Pointhop++: A Lightweight Learning Model on Point Sets for 3D Classification

The PointHop method was recently proposed by Zhang et al. for 3D point cloud classification with unsupervised feature extraction. It has an extremely low training complexity while achieving state-of-the-art classification performance. In this work, we improve the PointHop method furthermore in two aspects: 1) reducing its model complexity in terms of the model parameter number and 2) ordering discriminant features automatically based on the cross-entropy criterion. The resulting method is called PointHop++. The first improvement is essential for wearable and mobile computing while the second improvement bridges statistics-based and optimization-based machine learning methodologies. With experiments conducted on the ModelNet40 benchmark dataset, we show that the PointHop++ method performs on par with deep neural network (DNN) solutions and surpasses other unsupervised feature extraction methods.