DyCo3D (CVPR. 2021)

1. Motivation

• Previous top-performing approaches for point cloud instance segmentation involve a bottom-up strategy, which often includes inefficient operations or complex pipelines, such as grouping over-segmented components, introducing additional steps for refining, or designing complicated loss functions.
• The inevitable variation in the instance scales can lead bottom-up methods to become particularly sensitive to hyper-parameter values.
• Instance segmentation of3D point clouds has proven far more challenging.
• This is partly due to the inherent irregularity and sparsity of the data, but also due to the diversity of the scene.

之前相关的3D 点云实例分割的研究：

• 3D-MPA
• PointGroup(全文看下本文很多设定模仿这篇文章）

具体来说，之前bottom-up methods的缺点：

• the performance is sensitive to values of the pre-defined hyper-parameters, which require manual tuning.
• they incorporate either complex post-processing steps or training pipelines, rendering them unsuitable for real-time applications such as robotics and driverless cars.
• they are heavily reliant on the quality of the proposals, which limits their robustness and can lead to joint/fragmented instances in practice.

2. Contribution

• A novel method for 3D point cloud instance segmen- tation based on dynamic convolution that outperforms previous methods in both efficiency and effectiveness.
• A proposal-free instance segmentation approach that is more robust than bottom-up strategies.
• A light-weight transformer that enlarges the receptive field and captures non-local dependencies.
• Comprehensive experiments demonstrating that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art results, with improved robustness, and an inference speed superior to that of its comparators.

3. Related Work

3.1 Deep Learning for 3D Point Cloud

• The most prevalent existing approaches can be roughly categorised as: point-based [29, 31], voxel-based [23, 40, 13, 6], and multiview-based [35, 30, 8].
• Multi- view solutions often involve view projection to utilize well-explored 2D techniques.
• Voxel-based methods first transfer 3D points into rasterized voxels and apply convolution operations for feature extraction.

3.2 Instance Segmentation of 3D Point Cloud

• As in the 2D image domain, 3D instance segmentation approaches can be broadly divided into two groups: top-down and bottom-up.
• Top-down methods often use a detect-then-segment approach, which first detects 3D bounding boxes of the instances and then predicts foreground points.
• Bottom-up methods, in contrast, group sub-components into instances. Methods ap- plying this approach have dominated the leaderboard of the ScanNet dataset,

3.3 Dynamic Convolution

• However, our experiments demonstrate that it performs poorly when applied directly to 3D point clouds.
• It introduces a large amount of computation, resulting in optimization difficulties.
• The performance is constrained by the limited receptive field and representation capability due to the sparse convolution.

4. Methods

4.1. Overall Architecture

网络输入为 $P\in N\times I$，N个clound point。DyCo3D有三个部分：

• sparse convolution backbone，其中包含了light-weight transformer（位置编码与传统的transformer不同）
• weight generator，其中包含了MaskHead，OffsetHead，SegHead。
• instance decoder，动态卷积。

DyCo3D是一种proposal-free（可以类比为anchor-free）的检测器。

4.2 Backbone Network

4.2.1 Semantic Segmentation

$F_{seg}\in R^{N\times C}$，使用交叉熵计算point-wise所属于的标签分类的loss，Seg Head得到的是prediction of category label { lsegi}i=1N\{l^i_{seg} \}^N_{i=1}{ lsegi​}i=1N​。

4.2.2 Centroid Offset

Offset head分支得到的输出是$O_{off}\in R$