Masked Autoencoders in 3D Point Cloud Representation Learning

Transformer-based Self-supervised Representation Learning methods learn generic features from unlabeled datasets for providing useful network initialization parameters for downstream tasks. Recently, methods based upon masking Autoencoders have been explored in the fields. The input can be intuitively masked due to regular content, like sequence words and 2D pixels. However, the extension to 3D point cloud is challenging due to irregularity. In this article, we propose masked Autoencoders in 3D point cloud representation learning (abbreviated as MAE3D), a novel autoencoding paradigm for self-supervised learning. We first split the input point cloud into patches and mask a portion of them, then use our Patch Embedding Module to extract the features of unmasked patches. Secondly, we employ patch-wise MAE3D Transformers to learn both local features of point cloud patches and high-level contextual relationships between patches, then complete the latent representations of masked patches. We use our Point Cloud Reconstruction Module with multi-task loss to complete the incomplete point cloud as a result. We conduct self-supervised pre-training on ShapeNet55 with the point cloud completion pre-text task and fine-tune the pre-trained model on ModelNet40 and ScanObjectNN (PB_T50_RS, the hardest variant). Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that the local features extracted by our MAE3D from point cloud patches are beneficial for downstream classification tasks, soundly outperforming state-of-the-art methods (93.4% and 86.2% classification accuracy, respectively).