3D Point Cloud Recognition Based on a Multi-View Convolutional Neural Network

The recognition of three-dimensional (3D) lidar (light detection and ranging) point clouds remains a significant issue in point cloud processing. Traditional point cloud recognition employs the 3D point clouds from the whole object. Nevertheless, the lidar data is a collection of two-and-a-half-dimensional (2.5D) point clouds (each 2.5D point cloud comes from a single view) obtained by scanning the object within a certain field angle by lidar. To deal with this problem, we initially propose a novel representation which expresses 3D point clouds using 2.5D point clouds from multiple views and then we generate multi-view 2.5D point cloud data based on the Point Cloud Library (PCL). Subsequently, we design an effective recognition model based on a multi-view convolutional neural network. The model directly acts on the raw 2.5D point clouds from all views and learns to get a global feature descriptor by fusing the features from all views by the view fusion network. It has been proved that our approach can achieve an excellent recognition performance without any requirement for three-dimensional reconstruction and the preprocessing of point clouds. In conclusion, this paper can effectively solve the recognition problem of lidar point clouds and provide vital practical value.