CN: Channel Normalization for Point Cloud Recognition

In 3D recognition, to fuse multi-scale structure information, existing methods apply hierarchical frameworks stacked by multiple fusion layers for integrating current relative locations with structure information from the previous level. In this paper, we deeply analyze these point recognition frameworks and present a factor, called difference ratio, to measure the influence of structure information among different levels on the final representation. We discover that structure information in deeper layers is overwhelmed by information in shallower layers in generating the final features, which prevents the model from understanding the point cloud in a global view. Inspired by this observation, we propose a novel channel normalization scheme to balance structure information among different layers and avoid excessive accumulation of shallow information, which benefits the model in exploiting and integrating multilayer structure information. We evaluate our channel normalization in several core 3D recognition tasks including classification, segmentation and detection. Experimental results show that our channel normalization further boosts the performance of state-of-the-art methods effectively.