A Unified Query-based Paradigm for Point Cloud Understanding

3D point cloud understanding is an important component in autonomous driving and robotics. In this paper, we present a novel Embedding-Querying paradigm (EQ-Paradigm) for 3D understanding tasks including detection, segmentation and classification. EQ-Paradigm is a unified paradigm that enables combination of existing 3D back-bone architectures with different task heads. Under the EQ-Paradigm, the input is first encoded in the embedding stage with an arbitrary feature extraction architecture, which is independent of tasks and heads. Then, the querying stage enables the encoded features for diverse task heads. This is achieved by introducing an intermediate representation, i.e., Q-representation, in the querying stage to bridge the embedding stage and task heads. We design a novel Q-Net as the querying stage network. Extensive experimental results on various 3D tasks show that EQ-Paradigm in tandem with Q-Net is a general and effective pipeline, which enables flexible collaboration of backbones and heads. It further boosts performance of state-of-the-art methods.