Revisiting Point Cloud Shape Classification with a Simple and Effective Baseline

Ankit Goyal, Hei Law, Bowei Liu, Alejandro Newell, Jia Deng

Abstract:

Processing point cloud data is an important component of many real-world systems. As such, a
wide variety of point-based approaches have been
proposed, reporting steady benchmark improvements over time. We study the key ingredients
of this progress and uncover two critical results.
First, we find that auxiliary factors like different evaluation schemes, data augmentation strategies, and loss functions, which are independent
of the model architecture, make a large difference in performance. The differences are large
enough that they obscure the effect of architecture. When these factors are controlled for, PointNet++, a relatively older network, performs competitively with recent methods. Second, a very
simple projection-based method, which we refer to as SimpleView, performs surprisingly well.
It achieves on par or better results than sophisticated state-of-the-art methods on ModelNet40
while being half the size of PointNet++. It also
outperforms state-of-the-art methods on ScanObjectNN, a real-world point cloud benchmark, and
demonstrates better cross-dataset generalization.
Code is available at https://github.com/
princeton-vl/SimpleView.