PointCT: Point Central Transformer Network for Weakly-supervised Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation

Although point cloud segmentation has a principal role in 3D understanding, annotating fully large-scale scenes for this task can be costly and time-consuming. To resolve this issue, we propose Point Central Transformer (PointCT), a novel end-to-end trainable transformer network for weakly-supervised point cloud semantic segmentation. Divergent from prior approaches, our method addresses limited point annotation challenges exclusively based on 3D points through central-based attention. By employing two embedding processes, our attention mechanism integrates global features across neighborhoods, thereby effectively enhancing unlabeled point representations. Simultaneously, the interconnections between central points and their distinct neighborhoods are bidirectional cohered. Position encoding is further applied to enforce geometric features and improve overall performance. Notably, PointCT achieves outstanding performance under various labeled point settings without additional supervision. Extensive experiments on public datasets S3DIS, ScanNet-V2, and STPLS3D demonstrate the superiority of our proposed approach over other state-of-the-art methods.