CurveNet: Curvature-Based Multitask Learning Deep Networks for 3D Object Recognition

In computer vision fields, 3D object recognition is one of the most important tasks for many real-world applications. Three-dimensional convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have demonstrated their advantages in 3D object recognition. In this paper, we propose to use the principal curvature directions of 3D objects (using a CAD model) to represent the geometric features as inputs for the 3D CNN. Our framework, namely CurveNet, learns perceptually relevant salient features and predicts object class labels. Curvature directions incorporate complex surface information of a 3D object, which helps our framework to produce more precise and discriminative features for object recognition. Multitask learning is inspired by sharing features between two related tasks, where we consider pose classification as an auxiliary task to enable our CurveNet to better generalize object label classification. Experimental results show that our proposed framework using curvature vectors performs better than voxels as an input for 3D object classification. We further improved the performance of CurveNet by combining two networks with both curvature direction and voxels of a 3D object as the inputs. A Cross-Stitch module was adopted to learn effective shared features across multiple representations. We evaluated our methods using three publicly available datasets and achieved competitive performance in the 3D object recognition task.