtle details of the spatio-temporal structure existing in point cloud videos. In this paper, we propose a Masked Spatio-Temporal Structure Prediction (MaST-Pre) method to capture the structure of point cloud videos without human annotations. MaST-Pre is based on spatio-temporal point-tube masking and consists of two self-supervised learning tasks. First, by reconstructing masked point tubes, our method is able to capture the appearance information of point cloud videos. Second, to learn motion, we propose a temporal cardinality difference prediction task that estimates the change in the number of points within a point tube. In this way, MaST-Pre is forced to model the spatial and temporal structure in point cloud videos. Extensive experiments on MSRAction-3D, NTU-RGBD, NvGesture, and SHREC'17 demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Recently, a growing number of work design unsupervised paradigms for point cloud processing to alleviate the limitation of expensive manual annotation and poor transferability of supervised methods. Among them, CrossPoint follows the contrastive learning framework and exploits image and point cloud data for unsupervised point cloud understanding. Although the promising performance is presented, the unbalanced architecture makes it unnecessarily complex and inefficient. For example, the image branch in CrossPoint is sim8.3x heavier than the point cloud branch leading to higher complexity and latency. To address this problem, in this paper, we propose a lightweight Vision-and-Pointcloud Transformer (ViPFormer) to unify image and point cloud processing in a single architecture. ViPFormer learns in an unsupervised manner by optimizing intra-modal and cross-modal contrastive objectives. Then the pretrained model is transferred to various downstream tasks, including 3D shape classification and semantic segmentation. Experiments on different datasets show ViPFormer surpasses previous state-of-the-art unsupervised methods with higher accuracy, lower model complexity and runtime latency. Finally, the effectiveness of each component in ViPFormer is validated by extensive ablation studies. The implementation of the proposed method is available at https://github.com/auniquesun/ViPFormer.

Recent temporal LiDAR-based 3D object detectors achieve promising performance based on the two-stage proposal-based approach. They generate 3D box candidates from the first-stage dense detector, followed by different temporal aggregation methods. However, these approaches require per-frame objects or whole point clouds, posing challenges related to memory bank utilization. Moreover, point clouds and trajectory features are combined solely based on concatenation, which may neglect effective interactions between them. In this paper, we propose a point-trajectory transformer with long short-term memory for efficient temporal 3D object detection. To this end, we only utilize point clouds of current-frame objects and their historical trajectories as input to minimize the memory bank storage requirement. Furthermore, we introduce modules to encode trajectory features, focusing on long short-term and future-aware perspectives, and then effectively aggregate them with point cloud features. We conduct extensive experiments on the large-scale Waymo dataset to demonstrate that our approach performs well against state-of-the-art methods. Code and models will be made publicly available at https://github.com/kuanchihhuang/PTT.

This paper targets high-fidelity and real-time view synthesis of dynamic 3D scenes at 4K resolution. Recently, some methods on dynamic view synthesis have shown impressive rendering quality. However, their speed is still limited when rendering high-resolution images. To overcome this problem, we propose 4K4D, a 4D point cloud representation that supports hardware rasterization and enables unprecedented rendering speed. Our representation is built on a 4D feature grid so that the points are naturally regularized and can be robustly optimized. In addition, we design a novel hybrid appearance model that significantly boosts the rendering quality while preserving efficiency. Moreover, we develop a differentiable depth peeling algorithm to effectively learn the proposed model from RGB videos. Experiments show that our representation can be rendered at over 400 FPS on the DNA-Rendering dataset at 1080p resolution and 80 FPS on the ENeRF-Outdoor dataset at 4K resolution using an RTX 4090 GPU, which is 30x faster than previous methods and achieves the state-of-the-art rendering quality. We will release the code for reproducibility.

