The Devil is in the Pose: Ambiguity-free 3D Rotation-invariant Learning via Pose-aware Convolution

Recent progress in introducing rotation invariance (RI) to 3D deep learning methods is mainly made by designing RI features to replace 3D coordinates as input. The key to this strategy lies in how to restore the global information that is lost by the input RI features. Most state-of-the-arts achieve this by incurring additional blocks or complex global representations, which is time-consuming and ineffective. In this paper, we real that the global information loss stems from an unexplored pose information loss problem, i.e., common convolution layers cannot capture the relative poses between RI features, thus hindering the global information to be hierarchically aggregated in the deep networks. To address this problem, we develop a Poseaware Rotation Invariant Convolution (i.e., PaRI-Conv), which dynamically adapts its kernels based on the relative poses. Specifically, in each PaRI-Conv layer, a lightweight Augmented Point Pair Feature (APPF) is designed to fully encode the RI relative pose information. Then, we propose to synthesize a factorized dynamic kernel, which reduces the computational cost and memory burden by decomposing it into a shared basis matrix and a pose-aware diagonal matrix that can be learned from the APPF. Extensive experiments on shape classification and part segmentation tasks show that our PaRI-Conv surpasses the state-of-the-art RI methods while being more compact and efficient.