Spherical Mask: Coarse-to-Fine 3D Point Cloud Instance Segmentation with Spherical Representation
Authors: Sangyun Shin, Kaichen Zhou, Madhu Vankadari, Andrew Markham, Niki Trigoni

Coarse-to-fine 3D instance segmentation methods show weak performances compared to recent Grouping-based Kernel-based and Transformer-based methods. We argue that this is due to two limitations: 1) Instance size overestimation by axis-aligned bounding box(AABB) 2) False negative error accumulation from inaccurate box to the refinement phase. In this work we introduce Spherical Mask a novel coarse-to-fine approach based on spherical representation overcoming those two limitations with several benefits. Specifically our coarse detection estimates each instance with a 3D polygon using a center and radial distance predictions which avoids excessive size estimation of AABB. To cut the error propagation in the existing coarse-to-fine approaches we virtually migrate points based on the polygon allowing all foreground points including false negatives to be refined. During inference the proposal and point migration modules run in parallel and are assembled to form binary masks of instances. We also introduce two margin-based losses for the point migration to enforce corrections for the false positives/negatives and cohesion of foreground points significantly improving the performance. Experimental results from three datasets such as ScanNetV2 S3DIS and STPLS3D show that our proposed method outperforms existing works demonstrating the effectiveness of the new instance representation with spherical coordinates. The code is available at: https://github.com/yunshin/SphericalMask