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has emerged as a core technique for 3D representation. Its effectiveness largely depends on precise camera poses and accurate point cloud initialization, which are often derived from pretrained Multi-View Stereo (MVS) models. However, in unposed reconstruction task from hundreds of outdoor images, existing MVS models may struggle with memory limits and lose accuracy as the number of input images grows. To address this limitation, we propose a novel unposed 3DGS reconstruction framework that integrates pretrained MVS priors with the probabilistic Procrustes mapping strategy. The method partitions input images into subsets, maps submaps into a global space, and jointly optimizes geometry and poses with 3DGS. Technically, we formulate the mapping of tens of millions of point clouds as a probabilistic Procrustes problem and solve a closed-form alignment. By employing probabilistic coupling along with a soft dustbin mechanism to reject uncertain correspondences, our method globally aligns point clouds and poses within minutes across hundreds of images. Moreover, we propose a joint optimization framework for 3DGS and camera poses. It constructs Gaussians from confidence-aware anchor points and integrates 3DGS differentiable rendering with an analytical Jacobian to jointly refine scene and poses, enabling accurate reconstruction and pose estimation. Experiments on Waymo and KITTI datasets show that our method achieves accurate reconstruction from unposed image sequences, setting a new state of the art for unposed 3DGS reconstruction.

We introduce ECLAIR (Extended Classification of Lidar for AI Recognition), a new outdoor large-scale aerial LiDAR dataset designed specifically for advancing research in point cloud semantic segmentation. As the most extensive and diverse collection of its kind to date, the dataset covers a total area of 10km^2 with close to 600 million points and features eleven distinct object categories. To guarantee the dataset's quality and utility, we have thoroughly curated the point labels through an internal team of experts, ensuring accuracy and consistency in semantic labeling. The dataset is engineered to move forward the fields of 3D urban modeling, scene understanding, and utility infrastructure management by presenting new challenges and potential applications. As a benchmark, we report qualitative and quantitative analysis of a voxel-based point cloud segmentation approach based on the Minkowski Engine.

Point cloud registration is the task of estimating the rigid transformation that aligns a pair of point cloud fragments. We present an efficient and robust framework for pairwise registration of real-world 3D scans, leveraging Hough voting in the 6D transformation parameter space. First, deep geometric features are extracted from a point cloud pair to compute putative correspondences. We then construct a set of triplets of correspondences to cast votes on the 6D Hough space, representing the transformation parameters in sparse tensors. Next, a fully convolutional refinement module is applied to refine the noisy votes. Finally, we identify the consensus among the correspondences from the Hough space, which we use to predict our final transformation parameters. Our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on 3DMatch and 3DLoMatch benchmarks while achieving comparable performance on KITTI odometry dataset. We further demonstrate the generalizability of our approach by setting a new state-of-the-art on ICL-NUIM dataset, where we integrate our module into a multi-way registration pipeline.

We study the task of weakly-supervised point cloud semantic segmentation with sparse annotations (e.g., less than 0.1% points are labeled), aiming to reduce the expensive cost of dense annotations. Unfortunately, with extremely sparse annotated points, it is very difficult to extract both contextual and object information for scene understanding such as semantic segmentation. Motivated by masked modeling (e.g., MAE) in image and video representation learning, we seek to endow the power of masked modeling to learn contextual information from sparsely-annotated points. However, directly applying MAE to 3D point clouds with sparse annotations may fail to work. First, it is nontrivial to effectively mask out the informative visual context from 3D point clouds. Second, how to fully exploit the sparse annotations for context modeling remains an open question. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective Contextual Point Cloud Modeling (CPCM) method that consists of two parts: a region-wise masking (RegionMask) strategy and a contextual masked training (CMT) method. Specifically, RegionMask masks the point cloud continuously in geometric space to construct a meaningful masked prediction task for subsequent context learning. CMT disentangles the learning of supervised segmentation and unsupervised masked context prediction for effectively learning the very limited labeled points and mass unlabeled points, respectively. Extensive experiments on the widely-tested ScanNet V2 and S3DIS benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of CPCM over the state-of-the-art.

3D Gaussian splatting (3DGS) has recently emerged as an alternative representation that leverages a 3D Gaussian-based representation and introduces an approximated volumetric rendering, achieving very fast rendering speed and promising image quality. Furthermore, subsequent studies have successfully extended 3DGS to dynamic 3D scenes, demonstrating its wide range of applications. However, a significant drawback arises as 3DGS and its following methods entail a substantial number of Gaussians to maintain the high fidelity of the rendered images, which requires a large amount of memory and storage. To address this critical issue, we place a specific emphasis on two key objectives: reducing the number of Gaussian points without sacrificing performance and compressing the Gaussian attributes, such as view-dependent color and covariance. To this end, we propose a learnable mask strategy that significantly reduces the number of Gaussians while preserving high performance. In addition, we propose a compact but effective representation of view-dependent color by employing a grid-based neural field rather than relying on spherical harmonics. Finally, we learn codebooks to compactly represent the geometric and temporal attributes by residual vector quantization. With model compression techniques such as quantization and entropy coding, we consistently show over 25x reduced storage and enhanced rendering speed compared to 3DGS for static scenes, while maintaining the quality of the scene representation. For dynamic scenes, our approach achieves more than 12x storage efficiency and retains a high-quality reconstruction compared to the existing state-of-the-art methods. Our work provides a comprehensive framework for 3D scene representation, achieving high performance, fast training, compactness, and real-time rendering. Our project page is available at https://maincold2.github.io/c3dgs/.

