# A deep perceptual metric for 3D point clouds

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.12839 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12839/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 12 of its 36 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Feb 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [TensorFlow: Large-Scale Machine Learning on Heterogeneous Distributed Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.04467/) (2016)
- [Multiscale Point Cloud Geometry Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.03799/) (2020)
- [OctSqueeze: Octree-Structured Entropy Model for LiDAR Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.07178/) (2020)
- [Learning Convolutional Transforms for Lossy Point Cloud Geometry Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.08548/) (2019)
- [Improved Deep Point Cloud Geometry Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09043/) (2020)
- [MuSCLE: Multi Sweep Compression of LiDAR using Deep Entropy Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.07590/) (2020)
- [Deep Implicit Volume Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.08877/) (2020)
- [Orientation-boosted Voxel Nets for 3D Object Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.03351/) (2016)
- [Folding-based compression of point cloud attributes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.04439/) (2020)
- [Improving PSNR-based Quality Metrics Performance For Point Cloud Geometry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.03714/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Point clouds are essential for storage and transmission of 3D content. As they can entail significant volumes of data, point cloud compression is crucial for practical usage. Recently, point cloud geometry compression approaches based on deep neural networks have been explored. In this paper, we evaluate the ability to predict perceptual quality of typical voxel-based loss functions employed to train these networks. We find that the commonly used focal loss and weighted binary cross entropy are poorly correlated with human perception. We thus propose a perceptual loss function for 3D point clouds which outperforms existing loss functions on the ICIP2020 subjective dataset. In addition, we propose a novel truncated distance field voxel grid representation and find that it leads to sparser latent spaces and loss functions that are more correlated with perceived visual quality compared to a binary representation. The source code is available at https://github.com/mauriceqch/2021_pc_perceptual_loss.