With the development of 3D scanning technologies, 3D vision tasks have become a popular research area. Owing to the large amount of data acquired by sensors, unsupervised learning is essential for understanding and utilizing point clouds without an expensive annotation process. In this paper, we propose a novel framework and an effective auto-encoder architecture named "PSG-Net" for reconstruction-based learning of point clouds. Unlike existing studies that used fixed or random 2D points, our framework generates input-dependent point-wise features for the latent point set. PSG-Net uses the encoded input to produce point-wise features through the seed generation module and extracts richer features in multiple stages with gradually increasing resolution by applying the seed feature propagation module progressively. We prove the effectiveness of PSG-Net experimentally; PSG-Net shows state-of-the-art performances in point cloud reconstruction and unsupervised classification, and achieves comparable performance to counterpart methods in supervised completion.

Following considerable development in 3D scanning technologies, many studies have recently been proposed with various approaches for 3D vision tasks, including some methods that utilize 2D convolutional neural networks (CNNs). However, even though 2D CNNs have achieved high performance in many 2D vision tasks, existing works have not effectively applied them onto 3D vision tasks. In particular, segmentation has not been well studied because of the difficulty of dense prediction for each point, which requires rich feature representation. In this paper, we propose a simple and efficient architecture named point projection and back-projection network (PBP-Net), which leverages 2D CNNs for the 3D point cloud segmentation. 3 modules are introduced, each of which projects 3D point cloud onto 2D planes, extracts features using a 2D CNN backbone, and back-projects features onto the original 3D point cloud. To demonstrate effective 3D feature extraction using 2D CNN, we perform various experiments including comparison to recent methods. We analyze the proposed modules through ablation studies and perform experiments on object part segmentation (ShapeNet-Part dataset) and indoor scene semantic segmentation (S3DIS dataset). The experimental results show that proposed PBP-Net achieves comparable performance to existing state-of-the-art methods.