Labeling LiDAR point clouds is notoriously time-and-energy-consuming, which spurs recent unsupervised 3D representation learning methods to alleviate the labeling burden in LiDAR perception via pretrained weights. Almost all existing work focus on a single frame of LiDAR point cloud and neglect the temporal LiDAR sequence, which naturally accounts for object motion (and their semantics). Instead, we propose TREND, namely Temporal REndering with Neural fielD, to learn 3D representation via forecasting the future observation in an unsupervised manner. Unlike existing work that follows conventional contrastive learning or masked auto encoding paradigms, TREND integrates forecasting for 3D pre-training through a Recurrent Embedding scheme to generate 3D embedding across time and a Temporal Neural Field to represent the 3D scene, through which we compute the loss using differentiable rendering. To our best knowledge, TREND is the first work on temporal forecasting for unsupervised 3D representation learning. We evaluate TREND on downstream 3D object detection tasks on popular datasets, including NuScenes, Once and Waymo. Experiment results show that TREND brings up to 90% more improvement as compared to previous SOTA unsupervised 3D pre-training methods and generally improve different downstream models across datasets, demonstrating that indeed temporal forecasting brings improvement for LiDAR perception. Codes and models will be released.

Rendering high-fidelity images from sparse point clouds is still challenging. Existing learning-based approaches suffer from either hole artifacts, missing details, or expensive computations. In this paper, we propose a novel framework to render high-quality images from sparse points. This method first attempts to bridge the 3D Gaussian Splatting and point cloud rendering, which includes several cascaded modules. We first use a regressor to estimate Gaussian properties in a point-wise manner, the estimated properties are used to rasterize neural feature descriptors into 2D planes which are extracted from a multiscale extractor. The projected feature volume is gradually decoded toward the final prediction via a multiscale and progressive decoder. The whole pipeline experiences a two-stage training and is driven by our well-designed progressive and multiscale reconstruction loss. Experiments on different benchmarks show the superiority of our method in terms of rendering qualities and the necessities of our main components.

While scaling laws have transformed natural language processing and computer vision, 3D point cloud understanding has yet to reach that stage. This can be attributed to both the comparatively smaller scale of 3D datasets, as well as the disparate sources of the data itself. Point clouds are captured by diverse sensors (e.g., depth cameras, LiDAR) across varied domains (e.g., indoor, outdoor), each introducing unique scanning patterns, sampling densities, and semantic biases. Such domain heterogeneity poses a major barrier towards training unified models at scale, especially under the realistic constraint that domain labels are typically inaccessible at inference time. In this work, we propose Point-MoE, a Mixture-of-Experts architecture designed to enable large-scale, cross-domain generalization in 3D perception. We show that standard point cloud backbones degrade significantly in performance when trained on mixed-domain data, whereas Point-MoE with a simple top-k routing strategy can automatically specialize experts, even without access to domain labels. Our experiments demonstrate that Point-MoE not only outperforms strong multi-domain baselines but also generalizes better to unseen domains. This work highlights a scalable path forward for 3D understanding: letting the model discover structure in diverse 3D data, rather than imposing it via manual curation or domain supervision.

