Enhancing Few-Shot 3D Point Cloud Classification With Soft Interaction and Self-Attention

Abstract

Few-shot learning is a crucial aspect of modern machine learning that enables models to recognize and classify objects efficiently with limited training data. The shortage of labeled 3D point cloud data calls for innovative solutions, particularly when novel classes emerge more frequently. In this paper, we propose a novel few-shot learning method for recognizing 3D point clouds. More specifically, this paper addresses the challenges of applying few-shot learning to 3D point cloud data, which poses unique difficulties due to the unordered and irregular nature of these data. We propose two new modules for few-shot based 3D point cloud classification, i.e., the Soft Interaction Module (SIM) and Self-Attention Residual Feedforward (SARF) Module. These modules balance and enhance the feature representation by enabling more relevant feature interactions and capturing long-range dependencies between query and support features. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed method, extensive experiments are conducted on benchmark datasets, including ModelNet40, ShapeNetCore, and ScanObjectNN. Our approach demonstrates superior performance in handling abrupt feature changes occurring during the meta-learning process. The results of the experiments indicate the superiority of our proposed method by demonstrating its robust generalization ability and better classification performance for 3D point cloud data with limited training samples.