POIRot: A rotation invariant omni-directional pointnet

Point-cloud is an efficient way to represent 3D world. Analysis of point-cloud deals with understanding the underlying 3D geometric structure. But due to the lack of smooth topology, and hence the lack of neighborhood structure, standard correlation can not be directly applied on point-cloud. One of the popular approaches to do point correlation is to partition the point-cloud into voxels and extract features using standard 3D correlation. But this approach suffers from sparsity of point-cloud and hence results in multiple empty voxels. One possible solution to deal with this problem is to learn a MLP to map a point or its local neighborhood to a high dimensional feature space. All these methods suffer from a large number of parameters requirement and are susceptible to random rotations. A popular way to make the model "invariant" to rotations is to use data augmentation techniques with small rotations but the potential drawback includes \item more training samples \item susceptible to large rotations. In this work, we develop a rotation invariant point-cloud segmentation and classification scheme based on the omni-directional camera model (dubbed as {\bf POIRot$^1$}). Our proposed model is rotationally invariant and can preserve geometric shape of a 3D point-cloud. Because of the inherent rotation invariant property, our proposed framework requires fewer number of parameters (please see \cite{Iandola2017SqueezeNetAA} and the references therein for motivation of lean models). Several experiments have been performed to show that our proposed method can beat the state-of-the-art algorithms in classification and part segmentation applications.