This is only a preview version of GauMesh. Recently, primitive-based rendering has been proven to achieve convincing results in solving the problem of modeling and rendering the 3D dynamic scene from 2D images. Despite this, in the context of novel view synthesis, each type of primitive has its inherent defects in terms of representation ability. It is difficult to exploit the mesh to depict the fuzzy geometry. Meanwhile, the point-based splatting (e.g. the 3D Gaussian Splatting) method usually produces artifacts or blurry pixels in the area with smooth geometry and sharp textures. As a result, it is difficult, even not impossible, to represent the complex and dynamic scene with a single type of primitive. To this end, we propose a novel approach, GauMesh, to bridge the 3D Gaussian and Mesh for modeling and rendering the dynamic scenes. Given a sequence of tracked mesh as initialization, our goal is to simultaneously optimize the mesh geometry, color texture, opacity maps, a set of 3D Gaussians, and the deformation field. At a specific time, we perform alpha-blending on the RGB and opacity values based on the merged and re-ordered z-buffers from mesh and 3D Gaussian rasterizations. This produces the final rendering, which is supervised by the ground-truth image. Experiments demonstrate that our approach adapts the appropriate type of primitives to represent the different parts of the dynamic scene and outperforms all the baseline methods in both quantitative and qualitative comparisons without losing render speed.

Despite the progress on 3D point cloud deep learning, most prior works focus on learning features that are invariant to translation and point permutation, and very limited efforts have been devoted for rotation invariant property. Several recent studies achieve rotation invariance at the cost of lower accuracies. In this work, we close this gap by proposing a novel yet effective rotation invariant architecture for 3D point cloud classification and segmentation. Instead of traditional pointwise operations, we construct local triangle surfaces to capture more detailed surface structure, based on which we can extract highly expressive rotation invariant surface properties which are then integrated into an attention-augmented convolution operator named RISurConv to generate refined attention features via self-attention layers. Based on RISurConv we build an effective neural network for 3D point cloud analysis that is invariant to arbitrary rotations while maintaining high accuracy. We verify the performance on various benchmarks with supreme results obtained surpassing the previous state-of-the-art by a large margin. We achieve an overall accuracy of 96.0% (+4.7%) on ModelNet40, 93.1% (+12.8%) on ScanObjectNN, and class accuracies of 91.5% (+3.6%), 82.7% (+5.1%), and 78.5% (+9.2%) on the three categories of the FG3D dataset for the fine-grained classification task. Additionally, we achieve 81.5% (+1.0%) mIoU on ShapeNet for the segmentation task. Code is available here: https://github.com/cszyzhang/RISurConv

Self-supervised learning (SSL) for point cloud pre-training has become a cornerstone for many 3D vision tasks, enabling effective learning from large-scale unannotated data. At the scene level, existing SSL methods often incorporate volume rendering into the pre-training framework, using RGB-D images as reconstruction signals to facilitate cross-modal learning. This strategy promotes alignment between 2D and 3D modalities and enables the model to benefit from rich visual cues in the RGB-D inputs. However, these approaches are limited by their reliance on implicit scene representations and high memory demands. Furthermore, since their reconstruction objectives are applied only in 2D space, they often fail to capture underlying 3D geometric structures. To address these challenges, we propose Gaussian2Scene, a novel scene-level SSL framework that leverages the efficiency and explicit nature of 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) for pre-training. The use of 3DGS not only alleviates the computational burden associated with volume rendering but also supports direct 3D scene reconstruction, thereby enhancing the geometric understanding of the backbone network. Our approach follows a progressive two-stage training strategy. In the first stage, a dual-branch masked autoencoder learns both 2D and 3D scene representations. In the second stage, we initialize training with reconstructed point clouds and further supervise learning using the geometric locations of Gaussian primitives and rendered RGB images. This process reinforces both geometric and cross-modal learning. We demonstrate the effectiveness of Gaussian2Scene across several downstream 3D object detection tasks, showing consistent improvements over existing pre-training methods.

The remarkable breakthroughs in point cloud representation learning have boosted their usage in real-world applications such as self-driving cars and virtual reality. However, these applications usually have an urgent requirement for not only accurate but also efficient 3D object detection. Recently, knowledge distillation has been proposed as an effective model compression technique, which transfers the knowledge from an over-parameterized teacher to a lightweight student and achieves consistent effectiveness in 2D vision. However, due to point clouds' sparsity and irregularity, directly applying previous image-based knowledge distillation methods to point cloud detectors usually leads to unsatisfactory performance. To fill the gap, this paper proposes PointDistiller, a structured knowledge distillation framework for point clouds-based 3D detection. Concretely, PointDistiller includes local distillation which extracts and distills the local geometric structure of point clouds with dynamic graph convolution and reweighted learning strategy, which highlights student learning on the crucial points or voxels to improve knowledge distillation efficiency. Extensive experiments on both voxels-based and raw points-based detectors have demonstrated the effectiveness of our method over seven previous knowledge distillation methods. For instance, our 4X compressed PointPillars student achieves 2.8 and 3.4 mAP improvements on BEV and 3D object detection, outperforming its teacher by 0.9 and 1.8 mAP, respectively. Codes have been released at https://github.com/RunpeiDong/PointDistiller.

