A Review of Deep Learning-Based Semantic Segmentation for Point Cloud

In recent years, the popularity of depth sensors and 3D scanners has led to a rapid development of 3D point clouds. Semantic segmentation of point cloud, as a key step in understanding 3D scenes, has attracted extensive attention of researchers. Recent advances in this topic are dominantly led by deep learning-based methods. In this paper, we provide a survey covering various aspects ranging from indirect segmentation to direct segmentation. Firstly, we review methods of indirect segmentation based on multi-views and voxel grids, as well as direct segmentation methods from different perspectives including point ordering, multi-scale, feature fusion and fusion of graph convolutional neural network (GCNN). Then, the common datasets for point cloud segmentation are exposed to help researchers choose which one is the most suitable for their tasks. Following that, we devote a part of the paper to analyze the quantitative results of these methods. Finally, the development trend of point cloud semantic segmentation technology is prospected.