Spherical Interpolated Convolutional Network With Distance–Feature Density for 3-D Semantic Segmentation of Point Clouds

The semantic segmentation of point clouds is an important part of the environment perception for robots. However, it is difficult to directly adopt the traditional 3-D convolution kernel to extract features from raw 3-D point clouds because of the unstructured property of point clouds. In this article, a spherical interpolated convolution operator is proposed to replace the traditional grid-shaped 3-D convolution operator. In addition, this article analyzes the defect of point cloud interpolation methods based on the distance as the interpolation weight and proposes the self-learned distance–feature density by combining the distance and the feature correlation. The proposed method makes the feature extraction of the spherical interpolated convolution network more rational and effective. The effectiveness of the proposed network is demonstrated on the 3-D semantic segmentation task of point clouds. Experiments show that the proposed method achieves good performance on the ScanNet dataset and Paris-Lille-3D dataset. The comparison experiments with the traditional grid-shaped 3-D convolution operator demonstrated that the newly proposed feature extraction operator improves the accuracy of the network and reduces the parameters of the network. The source codes will be released on
https://github.com/IRMVLab/SIConv
.