DFNet: Deep Fusion Network for 3D Shape Classification and Retrieval

3D shape classification and retrieval are the primary tasks in computer vision with great application value. Recent researches have benefited a lot from deep learning methods, mainly around point-based and view-based methods. The former lacks robustness under different perspectives, while the latter lacks the ability to capture global features of 3D objects. Inspired by the way humans perceive a 3D object, first to receive its 3D global characteristics and then learn more details from multiple perspectives, we design a Deep Fusion Network (DFNet) that combines a point-based network (PointNet) which reflects intrinsic properties of 3D shape from the point cloud and a view-based network (ViewNet) which captures spatio-temporal features from shape's sequential projections through the combination of CNNs and LSTM. A high-level 3D shape feature descriptor, combining the advantages of the two features merits, is finally obtained by FusionNet. Experimental results show that our proposed DFNet which fuses point-based and view-based features achieves better performance than only one feature based network. And comparison with other excellent methods shows that DFNet outperforms under two large-scale 3D shape benchmarks.