Going Deeper with Point Networks

In this work, we introduce three generic point cloud processing blocks that improve both accuracy and memory consumption of state-of-the-art networks thus allowing to design deeper and more accurate networks. The novel processing blocks are: a multi-resolution point cloud processing block; a convolution-type operation for point sets that blends neighborhood information in a memory-efficient manner; and a crosslink block that efficiently shares information across low- and high-resolution processing branches. Combining these blocks allows us to design significantly wider and deeper architectures. We extensively evaluate the proposed architectures on multiple point segmentation benchmarks (ShapeNet-Part, ScanNet, PartNet) and report systematic improvements in terms of both accuracy and memory consumption by using our generic modules in conjunction with multiple recent architectures (PointNet++, DGCNN, SpiderCNN, PointCNN). We report a 3.4% increase in IoU on the -most complex- PartNet dataset while decreasing memory footprint by 57%.