L3DOC: Lifelong 3D Object Classification

3D object classification has been widely applied in both academic and industrial scenarios. However, most state-of-the-art algorithms rely on a fixed object classification task set, which cannot tackle the scenario when a new 3D object classification task is coming. Meanwhile, the existing lifelong learning models can easily destroy the learned tasks performance, due to the unordered, large-scale, and irregular 3D geometry data. To address these challenges, we propose a Lifelong 3D Object Classification (i.e., L3DOC) model, which can consecutively learn new 3D object classification tasks via imitating "human learning". More specifically, the core idea of our model is to capture and store the cross-task common knowledge of 3D geometry data in a 3D neural network, named as point-knowledge, through employing layer-wise point-knowledge factorization architecture. Afterwards, a task-relevant knowledge distillation mechanism is employed to connect the current task to previous relevant tasks and effectively prevent catastrophic forgetting. It consists of a point-knowledge distillation module and a transforming-space distillation module, which transfers the accumulated point-knowledge from previous tasks and soft-transfers the compact factorized representations of the transforming-space, respectively. To our best knowledge, the proposed L3DOC algorithm is the first attempt to perform deep learning on 3D object classification tasks in a lifelong learning way. Extensive experiments on several point cloud benchmarks illustrate the superiority of our L3DOC model over the state-of-the-art lifelong learning methods.