Learning and Memorizing Representative Prototypes for 3D Point Cloud Semantic and Instance Segmentation

Tong He, Dong Gong, Zhi Tian, Chunhua Shen ;

3D point cloud semantic and instance segmentation are crucial and fundamental for 3D scene understanding. Due to the complex structure, point sets are distributed off-balance and diversely, appearing as both category and pattern imbalance. It has been proved that deep networks can easily forget the non-dominant cases during training, which influences the model generalization and leads to unsatisfactory performance. Although re-weighting on instances may reduce the influence, it is hard to find a balance between the dominant and the non-dominant cases. To tackle the above issue, we propose a memory-augmented network that learns and memorizes the representative prototypes that encode both geometry and semantic information. The prototypes are shared by diverse 3D points and recorded in a universal memory module. During training, the memory slots are dynamically associated with both dominant and non-dominant cases, alleviating the forgetting issue. In testing, the distorted observations and rare cases can thus be augmented by retrieving the stored prototypes, leading to better generalization. Experiments on the benchmarks, i.e., S3DIS and ScanNetV2, show the superiority of our method on both effectiveness and efficiency, which substantially improves the accuracy not only on the entire dataset but also on non-dominant classes and samples."