# Boundary-Aware Geometric Encoding for Semantic Segmentation of Point Clouds

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.02381 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.02381/

## Key facts

- Cited by 23 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 27 of its 34 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Jan 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 27 of 27)

- [PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00593/) (2016)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [PointNet++: Deep Hierarchical Feature Learning on Point Sets in a Metric Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02413/) (2017)
- [DeepLab: Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets, Atrous Convolution, and Fully Connected CRFs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00915/) (2016)
- [ScanNet: Richly-annotated 3D Reconstructions of Indoor Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.04405/) (2017)
- [ShapeNet: An Information-Rich 3D Model Repository](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03012/) (2015)
- [VoxelNet: End-to-End Learning for Point Cloud Based 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.06396/) (2017)
- [KPConv: Flexible and Deformable Convolution for Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08889/) (2019)
- [PointCNN: Convolution On X-Transformed Points](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07791/) (2018)
- [3D Semantic Segmentation with Submanifold Sparse Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10275/) (2017)
- [PointConv: Deep Convolutional Networks on 3D Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.07246/) (2018)
- [Large-scale Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation with Superpoint Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09869/) (2017)
- [SpiderCNN: Deep Learning on Point Sets with Parameterized Convolutional Filters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.11527/) (2018)
- [PointASNL: Robust Point Clouds Processing using Nonlocal Neural Networks with Adaptive Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00492/) (2020)
- [Modeling Point Clouds with Self-Attention and Gumbel Subset Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03375/) (2019)
- [PPF-FoldNet: Unsupervised Learning of Rotation Invariant 3D Local Descriptors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.10322/) (2018)
- [3DMV: Joint 3D-Multi-View Prediction for 3D Semantic Scene Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.10409/) (2018)
- [Grid-GCN for Fast and Scalable Point Cloud Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.02984/) (2019)
- [Associatively Segmenting Instances and Semantics in Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09852/) (2019)
- [Hierarchical Point-Edge Interaction Network for Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.10469/) (2019)
- [Spherical Kernel for Efficient Graph Convolution on 3D Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.09287/) (2019)
- [TextureNet: Consistent Local Parametrizations for Learning from High-Resolution Signals on Meshes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.00020/) (2018)
- [Fusion-Aware Point Convolution for Online Semantic 3D Scene Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.06233/) (2020)
- [Semantic Segmentation with Boundary Neural Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.02674/) (2015)
- [JSNet: Joint Instance and Semantic Segmentation of 3D Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.09654/) (2019)
- [High-for-Low and Low-for-High: Efficient Boundary Detection from Deep Object Features and its Applications to High-Level Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.06201/) (2015)
- [Exploiting Local and Global Structure for Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation with Contextual Point Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05277/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 23 of 23)

- [Contrastive Boundary Learning for Point Cloud Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05272/) (2022)
- [PVT: Point-Voxel Transformer for Point Cloud Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.06076/) (2021)
- [Omni-supervised Point Cloud Segmentation via Gradual Receptive Field Component Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.10203/) (2021)
- [Centering the Value of Every Modality: Towards Efficient and Resilient Modality-agnostic Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.11344/) (2024)
- [MAGIC++: Efficient and Resilient Modality-Agnostic Semantic Segmentation via Hierarchical Modality Selection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.16876/) (2024)
- [GeoSegNet: Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation via Geometric Encoder-Decoder Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.06766/) (2022)
- [Building a Strong Pre-Training Baseline for Universal 3D Large-Scale Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.07201/) (2024)
- [3D Dental Model Segmentation with Geometrical Boundary Preserving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.23702/) (2025)
- [Robust Point Cloud Segmentation with Noisy Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.03242/) (2022)
- [BFANet: Revisiting 3D Semantic Segmentation with Boundary Feature Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.12539/) (2025)
- [ML-SemReg: Boosting Point Cloud Registration with Multi-level Semantic Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.09862/) (2024)
- [Push-the-Boundary: Boundary-aware Feature Propagation for Semantic Segmentation of 3D Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.12402/) (2022)
- [SAT: Size-Aware Transformer for 3D Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.06869/) (2023)
- [From Easy to Hard: Learning Curricular Shape-aware Features for Robust Panoptic Scene Graph Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.09191/) (2024)
- [3D Intracranial Aneurysm Classification and Segmentation via Unsupervised Dual-branch Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.02198/) (2022)
- [YouTube-Occ: Learning Indoor 3D Semantic Occupancy Prediction from YouTube Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.18266/) (2025)
- [Human Motion Synthesis in 3D Scenes via Unified Scene Semantic Occupancy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.07819/) (2025)
- [DEMOS: Dynamic Environment Motion Synthesis in 3D Scenes via Local Spherical-BEV Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.01740/) (2024)
- [EyeSeg: An Uncertainty-Aware Eye Segmentation Framework for AR/VR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.09649/) (2025)
- [HyGE-Occ: Hybrid View-Transformation with 3D Gaussian and Edge Priors for 3D Panoptic Occupancy Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.19871/) (2025)
- [G2P: Gaussian-to-Point Attribute Alignment for Boundary-Aware 3D Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.03510/) (2026)
- [World2Minecraft: Occupancy-Driven Simulated Scenes Construction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.27578/) (2026)
- [APRIL-MedSeg: A Modular Medical Image Segmentation Toolbox Embracing Modern Paradigms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.30577/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Boundary information plays a significant role in 2D image segmentation, while usually being ignored in 3D point cloud segmentation where ambiguous features might be generated in feature extraction, leading to misclassification in the transition area between two objects. In this paper, firstly, we propose a Boundary Prediction Module (BPM) to predict boundary points. Based on the predicted boundary, a boundary-aware Geometric Encoding Module (GEM) is designed to encode geometric information and aggregate features with discrimination in a neighborhood, so that the local features belonging to different categories will not be polluted by each other. To provide extra geometric information for boundary-aware GEM, we also propose a light-weight Geometric Convolution Operation (GCO), making the extracted features more distinguishing. Built upon the boundary-aware GEM, we build our network and test it on benchmarks like ScanNet v2, S3DIS. Results show our methods can significantly improve the baseline and achieve state-of-the-art performance. Code is available at https://github.com/JchenXu/BoundaryAwareGEM.