Deep FusionNet for Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation

Abstract

Many point cloud segmentation methods rely on transferring irregular points into a voxel-based regular representation. Although voxel-based convolutions are useful for feature aggregation, they produce ambiguous or wrong predictions if a voxel contains points from different classes. Other approaches (such as PointNets and point-wise convolutions) can take irregular points for feature learning. But their high memory and computational costs (such as for neighborhood search and ball-querying) limit their ability and accuracy for large-scale point cloud processing. To address these issues, we propose a deep fusion network architecture (FusionNet) with a unique voxel-based ``mini-PointNet'' point cloud representation and a new feature aggregation module (fusion module) for large-scale 3D semantic segmentation. Our FusionNet can learn more accurate point-wise predictions when compared to voxel-based convolutional networks. It can realize more effective feature aggregations with lower memory and computational complexity for large-scale point cloud segmentation when compared to the popular point-wise convolutions. Our experimental results show that FusionNet can take more than one million points on one GPU for training to achieve state-of-the-art accuracy on large-scale Semantic KITTI benchmark.