3D Point Capsule Networks.

Yongheng Zhao, Tolga Birdal, Haowen Deng, Federico Tombari

Abstract: In this paper, we propose 3D point-capsule networks, an auto-encoder designed to process sparse 3D point clouds while preserving spatial arrangements of the input data. 3D capsule networks arise as a direct consequence of our unified formulation of the common 3D auto-encoders. The dynamic routing scheme and the peculiar 2D latent space deployed by our capsule networks bring in improvements for several common point cloud-related tasks, such as object classification, object reconstruction and part segmentation as substantiated by our extensive evaluations. Moreover, it enables new applications such as part interpolation and replacement.