CLIP2Point: Transfer CLIP to Point Cloud Classification with Image-Depth Pre-Training

Pre-training across 3D vision and language remains under development because of limited training data. Recent works attempt to transfer vision-language (V-L) pre-training methods to 3D vision. However, the domain gap between 3D and images is unsolved, so that V-L pre-trained models are restricted in 3D downstream tasks. To address this issue, we propose CLIP2Point, an image-depth pre-training method by contrastive learning to transfer CLIP to the 3D domain, and adapt it to point cloud classification. We introduce a new depth rendering setting that forms a better visual effect, and then render 52,460 pairs of images and depth maps from ShapeNet for pre-training. The pre-training scheme of CLIP2Point combines cross-modality learning to enforce the depth features for capturing expressive visual and textual features and intra-modality learning to enhance the invariance of depth aggregation. Additionally, we propose a novel Gated Dual-Path Adapter (GDPA), i.e., a dual-path structure with global-view aggregators and gated fusion for downstream representative learning. It allows the ensemble of CLIP and CLIP2Point, tuning pre-training knowledge to downstream tasks in an efficient adaptation. Experimental results show that CLIP2Point is effective in transferring CLIP knowledge to 3D vision. CLIP2Point outperforms other 3D transfer learning and pre-training networks, achieving state-of-the-art results on zero-shot, few-shot, and fully-supervised classification. Codes are available at: https://github.com/tyhuang0428/CLIP2Point.