Multi-Path Region Mining for Weakly Supervised 3D Semantic Segmentation on Point Clouds

Jiacheng Wei, Guosheng Lin, Kim-Hui Yap, Tzu-Yi Hung, Lihua Xie; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020, pp. 4384-4393

Point clouds provide intrinsic geometric information and surface context for scene understanding. Existing methods for point cloud segmentation require a large amount of fully labeled data. Using advanced depth sensors, collection of large scale 3D dataset is no longer a cumbersome process. However, manually producing point-level label on the large scale dataset is time and labor-intensive. In this paper, we propose a weakly supervised approach to predict point-level results using weak labels on 3D point clouds. We introduce our multi-path region mining module to generate pseudo point-level labels from a classification network trained with weak labels. It mines the localization cues for each class from various aspects of the network feature using different attention modules. Then, we use the point-level pseudo label to train a point cloud segmentation network in a fully supervised manner. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first method that uses cloud-level weak labels on raw 3D space to train a point cloud semantic segmentation network. In our setting, the 3D weak labels only indicate the classes that appeared in our input sample. We discuss both scene- and subcloud-level weakly labels on raw 3D point cloud data and perform in-depth experiments on them. On ScanNet dataset, our result trained with subcloud-level labels is compatible with some fully supervised methods.