A Tiny Machine Learning Model for Point Cloud Object Classification

The design of a tiny machine learning model, which can be deployed in mobile and edge devices, for point cloud object classification is investigated in this work. To achieve this objective, we replace the multi-scale representation of a point cloud object with a single-scale representation for complexity reduction, and exploit rich 3D geometric information of a point cloud object for performance improvement. The proposed solution is named Green-PointHop due to its low computational complexity. We evaluate the performance of Green-PointHop on ModelNet40 and ScanObjectNN two datasets. Green-PointHop has a model size of 64K parameters. It demands 2.3M floating-point operations (FLOPs) to classify a ModelNet40 object of 1024 down-sampled points. Its classification performance gaps against the state-of-the-art DGCNN method are 3% and 7% for ModelNet40 and ScanObjectNN, respectively. On the other hand, the model size and inference complexity of DGCNN are 42X and 1203X of those of Green-PointHop, respectively.

S3I-PointHop: SO(3)-Invariant PointHop for 3D Point Cloud Classification

Many point cloud classification methods are developed under the assumption that all point clouds in the dataset are well aligned with the canonical axes so that the 3D Cartesian point coordinates can be employed to learn features. When input point clouds are not aligned, the classification performance drops significantly. In this work, we focus on a mathematically transparent point cloud classification method called PointHop, analyze its reason for failure due to pose variations, and solve the problem by replacing its pose dependent modules with rotation invariant counterparts. The proposed method is named SO(3)-Invariant PointHop (or S3I-PointHop in short). We also significantly simplify the PointHop pipeline using only one single hop along with multiple spatial aggregation techniques. The idea of exploiting more spatial information is novel. Experiments on the ModelNet40 dataset demonstrate the superiority of S3I-PointHop over traditional PointHop-like methods.