A Novel Point Cloud Encoding Method Based on Local Information for 3D Classification and Segmentation

Deep learning is robust to the perturbation of a point cloud, which is an important data form in the Internet of Things. However, it cannot effectively capture the local information of the point cloud and recognize the fine-grained features of an object. Different levels of features in the deep learning network are integrated to obtain local information, but this strategy increases network complexity. This paper proposes an effective point cloud encoding method that facilitates the deep learning network to utilize the local information. An axis-aligned cube is used to search for a local region that represents the local information. All of the points in the local region are available to construct the feature representation of each point. These feature representations are then input to a deep learning network. Two well-known datasets, ModelNet40 shape classification benchmark and Stanford 3D Indoor Semantics Dataset, are used to test the performance of the proposed method. Compared with other methods with complicated structures, the proposed method with only a simple deep learning network, can achieve a higher accuracy in 3D object classification and semantic segmentation.