GrowSP: Unsupervised Semantic Segmentation of 3D Point Clouds

Zihui Zhang, Bo Yang, Bing Wang, Bo Li; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2023, pp. 17619-17629

We study the problem of 3D semantic segmentation from raw point clouds. Unlike existing methods which primarily rely on a large amount of human annotations for training neural networks, we propose the first purely unsupervised method, called GrowSP, to successfully identify complex semantic classes for every point in 3D scenes, without needing any type of human labels or pretrained models. The key to our approach is to discover 3D semantic elements via progressive growing of superpoints. Our method consists of three major components, 1) the feature extractor to learn per-point features from input point clouds, 2) the superpoint constructor to progressively grow the sizes of superpoints, and 3) the semantic primitive clustering module to group superpoints into semantic elements for the final semantic segmentation. We extensively evaluate our method on multiple datasets, demonstrating superior performance over all unsupervised baselines and approaching the classic fully supervised PointNet. We hope our work could inspire more advanced methods for unsupervised 3D semantic learning.