On learning the right attention point for feature enhancement

Abstract

We present a novel attention-based mechanism to learn enhanced point features for point cloud processing tasks, e.g., classification and segmentation. Unlike prior studies, which were trained to optimize the weights of a pre-selected set of attention points, our approach learns to locate the best attention points to maximize the performance of a specific task, e.g., point cloud classification. Importantly, we advocate the use of single attention point to facilitate semantic understanding in point feature learning. Specifically, we formulate a new and simple convolution, which combines convolutional features from an input point and its corresponding learned attention point (LAP). Our attention mechanism can be easily incorporated into state-of-the-art point cloud classification and segmentation networks. Extensive experiments on common benchmarks, such as ModelNet40, ShapeNetPart, and S3DIS, all demonstrate that our LAP-enabled networks consistently outperform the respective original networks, as well as other competitive alternatives, which employ multiple attention points, either pre-selected or learned under our LAP framework.