A Lightweight Network for Point Cloud Analysis via the Fusion of Local Features and Distribution Characteristics

Effectively integrating the local features and their spatial distribution information for more effective point cloud analysis is a subject that has been explored for a long time. Inspired by convolutional neural networks (CNNs), this paper studies the relationship between local features and their spatial characteristics and proposes a concise architecture to effectively integrate them instead of designing more sophisticated feature extraction modules. Different positions in the feature map of the 2D image correspond to different weights in the convolution kernel, making the obtained features that are sensitive to local distribution characteristics. Thus, the spatial distribution of the input features of the point cloud within the receptive field is critical for capturing abstract regional aggregated features. We design a lightweight structure to extract local features by explicitly supplementing the distribution information of the input features to obtain distinctive features for point cloud analysis. Compared with the baseline, our model shows improvements in accuracy and convergence speed, and these advantages facilitate the introduction of the snapshot ensemble. Aiming at the shortcomings of the commonly used cosine annealing learning schedule, we design a new annealing schedule that can be flexibly adjusted for the snapshot ensemble technology, which significantly improves the performance by a large margin. Extensive experiments on typical benchmarks verify that, although it adopts the basic shared multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs) as feature extractors, the proposed model with a lightweight structure achieves on-par performance with previous state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods (e.g., MoldeNet40 classification, 0.98 million parameters and 93.5% accuracy; S3DIS segmentation, 1.4 million parameters and 68.7% mIoU).