Superpoint Network for Point Cloud Oversegmentation

Superpoints are formed by grouping similar points with local geometric structures, which can effectively reduce the number of primitives of point clouds for subsequent point cloud processing. Existing superpoint methods mainly focus on employing clustering or graph partition to generate superpoints with handcrafted or learned features. Nonetheless, these methods cannot learn superpoints of point clouds with an end-to-end network. In this paper, we develop a new deep iterative clustering network to directly generate superpoints from irregular 3D point clouds in an end-to-end manner. Specifically, in our clustering network, we first jointly learn a soft point-superpoint association map from the coordinate and feature spaces of point clouds, where each point is assigned to the superpoint with a learned weight. Furthermore, we then iteratively update the association map and superpoint centers so that we can more accurately group the points into the corresponding superpoints with locally similar geometric structures. Finally, by predicting the pseudo labels of the superpoint centers, we formulate a label consistency loss on the points and superpoint centers to train the network. Extensive experiments on various datasets indicate that our method not only achieves the state-of-the-art on superpoint generation but also improves the performance of point cloud semantic segmentation. Code is available at https: //github.com/fpthink/SPNet .