We present a Multimodal Interlaced Transformer (MIT) that jointly considers 2D and 3D data for weakly supervised point cloud segmentation. Research studies have shown that 2D and 3D features are complementary for point cloud segmentation. However, existing methods require extra 2D annotations to achieve 2D-3D information fusion. Considering the high annotation cost of point clouds, effective 2D and 3D feature fusion based on weakly supervised learning is in great demand. To this end, we propose a transformer model with two encoders and one decoder for weakly supervised point cloud segmentation using only scene-level class tags. Specifically, the two encoders compute the self-attended features for 3D point clouds and 2D multi-view images, respectively. The decoder implements interlaced 2D-3D cross-attention and carries out implicit 2D and 3D feature fusion. We alternately switch the roles of queries and key-value pairs in the decoder layers. It turns out that the 2D and 3D features are iteratively enriched by each other. Experiments show that it performs favorably against existing weakly supervised point cloud segmentation methods by a large margin on the S3DIS and ScanNet benchmarks. The project page will be available at https://jimmy15923.github.io/mit_web/.

Text-to-3D generation has recently garnered significant attention, fueled by 2D diffusion models trained on billions of image-text pairs. Existing methods primarily rely on score distillation to leverage the 2D diffusion priors to supervise the generation of 3D models, e.g., NeRF. However, score distillation is prone to suffer the view inconsistency problem, and implicit NeRF modeling can also lead to an arbitrary shape, thus leading to less realistic and uncontrollable 3D generation. In this work, we propose a flexible framework of Points-to-3D to bridge the gap between sparse yet freely available 3D points and realistic shape-controllable 3D generation by distilling the knowledge from both 2D and 3D diffusion models. The core idea of Points-to-3D is to introduce controllable sparse 3D points to guide the text-to-3D generation. Specifically, we use the sparse point cloud generated from the 3D diffusion model, Point-E, as the geometric prior, conditioned on a single reference image. To better utilize the sparse 3D points, we propose an efficient point cloud guidance loss to adaptively drive the NeRF's geometry to align with the shape of the sparse 3D points. In addition to controlling the geometry, we propose to optimize the NeRF for a more view-consistent appearance. To be specific, we perform score distillation to the publicly available 2D image diffusion model ControlNet, conditioned on text as well as depth map of the learned compact geometry. Qualitative and quantitative comparisons demonstrate that Points-to-3D improves view consistency and achieves good shape controllability for text-to-3D generation. Points-to-3D provides users with a new way to improve and control text-to-3D generation.

Most real-world 3D measurements from depth sensors are incomplete, and to address this issue the point cloud completion task aims to predict the complete shapes of objects from partial observations. Previous works often adapt an encoder-decoder architecture, where the encoder is trained to extract embeddings that are used as inputs to generate predictions from the decoder. However, the learned embeddings have sparse distribution in the feature space, which leads to worse generalization results during testing. To address these problems, this paper proposes a hyperspherical module, which transforms and normalizes embeddings from the encoder to be on a unit hypersphere. With the proposed module, the magnitude and direction of the output hyperspherical embedding are decoupled and only the directional information is optimized. We theoretically analyze the hyperspherical embedding and show that it enables more stable training with a wider range of learning rates and more compact embedding distributions. Experiment results show consistent improvement of point cloud completion in both single-task and multi-task learning, which demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed method.

