ClusterNet: Deep Hierarchical Cluster Network with Rigorously
Rotation-Invariant Representation for Point Cloud Analysis
Abstract
Current neural networks for 3D object recognition are
vulnerable to 3D rotation. Existing works mostly rely on
massive amounts of rotation-augmented data to alleviate
the problem, which lacks solid guarantee of the 3D rotation
invariance. In this paper, we address the issue by introducing a novel point cloud representation that can be mathematically proved rigorously rotation-invariant, i.e., identical point clouds in different orientations are unified as a
unique and consistent representation. Moreover, the proposed representation is conditional information-lossless,
because it retains all necessary information of point cloud
except for orientation information. In addition, the proposed representation is complementary with existing network architectures for point cloud and fundamentally improves their robustness against rotation transformation. Finally, we propose a deep hierarchical cluster network called
ClusterNet to better adapt to the proposed representation.
We employ hierarchical clustering to explore and exploit
the geometric structure of point cloud, which is embedded in a hierarchical structure tree. Extensive experimental results have shown that our proposed method greatly
outperforms the state-of-the-arts in rotation robustness on
rotation-augmented 3D object classification benchmarks.