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Title: Unsupervised Feature Learning for Point Cloud Understanding by Contrasting and Clustering Using Graph Convolutional Neural Networks
To alleviate the cost of collecting and annotating large-scale "3D object" point cloud data, we propose an unsupervised learning approach to learn features from an unlabeled point cloud dataset by using part contrasting and object clustering with deep graph convolutional neural networks (GCNNs). In the contrast learning step, all the samples in the 3D object dataset are cut into two parts and put into a "part" dataset. Then a contrast learning GCNN (ContrastNet) is trained to verify whether two randomly sampled parts from the part dataset belong to the same object. In the cluster learning step, the trained ContrastNet is applied to all the samples in the original 3D object dataset to extract features, which are used to group the samples into clusters. Then another GCNN for clustering learning (ClusterNet) is trained from the orignal 3D data to predict the cluster IDs of all the training samples. The contrasting learning forces the ContrastNet to learn semantic features of objects, while the ClusterNet improves the quality of learned features by being trained to discover objects that belong to the same semantic categories by using cluster IDs. We have conducted extensive experiments to evaluate the proposed framework on point cloud classification tasks. The proposed unsupervised learning approach obtains comparable performance to the state-of-the-art with heavier shape auto-encoding unsupervised feature extraction methods. We have also tested the networks on object recognition using partial 3D data, by simulating occlusions and perspective views, and obtained practically useful results. The code of this work is publicly available at: https://github.com/lingzhang1/ContrastNet.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1737533 1827505
NSF-PAR ID:
10124686
Author(s) / Creator(s):
;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Proceedings - 2019 International Conference on 3D Vision (3DV)
Page Range / eLocation ID:
395 to 404
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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