Surface Representation for Point Clouds

Haoxi Ran, Jun Liu, Chengjie Wang; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2022, pp. 18942-18952

Most prior work represents the shapes of point clouds by coordinates. However, it is insufficient to describe the local geometry directly. In this paper, we present RepSurf (representative surfaces), a novel representation of point clouds to explicitly depict the very local structure. We explore two variants of RepSurf, Triangular RepSurf and Umbrella RepSurf inspired by triangle meshes and umbrella curvature in computer graphics. We compute the representations of RepSurf by predefined geometric priors after surface reconstruction. RepSurf can be a plug-and-play module for most point cloud models thanks to its free collaboration with irregular points. Based on a simple baseline of PointNet++ (SSG version), Umbrella RepSurf surpasses the previous state-of-the-art by a large margin for classification, segmentation and detection on various benchmarks in terms of performance and efficiency. With an increase of around 0.008M number of parameters, 0.04G FLOPs, and 1.12ms inference time, our method achieves 94.7% (+0.5%) on ModelNet40, and 84.6% (+1.8%) on ScanObjectNN for classification, while 74.3% (+0.8%) mIoU on S3DIS 6-fold, and 70.0% (+1.6%) mIoU on ScanNet for segmentation. For detection, previous state-of-the-art detector with our RepSurf obtains 71.2% (+2.1%) mAP_25, 54.8% (+2.0%) mAP_50 on ScanNetV2, and 64.9% (+1.9%) mAP_25, 47.1% (+2.5%) mAP_50 on SUN RGB-D. Our lightweight Triangular RepSurf performs its excellence on these benchmarks as well. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/hancyran/RepSurf.