Self-Supervised Learning for Point-Cloud Classification by a Multigrid Autoencoder

It has become routine to directly process point clouds using a combination of shared multilayer perceptrons and aggregate functions. However, this practice has difficulty capturing the local information of point clouds, leading to information loss. Nevertheless, several recent works have proposed models that establish point-to-point relationships based on this procedure. However, to address the information loss, in this study we use self-supervised methods to enhance the network’s understanding of point clouds. Our proposed multigrid autoencoder (MA) constrains the encoder part of the classification network so that it gains an understanding of the point cloud as it reconstructs it. With the help of self-supervised learning, we find the original network improves performance. We validate our model on PointNet++, and the experimental results show that our method improves overall classification accuracy by 2.0% and 4.7% with ModelNet40 and ScanObjectNN datasets, respectively.