This paper concerns the research problem of point cloud registration to find the rigid transformation to optimally align the source point set with the target one. Learning robust point cloud registration models with deep neural networks has emerged as a powerful paradigm, offering promising performance in predicting the global geometric transformation for a pair of point sets. Existing methods firstly leverage an encoder to regress a latent shape embedding, which is then decoded into a shape-conditioned transformation via concatenation-based conditioning. However, different regions of a 3D shape vary in their geometric structures which makes it more sense that we have a region-conditioned transformation instead of the shape-conditioned one. In this paper we present a Region-Aware point cloud Registration, denoted as RAR, to predict transformation for pairwise point sets in the self-supervised learning fashion. More specifically, we develop a novel region-aware decoder (RAD) module that is formed with an implicit neural region representation parameterized by neural networks. The implicit neural region representation is learned with a self-supervised 3D shape reconstruction loss without the need for region labels. Consequently, the region-aware decoder (RAD) module guides the training of the region-aware transformation (RAT) module and region-aware weight (RAW) module, which predict the transforms and weights for different regions respectively. The global geometric transformation from source point set to target one is then formed by the weighted fusion of region-aware transforms. Compared to the state-of-the-art approaches, our experiments show that our RAR achieves superior registration performance over various benchmark datasets (e.g. ModelNet40).

Large-scale visual localization systems continue to rely on 3D point clouds built from image collections using structure-from-motion. While the 3D points in these models are represented using local image features, directly matching a query image's local features against the point cloud is challenging due to the scale of the nearest-neighbor search problem. Many recent approaches to visual localization have thus proposed a hybrid method, where first a global (per image) embedding is used to retrieve a small subset of database images, and local features of the query are matched only against those. It seems to have become common belief that global embeddings are critical for said image-retrieval in visual localization, despite the significant downside of having to compute two feature types for each query image. In this paper, we take a step back from this assumption and propose Constrained Approximate Nearest Neighbors (CANN), a joint solution of k-nearest-neighbors across both the geometry and appearance space using only local features. We first derive the theoretical foundation for k-nearest-neighbor retrieval across multiple metrics and then showcase how CANN improves visual localization. Our experiments on public localization benchmarks demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms both state-of-the-art global feature-based retrieval and approaches using local feature aggregation schemes. Moreover, it is an order of magnitude faster in both index and query time than feature aggregation schemes for these datasets. Code will be released.

Point management is a critical component in optimizing 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) models, as the point initiation (e.g., via structure from motion) is distributionally inappropriate. Typically, the Adaptive Density Control (ADC) algorithm is applied, leveraging view-averaged gradient magnitude thresholding for point densification, opacity thresholding for pruning, and regular all-points opacity reset. However, we reveal that this strategy is limited in tackling intricate/special image regions (e.g., transparent) as it is unable to identify all the 3D zones that require point densification, and lacking an appropriate mechanism to handle the ill-conditioned points with negative impacts (occlusion due to false high opacity). To address these limitations, we propose a Localized Point Management (LPM) strategy, capable of identifying those error-contributing zones in the highest demand for both point addition and geometry calibration. Zone identification is achieved by leveraging the underlying multiview geometry constraints, with the guidance of image rendering errors. We apply point densification in the identified zone, whilst resetting the opacity of those points residing in front of these regions so that a new opportunity is created to correct ill-conditioned points. Serving as a versatile plugin, LPM can be seamlessly integrated into existing 3D Gaussian Splatting models. Experimental evaluation across both static 3D and dynamic 4D scenes validate the efficacy of our LPM strategy in boosting a variety of existing 3DGS models both quantitatively and qualitatively. Notably, LPM improves both vanilla 3DGS and SpaceTimeGS to achieve state-of-the-art rendering quality while retaining real-time speeds, outperforming on challenging datasets such as Tanks & Temples and the Neural 3D Video Dataset.

We present cmKAN, a versatile framework for color matching. Given an input image with colors from a source color distribution, our method effectively and accurately maps these colors to match a target color distribution in both supervised and unsupervised settings. Our framework leverages the spline capabilities of Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) to model the color matching between source and target distributions. Specifically, we developed a hypernetwork that generates spatially varying weight maps to control the nonlinear splines of a KAN, enabling accurate color matching. As part of this work, we introduce a first large-scale dataset of paired images captured by two distinct cameras and evaluate the efficacy of our and existing methods in matching colors. We evaluated our approach across various color-matching tasks, including: (1) raw-to-raw mapping, where the source color distribution is in one camera's raw color space and the target in another camera's raw space; (2) raw-to-sRGB mapping, where the source color distribution is in a camera's raw space and the target is in the display sRGB space, emulating the color rendering of a camera ISP; and (3) sRGB-to-sRGB mapping, where the goal is to transfer colors from a source sRGB space (e.g., produced by a source camera ISP) to a target sRGB space (e.g., from a different camera ISP). The results show that our method outperforms existing approaches by 37.3% on average for supervised and unsupervised cases while remaining lightweight compared to other methods. The codes, dataset, and pre-trained models are available at: https://github.com/gosha20777/cmKAN

