Few-shot learning of part-specific probability space for 3d shape segmentation

Recently, deep neural networks are introduced as supervised discriminative models for the learning of 3D point cloud segmentation. Most previous supervised methods require a large number of training data with human annotation part labels to guide the training process to ensure the model's generalization abilities on test data. In comparison, we propose a novel 3D shape segmentation method that requires few labeled data for training. Given an input 3D shape, the training of our model starts with identifying a similar 3D shape with part annotations from a mini-pool of shape templates (e.g. 10 shapes). With the selected template shape, a novel Coherent Point Transformer is proposed to fully leverage the power of a deep neural network to smoothly morph the template shape towards the input shape. Then, based on the transformed template shapes with part labels, a newly proposed Part-specific Density Estimator is developed to learn a continuous part-specific probability distribution function on the entire 3D space with a batch consistency regularization term. With the learned part-specific probability distribution, our model is able to predict the part labels of a new input 3D shape in an end-to-end manner. We demonstrate that our proposed method can achieve remarkable segmentation results on the ShapeNet dataset with few shots, compared to previous supervised learning approaches.