PointMBF: A Multi-scale Bidirectional Fusion Network for Unsupervised RGB-D Point Cloud Registration

Point cloud registration is a task to estimate the rigid transformation between two unaligned scans, which plays an important role in many computer vision applications. Previous learning-based works commonly focus on supervised registration, which have limitations in practice. Recently, with the advance of inexpensive RGB-D sensors, several learning-based works utilize RGB-D data to achieve unsupervised registration. However, most of existing unsupervised methods follow a cascaded design or fuse RGB-D data in a unidirectional manner, which do not fully exploit the complementary information in the RGB-D data. To leverage the complementary information more effectively, we propose a network implementing multi-scale bidirectional fusion between RGB images and point clouds generated from depth images. By bidirectionally fusing visual and geometric features in multi-scales, more distinctive deep features for correspondence estimation can be obtained, making our registration more accurate. Extensive experiments on ScanNet and 3DMatch demonstrate that our method achieves new state-of-the-art performance. Code will be released at https://github.com/phdymz/PointMBF

Boosting 3D Point Cloud Registration by Transferring Multi-modality Knowledge

The recent multi-modality models have achieved great performance in many vision tasks because the extracted features contain the multi-modality knowledge. However, most of the current registration descriptors have only concentrated on local geometric structures. This paper proposes a method to boost point cloud registration accuracy by transferring the multi-modality knowledge of pre-trained multi-modality model to a new descriptor neural network. Different to the previous multi-modality methods that requires both modalities, the proposed method only requires point clouds during inference. Specifically, we propose an ensemble descriptor neural network combining pre-trained sparse convolution branch and a new point-based convolution branch. By fine-tuning on a single modality data, the proposed method achieves new state-of-the-art results on 3DMatch and competitive accuracy on 3DLoMatch and KITTI.

Boosting Point-BERT by Multi-choice Tokens

Masked language modeling (MLM) has become one of the most successful self-supervised pre-training task. Inspired by its success, Point-BERT, as a pioneer work in point cloud, proposed masked point modeling (MPM) to pre-train point transformer on large scale unanotated dataset. Despite its great performance, we find the inherent difference between language and point cloud tends to cause ambiguous tokenization for point cloud. For point cloud, there doesn't exist a gold standard for point cloud tokenization. Point-BERT use a discrete Variational AutoEncoder (dVAE) as tokenizer, but it might generate different token ids for semantically-similar patches and generate the same token ids for semantically-dissimilar patches. To tackle above problem, we propose our McP-BERT, a pre-training framework with multi-choice tokens. Specifically, we ease the previous single-choice constraint on patch token ids in Point-BERT, and provide multi-choice token ids for each patch as supervision. Moreover, we utilitze the high-level semantics learned by transformer to further refine our supervision signals. Extensive experiments on point cloud classification, few-shot classification and part segmentation tasks demonstrate the superiority of our method, e.g., the pre-trained transformer achieves 94.1% accuracy on ModelNet40, 84.28% accuracy on the hardest setting of ScanObjectNN and new state-of-the-art performance on few-shot learning. We also demonstrate that our method not only improves the performance of Point-BERT on all downstream tasks, but also incurs almost no extra computational overhead. The code will be released in https://github.com/fukexue/McP-BERT.

Point-McBert: A Multi-choice Self-supervised Framework for Point Cloud Pre-training

Masked language modeling (MLM) has become one of the most successful self-supervised pre-training task. Inspired by its success, Point-Bert, as a pioneer work in point cloud, proposed masked point modeling (MPM) to pre-train point transformer on large scale unanotated dataset. Despite its great performance, we find inherent difference between language and point cloud tends to cause ambiguous tokenization for point cloud. For point cloud, there doesn't exist a gold standard for point cloud tokenization. Although Point-Bert introduce a discrete Variational AutoEncoder (dVAE) as tokenizer to allocate token ids to local patches, it tends to generate ambigious token ids for local patches. We find this imperfect tokenizer might generate different token ids for semantically-similar patches and same token ids for semantically-dissimilar patches. To tackle above problem, we propose our Point-McBert, a pre-training framework with eased and refined supervision signals. Specifically, we ease the previous single-choice constraint on patches, and provide multi-choice token ids for each patch as supervision. Moreover, we utilitze the high-level semantics learned by transformer to further refine our supervision signals. Extensive experiments on point cloud classification, few-shot classification and part segmentation tasks demonstrate the superiority of our method, e.g., the pre-trained transformer achieves 94.1% accuracy on ModelNet40, 84.28% accuracy on the hardest setting of ScanObjectNN and new state-of-the-art performance on few-shot learning. We also demonstrate that our method not only improves the performance of Point-Bert on all downstream tasks, but also incurs almost no extra computational overhead.