We introduce Point-Bind, a 3D multi-modality model aligning point clouds with 2D image, language, audio, and video. Guided by ImageBind, we construct a joint embedding space between 3D and multi-modalities, enabling many promising applications, e.g., any-to-3D generation, 3D embedding arithmetic, and 3D open-world understanding. On top of this, we further present Point-LLM, the first 3D large language model (LLM) following 3D multi-modal instructions. By parameter-efficient fine-tuning techniques, Point-LLM injects the semantics of Point-Bind into pre-trained LLMs, e.g., LLaMA, which requires no 3D instruction data, but exhibits superior 3D and multi-modal question-answering capacity. We hope our work may cast a light on the community for extending 3D point clouds to multi-modality applications. Code is available at https://github.com/ZiyuGuo99/Point-Bind_Point-LLM.

This study introduces a novel framework, G3Reg, for fast and robust global registration of LiDAR point clouds. In contrast to conventional complex keypoints and descriptors, we extract fundamental geometric primitives, including planes, clusters, and lines (PCL) from the raw point cloud to obtain low-level semantic segments. Each segment is represented as a unified Gaussian Ellipsoid Model (GEM), using a probability ellipsoid to ensure the ground truth centers are encompassed with a certain degree of probability. Utilizing these GEMs, we present a distrust-and-verify scheme based on a Pyramid Compatibility Graph for Global Registration (PAGOR). Specifically, we establish an upper bound, which can be traversed based on the confidence level for compatibility testing to construct the pyramid graph. Then, we solve multiple maximum cliques (MAC) for each level of the pyramid graph, thus generating the corresponding transformation candidates. In the verification phase, we adopt a precise and efficient metric for point cloud alignment quality, founded on geometric primitives, to identify the optimal candidate. The algorithm's performance is validated on three publicly available datasets and a self-collected multi-session dataset. Parameter settings remained unchanged during the experiment evaluations. The results exhibit superior robustness and real-time performance of the G3Reg framework compared to state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, we demonstrate the potential for integrating individual GEM and PAGOR components into other registration frameworks to enhance their efficacy. Code: https://github.com/HKUST-Aerial-Robotics/G3Reg

As the task of 2D-to-3D reconstruction has gained significant attention in various real-world scenarios, it becomes crucial to be able to generate high-quality point clouds. Despite the recent success of deep learning models in generating point clouds, there are still challenges in producing high-fidelity results due to the disparities between images and point clouds. While vision transformers (ViT) and diffusion models have shown promise in various vision tasks, their benefits for reconstructing point clouds from images have not been demonstrated yet. In this paper, we first propose a neat and powerful architecture called DiffPoint that combines ViT and diffusion models for the task of point cloud reconstruction. At each diffusion step, we divide the noisy point clouds into irregular patches. Then, using a standard ViT backbone that treats all inputs as tokens (including time information, image embeddings, and noisy patches), we train our model to predict target points based on input images. We evaluate DiffPoint on both single-view and multi-view reconstruction tasks and achieve state-of-the-art results. Additionally, we introduce a unified and flexible feature fusion module for aggregating image features from single or multiple input images. Furthermore, our work demonstrates the feasibility of applying unified architectures across languages and images to improve 3D reconstruction tasks.

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) are a very recent and very popular approach for the problems of novel view synthesis and 3D reconstruction. A popular scene representation used by NeRFs is to combine a uniform, voxel-based subdivision of the scene with an MLP. Based on the observation that a (sparse) point cloud of the scene is often available, this paper proposes to use an adaptive representation based on tetrahedra obtained by Delaunay triangulation instead of uniform subdivision or point-based representations. We show that such a representation enables efficient training and leads to state-of-the-art results. Our approach elegantly combines concepts from 3D geometry processing, triangle-based rendering, and modern neural radiance fields. Compared to voxel-based representations, ours provides more detail around parts of the scene likely to be close to the surface. Compared to point-based representations, our approach achieves better performance. The source code is publicly available at: https://jkulhanek.com/tetra-nerf.

