GAM: Gradient Attention Module of Optimization for Point Clouds Analysis

In the point cloud analysis task, the existing local feature aggregation descriptors (LFAD) do not fully utilize the neighborhood information of center points. Previous methods only use the distance information to constrain the local aggregation process, which is easy to be affected by abnormal points and cannot adequately fit the original geometry of the point cloud. This paper argues that fine-grained geometric information (FGGI) plays an important role in the aggregation of local features. Based on this, we propose a gradient-based local attention module to address the above problem, which is called Gradient Attention Module (GAM). GAM simplifies the process of extracting the gradient information in the neighborhood to explicit representation using the Zenith Angle matrix and Azimuth Angle matrix, which makes the module 35X faster. The comprehensive experiments on the ScanObjectNN dataset, ShapeNet dataset, S3DIS dataset, Modelnet40 dataset, and KITTI dataset demonstrate the effectiveness, efficientness, and generalization of our newly proposed GAM for 3D point cloud analysis. Especially in S3DIS, GAM achieves the highest index in the current point-based model with mIoU/OA/mAcc of 74.4%/90.6%/83.2%.