Dynamic Convolution for 3D Point Cloud Instance Segmentation

In this paper, we come up with a simple yet effective approach for instance segmentation on 3D point cloud with strong robustness. Previous top-performing methods for this task adopt a bottom-up strategy, which often involves various inefficient operations or complex pipelines, such as grouping over-segmented components, introducing heuristic post-processing steps, and designing complex loss functions. As a result, the inevitable variations of the instances sizes make it vulnerable and sensitive to the values of pre-defined hyper-parameters. To this end, we instead propose a novel pipeline that applies dynamic convolution to generate instance-aware parameters in response to the characteristics of the instances. The representation capability of the parameters is greatly improved by gathering homogeneous points that have identical semantic categories and close votes for the geometric centroids. Instances are then decoded via several simple convolution layers, where the parameters are generated depending on the input. In addition, to introduce a large context and maintain limited computational overheads, a light-weight transformer is built upon the bottleneck layer to capture the long-range dependencies. With the only post-processing step, non-maximum suppression (NMS), we demonstrate a simpler and more robust approach that achieves promising performance on various datasets: ScanNetV2, S3DIS, and PartNet. The consistent improvements on both voxel- and point-based architectures imply the effectiveness of the proposed method. Code is available at: https://git.io/DyCo3D.