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) provide an energy-efficient way to extract 3D spatio-temporal features. Point clouds are sparse 3D spatial data, which suggests that SNNs should be well-suited for processing them. However, when applying SNNs to point clouds, they often exhibit limited performance and fewer application scenarios. We attribute this to inappropriate preprocessing and feature extraction methods. To address this issue, we first introduce the Spike Voxel Coding (SVC) scheme, which encodes the 3D point clouds into a sparse spike train space, reducing the storage requirements and saving time on point cloud preprocessing. Then, we propose a Spike Sparse Convolution (SSC) model for efficiently extracting 3D sparse point cloud features. Combining SVC and SSC, we design an efficient 3D SNN backbone (E-3DSNN), which is friendly with neuromorphic hardware. For instance, SSC can be implemented on neuromorphic chips with only minor modifications to the addressing function of vanilla spike convolution. Experiments on ModelNet40, KITTI, and Semantic KITTI datasets demonstrate that E-3DSNN achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) results with remarkable efficiency. Notably, our E-3DSNN (1.87M) obtained 91.7\% top-1 accuracy on ModelNet40, surpassing the current best SNN baselines (14.3M) by 3.0\%. To our best knowledge, it is the first direct training 3D SNN backbone that can simultaneously handle various 3D computer vision tasks (e.g., classification, detection, and segmentation) with an event-driven nature. Code is available: https://github.com/bollossom/E-3DSNN/.

Point-based radiance field rendering has demonstrated impressive results for novel view synthesis, offering a compelling blend of rendering quality and computational efficiency. However, also latest approaches in this domain are not without their shortcomings. 3D Gaussian Splatting [Kerbl and Kopanas et al. 2023] struggles when tasked with rendering highly detailed scenes, due to blurring and cloudy artifacts. On the other hand, ADOP [R\"uckert et al. 2022] can accommodate crisper images, but the neural reconstruction network decreases performance, it grapples with temporal instability and it is unable to effectively address large gaps in the point cloud. In this paper, we present TRIPS (Trilinear Point Splatting), an approach that combines ideas from both Gaussian Splatting and ADOP. The fundamental concept behind our novel technique involves rasterizing points into a screen-space image pyramid, with the selection of the pyramid layer determined by the projected point size. This approach allows rendering arbitrarily large points using a single trilinear write. A lightweight neural network is then used to reconstruct a hole-free image including detail beyond splat resolution. Importantly, our render pipeline is entirely differentiable, allowing for automatic optimization of both point sizes and positions. Our evaluation demonstrate that TRIPS surpasses existing state-of-the-art methods in terms of rendering quality while maintaining a real-time frame rate of 60 frames per second on readily available hardware. This performance extends to challenging scenarios, such as scenes featuring intricate geometry, expansive landscapes, and auto-exposed footage.

Enabling Large Language Models (LLMs) to comprehend the 3D physical world remains a significant challenge. Due to the lack of large-scale 3D-text pair datasets, the success of LLMs has yet to be replicated in 3D understanding. In this paper, we rethink this issue and propose a new task: 3D Data-Efficient Point-Language Understanding. The goal is to enable LLMs to achieve robust 3D object understanding with minimal 3D point cloud and text data pairs. To address this task, we introduce GreenPLM, which leverages more text data to compensate for the lack of 3D data. First, inspired by using CLIP to align images and text, we utilize a pre-trained point cloud-text encoder to map the 3D point cloud space to the text space. This mapping leaves us to seamlessly connect the text space with LLMs. Once the point-text-LLM connection is established, we further enhance text-LLM alignment by expanding the intermediate text space, thereby reducing the reliance on 3D point cloud data. Specifically, we generate 6M free-text descriptions of 3D objects, and design a three-stage training strategy to help LLMs better explore the intrinsic connections between different modalities. To achieve efficient modality alignment, we design a zero-parameter cross-attention module for token pooling. Extensive experimental results show that GreenPLM requires only 12% of the 3D training data used by existing state-of-the-art models to achieve superior 3D understanding. Remarkably, GreenPLM also achieves competitive performance using text-only data. The code and weights are available at: https://github.com/TangYuan96/GreenPLM.