Point cloud learning has lately attracted increasing attention due to its wide applications in many areas, such as computer vision, autonomous driving, and robotics. As a dominating technique in AI, deep learning has been successfully used to solve various 2D vision problems. However, deep learning on point clouds is still in its infancy due to the unique challenges faced by the processing of point clouds with deep neural networks. Recently, deep learning on point clouds has become even thriving, with numerous methods being proposed to address different problems in this area. To stimulate future research, this paper presents a comprehensive review of recent progress in deep learning methods for point clouds. It covers three major tasks, including 3D shape classification, 3D object detection and tracking, and 3D point cloud segmentation. It also presents comparative results on several publicly available datasets, together with insightful observations and inspiring future research directions.
Point cloud registration is to estimate a transformation to align point clouds collected in different perspectives. In learning-based point cloud registration, a robust descriptor is vital for high-accuracy registration. However, most methods are susceptible to noise and have poor generalization ability on unseen datasets. Motivated by this, we introduce SphereNet to learn a noise-robust and unseen-general descriptor for point cloud registration. In our method, first, the spheroid generator builds a geometric domain based on spherical voxelization to encode initial features. Then, the spherical interpolation of the sphere is introduced to realize robustness against noise. Finally, a new spherical convolutional neural network with spherical integrity padding completes the extraction of descriptors, which reduces the loss of features and fully captures the geometric features. To evaluate our methods, a new benchmark 3DMatchnoise with strong noise is introduced. Extensive experiments are carried out on both indoor and outdoor datasets. Under high-intensity noise, SphereNet increases the feature matching recall by more than 25 percentage points on 3DMatch-noise. In addition, it sets a new state-of-the-art performance for the 3DMatch and 3DLoMatch benchmarks with 93.5% and 75.6% registration recall and also has the best generalization ability on unseen datasets.
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