PointGL: A Simple Global-Local Framework for Efficient Point Cloud Analysis

Efficient analysis of point clouds holds paramount significance in real-world 3D applications. Currently, prevailing point-based models adhere to the PointNet++ methodology, which involves embedding and abstracting point features within a sequence of spatially overlapping local point sets, resulting in noticeable computational redundancy. Drawing inspiration from the streamlined paradigm of pixel embedding followed by regional pooling in Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), we introduce a novel, uncomplicated yet potent architecture known as PointGL, crafted to facilitate efficient point cloud analysis. PointGL employs a hierarchical process of feature acquisition through two recursive steps. First, the Global Point Embedding leverages straightforward residual Multilayer Perceptrons (MLPs) to effectuate feature embedding for each individual point. Second, the novel Local Graph Pooling technique characterizes point-to-point relationships and abstracts regional representations through succinct local graphs. The harmonious fusion of one-time point embedding and parameter-free graph pooling contributes to PointGL's defining attributes of minimized model complexity and heightened efficiency. Our PointGL attains state-of-the-art accuracy on the ScanObjectNN dataset while exhibiting a runtime that is more than 5 times faster and utilizing only approximately 4% of the FLOPs and 30% of the parameters compared to the recent PointMLP model.