PointNAC: Copula-Based Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation Network

Three-dimensional point cloud data generally contain complex scene information and diversified category structures. Existing point cloud semantic segmentation networks tend to learn feature information between sampled center points and their neighboring points, while ignoring the scale and structural information of the spatial context of the sampled center points. To address these issues, this paper introduces PointNAC (PointNet based on normal vector and attention copula feature enhancement), a network designed for point cloud semantic segmentation in large-scale complex scenes, which consists of the following two main modules: (1) The local stereoscopic feature-encoding module: this feature-encoding process incorporates distance, normal vectors, and angles calculated based on the cosine theorem, enabling the network to learn not only the spatial positional information of the point cloud but also the spatial scale and geometric structure; and (2) the copula-based similarity feature enhancement module. Based on the stereoscopic feature information, this module analyzes the correlation among points in the local neighborhood. It enhances the features of positively correlated points while leaving the features of negatively correlated points unchanged. By combining these enhancements, it effectively enhances the feature saliency within the same class and the feature distinctiveness between different classes. The experimental results show that PointNAC achieved an overall accuracy (OA) of 90.9% and a mean intersection over union (MIoU) of 67.4% on the S3DIS dataset. And on the Vaihingen dataset, PointNAC achieved an overall accuracy (OA) of 85.9% and an average F1 score of 70.6%. Compared to the segmentation results of other network models on public datasets, our algorithm demonstrates good generalization and segmentation capabilities.