ToThePoint: Efficient Contrastive Learning of 3D Point Clouds via Recycling

Recent years have witnessed significant developments in point cloud processing, including classification and segmentation. However, supervised learning approaches need a lot of well-labeled data for training, and annotation is labor- and time-intensive. Self-supervised learning, on the other hand, uses unlabeled data, and pre-trains a backbone with a pretext task to extract latent representations to be used with the downstream tasks. Compared to 2D images, self-supervised learning of 3D point clouds is under-explored. Existing models, for self-supervised learning of 3D point clouds, rely on a large number of data samples, and require significant amount of computational resources and training time. To address this issue, we propose a novel contrastive learning approach, referred to as ToThePoint. Different from traditional contrastive learning methods, which maximize agreement between features obtained from a pair of point clouds formed only with different types of augmentation, ToThePoint also maximizes the agreement between the permutation invariant features and features discarded after max pooling. We first perform self-supervised learning on the ShapeNet dataset, and then evaluate the performance of the network on different downstream tasks. In the downstream task experiments, performed on the ModelNet40, ModelNet40C, ScanobjectNN and ShapeNet-Part datasets, our proposed ToThePoint achieves competitive, if not better results compared to the state-of-the-art baselines, and does so with significantly less training time (200 times faster than baselines)