PAPooling: Graph-based Position Adaptive Aggregation of Local Geometry in Point Clouds

Fine-grained geometry, obtained through the assimilation of localized point features, is crucial in the realms of object recognition and scene comprehension within point cloud contexts. Traditional point cloud backbones predominantly utilize max pooling for the amalgamation of local features, a process that tends to overlook spatial interrelations among points, consequently leading to the potential loss of fine-grained geometric details. To overcome this limitation, we introduce an innovative operation termed Position Adaptive Pooling (PAPooling), which is designed to amalgamate local features while sensitively considering the spatial positions of points. This is achieved by employing a graph-based representation to explicitly model the spatial relationships of points. PAPooling involves two principal components: first, the local graph construction, which establishes a local graph for a set of points by linking a central point with its adjacent points, thereby transforming pairwise relative positions into channel-specific attention weights; second, the attentive feature aggregation, which adeptly takes into account the contribution of each node and simulates the inter-node relationships within the local graph, effectively extracting representations of local features through a Graph Convolution Network (GCN). PAPooling's simplicity and efficacy make it a versatile addition to widely used point-based backbones such as PointNet++ and DGCNN, offering a plug-and-play solution. Comprehensive experimental analysis demonstrates PAPooling's enhanced capability in capturing local geometry, contributing significantly across a spectrum of applications including 3D shape classification, part segmentation, scene segmentation, and corruption defense, all with minimal computational increase. Code will be public at https://github.com/Roywangj/PAPooling/.