Fuzzy Neighborhood Learning for Deep 3-D Segmentation of Point Cloud

Semantic segmentation of point cloud data, an efficient 3-D scattered point representation, is a fundamental task for various applications, such as autonomous driving and 3-D telepresence. In recent years, deep learning techniques have achieved significant progress in semantic segmentation, especially in the 2-D image setting. However, due to the irregularity of point clouds, most of them cannot be applied to this special data representation directly. While recent works are able to handle the irregularity problem and maintain the permutation invariance, most of them fail to capture the valuable high-dimensional local feature in fine granularity. Inspired by fuzzy mathematical methods and the analysis on the drawbacks of current state-of-the-art works, in this article, we propose a novel deep neural model, Fuzzy3DSeg, that is able to directly feed in the point clouds while maintaining invariant to the permutation of the data feeding order. We deeply integrate the learning of the fuzzy neighborhood feature of each point into our network architecture, so as to perform operations on high-dimensional features. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this network architecture level integration, compared with methods of the fuzzy data preprocessing cascading neural network. Comprehensive experiments on two challenging datasets demonstrate that the proposed Fuzzy3DSeg significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.