Semantic Preserving Learning for Task-oriented Point Cloud Downsampling

Recent years have witnessed a tremendous growth in the scale and resolution of point clouds. To facilitate the applications of point cloud in downsampling tasks (e.g., point cloud classification), several task-oriented downsampling works have been developed by training with the task-specific loss with one-hot encoded label. However, these methods still suffer from performance degradation at high downsampling scales. In this paper, we propose a general semantic-preserved downsampling framework (SPDF) for point clouds by exploiting the rich knowledge inherent in the task network. Specifically, we firstly refine the previous pipeline to generate richer semantic supervised information. Then, the semantic feature learning is subdivided into label-level and feature-level to guide the training of downsampling network, which can better limit the semantic loss during downsampling. Extensive experiments on the benchmark dataset show that SPDF outperforms state-of-the-art downsampling methods.