Retrieval-and-alignment based large-scale indoor point cloud semantic segmentation

Current methods for point cloud semantic segmentation depend on the extraction of descriptive features. However, unlike images, point clouds are irregular and often lack texture information, making it demanding to extract discriminative features. In addition, noise, outliers, and uneven point distribution are commonly present in point clouds, which further complicates the segmentation task. To address these problems, a novel architecture is proposed for direct and accurate large-scale point cloud segmentation based on point cloud retrieval and alignment. The proposed approach involves using a feature-based point cloud retrieval method for searching for reference point clouds with annotations from a dataset. In the following segmentation stage, an overlap-based point cloud registration method has been developed to align the target and reference point clouds. For accurate and robust alignment, an overlap region estimation module is trained to locate the optimal overlap region between two pieces of point clouds in a coarse-to-fine manner. In the detected overlap region, the global and local features of the points are extracted and combined for feature-metric registration to obtain accurate transformation parameters between the target and reference point clouds. After alignment, the annotated segmentation of the reference is transferred to the target point clouds to obtain accurate segmentation results. Extensive experiments are conducted to show that the developed method outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches in terms of both accuracy and robustness against noise and outliers.