R-PointNet: Robust 3D Object Recognition Network for Real-World Point Clouds Corruption

Abstract

Point clouds obtained with 3D scanners in realistic scenes inevitably contain corruption, including noise and outliers. Traditional algorithms for cleaning point cloud corruption require the selection of appropriate parameters based on the characteristics of the scene, data, and algorithm, which means that their performance is highly dependent on the experience and adaptation of the algorithm itself to the application. Three-dimensional object recognition networks for real-world recognition tasks can take the raw point cloud as input and output the recognition results directly. Current 3D object recognition networks generally acquire uniform sampling points by farthest point sampling (FPS) to extract features. However, sampled defective points from FPS lower the recognition accuracy by affecting the aggregated global feature. To deal with this issue, we design a compensation module, named offset-adjustment (OA). It can adaptively adjust the coordinates of sampled defective points based on neighbors and improve local feature extraction to enhance network robustness. Furthermore, we employ the OA module to build an end-to-end network based on PointNet++ framework for robust point cloud recognition, named R-PointNet. Experiments show that R-PointNet reaches state-of-the-art performance by 92.5% of recognition accuracy on ModelNet40, and significantly outperforms previous networks by 3–7.7% on the corruption dataset ModelNet40-C for robustness benchmark.