Dynamic graph convolutional neural networks : learning point cloud representations by dynamic graph convolutional neural networks

Thesis: S.M. in Computer Science and Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, September, 2020Cataloged from student-submitted PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (pages 55-59).Point clouds provide a flexible geometric representation suitable for countless applications in computer graphics; they also comprise the raw output of most 3D data acquisition devices. While hand-designed features on point clouds have long been proposed in graphics and vision, however, the recent overwhelming success of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for image analysis suggests the value of adapting insight from CNN to the point cloud world. Point clouds inherently lack topological information so designing a model to recover topology can enrich the representation power of point clouds. To this end, we propose a new neural network module dubbed EdgeConv suitable for CNN-based high-level tasks on point clouds including classification and segmentation. EdgeConv acts on graphs dynamically computed in each layer of the network. It is differentiable and can be plugged into existing architectures. Compared to existing modules operating in extrinsic space or treating each point independently, EdgeConv has several appealing properties: It incorporates local neighborhood information; it can be stacked applied to learn global shape properties; and in multi-layer systems affinity in feature space captures semantic characteristics over potentially long distances in the original embedding. We show the performance of our model on standard benchmarks including ModelNet40, ShapeNetPart, and S3DIS.by Yue Wang.S.M. in Computer Science and EngineeringS.M.inComputerScienceandEngineering Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Scienc