Test Input Prioritization for 3D Point Clouds

Three-dimensional (3D) point cloud applications have become increasingly prevalent in diverse domains, showcasing their efficacy in various software systems. However, testing such applications presents unique challenges due to the high-dimensional nature of 3D point cloud data and the vast number of possible test cases. Test input prioritization has emerged as a promising approach to enhance testing efficiency by prioritizing potentially misclassified test cases during the early stages of the testing process. Consequently, this enables the early labeling of critical inputs, leading to a reduction in the overall labeling cost. However, applying existing prioritization methods to 3D point cloud data is constrained by several factors: 1) Inadequate consideration of crucial spatial information, and 2) susceptibility to noises inherent in 3D point cloud data. In this paper, we propose PCPrior, the first test prioritization approach specifically designed for 3D point cloud test cases. The fundamental concept behind PCPrior is that test inputs closer to the decision boundary of the model are more likely to be predicted incorrectly. To capture the spatial relationship between a point cloud test and the decision boundary, we propose transforming each test (a point cloud) into a low-dimensional feature vector, towards indirectly revealing the underlying proximity between a test and the decision boundary. To achieve this, we carefully design a group of feature generation strategies, and for each test input, we generate four distinct types of features, namely, spatial features, mutation features, prediction features, and uncertainty features. Through a concatenation of the four feature types, PCPrior assembles a final feature vector for each test. Subsequently, a ranking model is employed to estimate the probability of misclassification for each test based on its feature vector. Finally, PCPrior ranks all tests based on their misclassification probabilities. We conducted an extensive study based on 165 subjects to evaluate the performance of PCPrior, encompassing both natural and noisy datasets. The results demonstrate that PCPrior outperforms all the compared test prioritization approaches, with an average improvement of 10.99%~66.94% on natural datasets and 16.62%~53% on noisy datasets.