PCEDNet : A Lightweight Neural Network for Fast and Interactive Edge Detection in 3D Point Clouds

TL;DR

This paper introduces PCEDNet, a lightweight neural network that efficiently detects edges in 3D point clouds by leveraging a novel scale-space matrix parameterization, enabling fast and accurate classification with minimal training data.

Contribution

The paper presents a new parameterization method and a lightweight neural network architecture that outperforms traditional CNNs in edge detection speed and efficiency in 3D point clouds.

Findings

Outperforms CNNs in processing time and classification accuracy

Requires small training sets and trains quickly

Classifies millions of points in seconds

Abstract

In recent years, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) have proven to be efficient analysis tools for processing point clouds, e.g., for reconstruction, segmentation and classification. In this paper, we focus on the classification of edges in point clouds, where both edges and their surrounding are described. We propose a new parameterization adding to each point a set of differential information on its surrounding shape reconstructed at different scales. These parameters, stored in a Scale-Space Matrix (SSM), provide a well suited information from which an adequate neural network can learn the description of edges and use it to efficiently detect them in acquired point clouds. After successfully applying a multi-scale CNN on SSMs for the efficient classification of edges and their neighborhood, we propose a new lightweight neural network architecture outperforming the CNN in learning time, processing time and classification capabilities. Our architecture is compact, requires small learning sets, is very fast to train and classifies millions of points in seconds.