A promising direction for pre-training 3D point clouds is to leverage the massive amount of data in 2D, whereas the domain gap between 2D and 3D creates a fundamental challenge. This paper proposes a novel approach to point-cloud pre-training that learns 3D representations by leveraging pre-trained 2D networks. Different from the popular practice of predicting 2D features first and then obtaining 3D features through dimensionality lifting, our approach directly uses a 3D network for feature extraction. We train the 3D feature extraction network with the help of the novel 2D knowledge transfer loss, which enforces the 2D projections of the 3D feature to be consistent with the output of pre-trained 2D networks. To prevent the feature from discarding 3D signals, we introduce the multi-view consistency loss that additionally encourages the projected 2D feature representations to capture pixel-wise correspondences across different views. Such correspondences induce 3D geometry and effectively retain 3D features in the projected 2D features. Experimental results demonstrate that our pre-trained model can be successfully transferred to various downstream tasks, including 3D shape classification, part segmentation, 3D object detection, and semantic segmentation, achieving state-of-the-art performance.

Masked autoencoders (MAE) have recently been introduced to 3D self-supervised pretraining for point clouds due to their great success in NLP and computer vision. Unlike MAEs used in the image domain, where the pretext task is to restore features at the masked pixels, such as colors, the existing 3D MAE works reconstruct the missing geometry only, i.e, the location of the masked points. In contrast to previous studies, we advocate that point location recovery is inessential and restoring intrinsic point features is much superior. To this end, we propose to ignore point position reconstruction and recover high-order features at masked points including surface normals and surface variations, through a novel attention-based decoder which is independent of the encoder design. We validate the effectiveness of our pretext task and decoder design using different encoder structures for 3D training and demonstrate the advantages of our pretrained networks on various point cloud analysis tasks.

This paper advocates the use of implicit surface representation in autoencoder-based self-supervised 3D representation learning. The most popular and accessible 3D representation, i.e., point clouds, involves discrete samples of the underlying continuous 3D surface. This discretization process introduces sampling variations on the 3D shape, making it challenging to develop transferable knowledge of the true 3D geometry. In the standard autoencoding paradigm, the encoder is compelled to encode not only the 3D geometry but also information on the specific discrete sampling of the 3D shape into the latent code. This is because the point cloud reconstructed by the decoder is considered unacceptable unless there is a perfect mapping between the original and the reconstructed point clouds. This paper introduces the Implicit AutoEncoder (IAE), a simple yet effective method that addresses the sampling variation issue by replacing the commonly-used point-cloud decoder with an implicit decoder. The implicit decoder reconstructs a continuous representation of the 3D shape, independent of the imperfections in the discrete samples. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed IAE achieves state-of-the-art performance across various self-supervised learning benchmarks. Our code is available at https://github.com/SimingYan/IAE.

Developing deep neural networks to generate 3D scenes is a fundamental problem in neural synthesis with immediate applications in architectural CAD, computer graphics, as well as in generating virtual robot training environments. This task is challenging because 3D scenes exhibit diverse patterns, ranging from continuous ones, such as object sizes and the relative poses between pairs of shapes, to discrete patterns, such as occurrence and co-occurrence of objects with symmetrical relationships. This paper introduces a novel neural scene synthesis approach that can capture diverse feature patterns of 3D scenes. Our method combines the strength of both neural network-based and conventional scene synthesis approaches. We use the parametric prior distributions learned from training data, which provide uncertainties of object attributes and relative attributes, to regularize the outputs of feed-forward neural models. Moreover, instead of merely predicting a scene layout, our approach predicts an over-complete set of attributes. This methodology allows us to utilize the underlying consistency constraints among the predicted attributes to prune infeasible predictions. Experimental results show that our approach outperforms existing methods considerably. The generated 3D scenes interpolate the training data faithfully while preserving both continuous and discrete feature patterns.

This paper introduces HPNet, a novel deep-learning approach for segmenting a 3D shape represented as a point cloud into primitive patches. The key to deep primitive segmentation is learning a feature representation that can separate points of different primitives. Unlike utilizing a single feature representation, HPNet leverages hybrid representations that combine one learned semantic descriptor, two spectral descriptors derived from predicted geometric parameters, as well as an adjacency matrix that encodes sharp edges. Moreover, instead of merely concatenating the descriptors, HPNet optimally combines hybrid representations by learning combination weights. This weighting module builds on the entropy of input features. The output primitive segmentation is obtained from a meanshift clustering module. Experimental results on benchmark datasets ANSI and ABCParts show that HPNet leads to significant performance gains from baseline approaches.

In this paper, we introduce a novel RGB-D based relative pose estimation approach that is suitable for smalloverlapping or non-overlapping scans and can output multiple relative poses. Our method performs scene completion and matches the completed scans. However, instead of using afixed representation for completion, the key idea is to utilize hybrid representations that combine 360-image, 2D image-based layout, and planar patches. This approach offers adaptively feature representations for relative pose estimation. Besides, we introduce a global-2-local matching procedure, which utilizes initial relative poses obtained during the global phase to detect and then integrate geometric relations for pose refinement. Experimental results justify the potential of this approach across a wide range of benchmark datasets. For example, on ScanNet, the rotation translation errors of the top-1/top-5 predictions of our approach are 28.6°/0.90m and 16.8°/0.76m, respectively. Our approach also considerably boosts the performance of multiscan reconstruction in few-view reconstruction settings.