Local region-learning modules for point cloud classification

Data organization via forming local regions is an integral part of deep learning networks that process 3D point clouds in a hierarchical manner. At each level, the point cloud is sampled to extract representative points and these points are used to be centers of local regions. The organization of local regions is of considerable importance since it determines the location and size of the receptive field at a particular layer of feature aggregation. In this paper, we present two local region-learning modules: Center Shift Module to infer the appropriate shift for each center point, and Radius Update Module to alter the radius of each local region. The parameters of the modules are learned through optimizing the loss associated with the particular task within an end-to-end network. We present alternatives for these modules through various ways of modeling the interactions of the features and locations of 3D points in the point cloud. We integrated both modules independently and together to the PointNet++ object classification architecture, and demonstrated that the modules contributed to a significant increase in classification accuracy for the ScanObjectNN data set.

Segmentation of structural parts of rosebush plants with 3D point-based deep learning methods

Segmentation of structural parts of 3D models of plants is an important step for plant phenotyping, especially for monitoring architectural and morphological traits. This work introduces a benchmark for assessing the performance of 3D point-based deep learning methods on organ segmentation of 3D plant models, specifically rosebush models. Six recent deep learning architectures that segment 3D point clouds into semantic parts were adapted and compared. The methods were tested on the ROSE-X data set, containing fully annotated 3D models of real rosebush plants. The contribution of incorporating synthetic 3D models generated through Lindenmayer systems into training data was also investigated.