An Unequal Deep Learning Approach for 3-D Point Cloud Segmentation

Object segmentation for 3-D point clouds plays a critical role in autonomous driving, robotic navigation, and other computer version applications. In object segmentation, all points are considered to be equal of importance in the literature. However, unequal cases exist and a segmentation boundary is mainly determined by neighbor points. To investigate point inequivalence, in this article, an unequal learning approach is proposed to integrate gene expression programming (GEP) and a deep neural network (DNN). GEP is designed to discover the inequivalent function, which measures the importance of different points according to the distances to the segmentation boundary. A cost sensitive learning method is improved to guide the DNN to obtain the loss of different points unequally with the discovered inequivalent function during model training. The experimental results reveal that point inequivalence with respect to boundary distance exists and is helpful to improve the accuracy of object segmentation.