Long and Short-Range Dependency Graph Structure Learning Framework on Point Cloud

Graph convolutional neural networks can effectively process geometric data and thus have been successfully used in point cloud data representation. However, existing graph-based methods usually adopt the K-nearest neighbor (KNN) algorithm to construct graphs, which may not be optimal for point cloud analysis tasks, owning to the solution of KNN is independent of network training. In this paper, we propose a novel graph structure learning convolutional neural network (GSLCN) for multiple point cloud analysis tasks. The fundamental concept is to propose a general graph structure learning architecture (GSL) that builds long-range and short-range dependency graphs. To learn optimal graphs that best serve to extract local features and investigate global contextual information, respectively, we integrated the GSL with the designed graph convolution operator under a unified framework. Furthermore, we design the graph structure losses with some prior knowledge to guide graph learning during network training. The main benefit is that given labels and prior knowledge are taken into account in GSLCN, providing useful supervised information to build graphs and thus facilitating the graph convolution operation for the point cloud. Experimental results on challenging benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves excellent performance for point cloud classification, part segmentation, and semantic segmentation.