GAPointNet: Graph attention based point neural network for exploiting local feature of point cloud

Exploiting fine-grained semantic features on point cloud data is still challenging because of its irregular and sparse structure in a non-Euclidean space. In order to represent the local feature for each central point that is helpful towards better contextual learning, a max pooling operation is often used to highlight the most important feature in the local region. However, all other geometric local correlations between each central point and corresponding neighbourhood are ignored during the max pooling operation. To this end, the attention mechanism is promising in capturing node representation on graph-based data by attending over all the neighbouring nodes. In this paper, we propose a novel neural network for point cloud analysis, GAPointNet, which is able to learn local geometric representations by embedding graph attention mechanism within stacked Multi-Layer-Perceptron (MLP) layers. Specifically, we highlight different attention weights on the neighbourhood of each center point to efficiently exploit local features. We also combine attention features with local signature features generated by our attention pooling to fully extract local geometric structures and enhance the network robustness. The proposed GAPointNet architecture is tested on various benchmark datasets (i.e. ModelNet40, ShapeNet part, S3DIS, KITTI) and achieves state-of-the-art performance in both the shape classification and segmentation tasks