Point2Point : A Framework for Efficient Deep Learning on Hilbert sorted Point Clouds with applications in Spatio-Temporal Occupancy Prediction

TL;DR

This paper introduces Point2Point, a neural architecture that efficiently learns from Hilbert-sorted point clouds, improving tasks like segmentation, generation, and spatio-temporal occupancy prediction by preserving local structure.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel Hilbert space-filling curve-based representation for point clouds and a neural architecture that effectively learns from this ordering, addressing permutation invariance issues.

Findings

Competitive performance on point cloud segmentation and generation

Effective learning on Hilbert-sorted point clouds

Improved spatio-temporal occupancy prediction results

Abstract

The irregularity and permutation invariance of point cloud data pose challenges for effective learning. Conventional methods for addressing this issue involve converting raw point clouds to intermediate representations such as 3D voxel grids or range images. While such intermediate representations solve the problem of permutation invariance, they can result in significant loss of information. Approaches that do learn on raw point clouds either have trouble in resolving neighborhood relationships between points or are too complicated in their formulation. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to representing point clouds as a locality preserving 1D ordering induced by the Hilbert space-filling curve. We also introduce Point2Point, a neural architecture that can effectively learn on Hilbert-sorted point clouds. We show that Point2Point shows competitive performance on point cloud segmentation and generation tasks. Finally, we show the performance of Point2Point on Spatio-temporal Occupancy prediction from Point clouds.