A Large-Scale Network Construction and Lightweighting Method for Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation

To significantly enhance the performance of point cloud semantic segmentation, this manuscript presents a novel method for constructing large-scale networks and offers an effective lightweighting technique. First, a latent point feature processing (LPFP) module is utilized to interconnect base networks such as PointNet++ and Point Transformer. This intermediate module serves both as a feature information transfer and a ground truth supervision function. Furthermore, in order to alleviate the increase in computational costs brought by constructing large-scale networks and better adapt to the demand for terminal deployment, a novel point cloud lightweighting method for semantic segmentation network (PCLN) is proposed to compress the network by transferring multidimensional feature information of large-scale networks. Specifically, at different stages of the large-scale network, the structure and attention information of the point features are selectively transferred to guide the compressed network to train in the direction of the large-scale network. This paper also solves the problem of representing global structure information of large-scale point clouds through feature sampling and aggregation. Extensive experiments on public datasets and real-world data demonstrate that the proposed method can significantly improve the performance of different base networks and outperform the state-of-the-art.