Point cloud segmentation with PointNet

Introduction

A “point cloud” is an important type of data structure for storing geometric shape data. Due to its irregular format, it’s often transformed into regular 3D voxel grids or collections of images before being used in deep learning applications, a step which makes the data unnecessarily large. The PointNet family of models solves this problem by directly consuming point clouds, respecting the permutation-invariance property of the point data. The PointNet family of models provides a simple, unified architecture for applications ranging from object classification, part segmentation, to scene semantic parsing.