Local-consistent Transformation Learning for Rotation-invariant Point Cloud Analysis

Rotation invariance is an important requirement for point shape analysis. To achieve this, current state-of-the-art methods attempt to construct the local rotation-invariant representation through learning or defining the local reference frame (LRF). Although efficient, these LRF-based methods suffer from perturbation of local geometric relations, resulting in suboptimal local rotation invariance. To alleviate this issue, we propose a Local-consistent Transformation (LocoTrans) learning strategy. Specifically, we first construct the local-consistent reference frame (LCRF) by considering the symmetry of the two axes in LRF. In comparison with previous LRFs, our LCRF is able to preserve local geometric relationships better through performing local-consistent transformation. However, as the consistency only exists in local regions, the relative pose information is still lost in the intermediate layers of the network. We mitigate such a relative pose issue by developing a relative pose recovery (RPR) module. RPR aims to restore the relative pose between adjacent transformed patches. Equipped with LCRF and RPR, our LocoTrans is capable of learning local-consistent transformation and preserving local geometry, which benefits rotation invariance learning. Competitive performance under arbitrary rotations on both shape classification and part segmentation tasks and ablations can demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Code will be available publicly at https://github.com/wdttt/LocoTrans.

ConDaFormer: Disassembled Transformer with Local Structure Enhancement for 3D Point Cloud Understanding

Transformers have been recently explored for 3D point cloud understanding with impressive progress achieved. A large number of points, over 0.1 million, make the global self-attention infeasible for point cloud data. Thus, most methods propose to apply the transformer in a local region, e.g., spherical or cubic window. However, it still contains a large number of Query-Key pairs, which requires high computational costs. In addition, previous methods usually learn the query, key, and value using a linear projection without modeling the local 3D geometric structure. In this paper, we attempt to reduce the costs and model the local geometry prior by developing a new transformer block, named ConDaFormer. Technically, ConDaFormer disassembles the cubic window into three orthogonal 2D planes, leading to fewer points when modeling the attention in a similar range. The disassembling operation is beneficial to enlarging the range of attention without increasing the computational complexity, but ignores some contexts. To provide a remedy, we develop a local structure enhancement strategy that introduces a depth-wise convolution before and after the attention. This scheme can also capture the local geometric information. Taking advantage of these designs, ConDaFormer captures both long-range contextual information and local priors. The effectiveness is demonstrated by experimental results on several 3D point cloud understanding benchmarks. Code is available at https://github.com/LHDuan/ConDaFormer .