# Revisiting Point Cloud Shape Classification with a Simple and Effective Baseline

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.05304 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05304/

## Key facts

- Cited by 145 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 43 of its 71 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Jun 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 43)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Rethinking the Inception Architecture for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.00567/) (2015)
- [PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00593/) (2016)
- [PointNet++: Deep Hierarchical Feature Learning on Point Sets in a Metric Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02413/) (2017)
- [Dynamic Graph CNN for Learning on Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07829/) (2018)
- [Deep Sets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06114/) (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)
- [PointConv: Deep Convolutional Networks on 3D Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.07246/) (2018)
- [Multi-view Convolutional Neural Networks for 3D Shape Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.00880/) (2015)
- [Deep Learning for 3D Point Clouds: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.12033/) (2019)
- [Revisiting Point Cloud Classification: A New Benchmark Dataset and Classification Model on Real-World Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.04616/) (2019)
- [Hypergraph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.09401/) (2018)
- [Relation-Shape Convolutional Neural Network for Point Cloud Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.07601/) (2019)
- [Neural Point-Based Graphics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08240/) (2019)
- [Dynamic Edge-Conditioned Filters in Convolutional Neural Networks on Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.02901/) (2017)
- [SpiderCNN: Deep Learning on Point Sets with Parameterized Convolutional Filters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.11527/) (2018)
- [6-DOF GraspNet: Variational Grasp Generation for Object Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.10520/) (2019)
- [Volumetric and Multi-View CNNs for Object Classification on 3D Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.03265/) (2016)
- [PointASNL: Robust Point Clouds Processing using Nonlocal Neural Networks with Adaptive Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00492/) (2020)
- [Billion-scale semi-supervised learning for image classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.00546/) (2019)
- [SO-Net: Self-Organizing Network for Point Cloud Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.04249/) (2018)
- [SEGCloud: Semantic Segmentation of 3D Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.07563/) (2017)
- [Tangent Convolutions for Dense Prediction in 3D](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.02443/) (2018)
- [Semantic3D.net: A new Large-scale Point Cloud Classification Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.03847/) (2017)
- [SPLATNet: Sparse Lattice Networks for Point Cloud Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.08275/) (2018)
- [Point Convolutional Neural Networks by Extension Operators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.10091/) (2018)
- [Escape from Cells: Deep Kd-Networks for the Recognition of 3D Point Cloud Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.01222/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 145)

- [PointCLIP: Point Cloud Understanding by CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.02413/) (2021)
- [PointNeXt: Revisiting PointNet++ with Improved Training and Scaling Strategies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.04670/) (2022)
- [Rethinking Network Design and Local Geometry in Point Cloud: A Simple Residual MLP Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.07123/) (2022)
- [OmniObject3D: Large-Vocabulary 3D Object Dataset for Realistic Perception, Reconstruction and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.07525/) (2023)
- [ULIP: Learning a Unified Representation of Language, Images, and Point Clouds for 3D Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.05171/) (2022)
- [RVT: Robotic View Transformer for 3D Object Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14896/) (2023)
- [PointCLIP V2: Prompting CLIP and GPT for Powerful 3D Open-world Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11682/) (2022)
- [Contrast with Reconstruct: Contrastive 3D Representation Learning Guided by Generative Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.02318/) (2023)
- [CLIP2Point: Transfer CLIP to Point Cloud Classification with Image-Depth Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.01055/) (2022)
- [Learning 3D Representations from 2D Pre-trained Models via Image-to-Point Masked Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.06785/) (2022)
- [RVT-2: Learning Precise Manipulation from Few Demonstrations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08545/) (2024)
- [Autoencoders as Cross-Modal Teachers: Can Pretrained 2D Image Transformers Help 3D Representation Learning?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08320/) (2022)
- [Benchmarking Robustness of 3D Point Cloud Recognition Against Common Corruptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12296/) (2022)
- [Benchmarking and Analyzing Point Cloud Classification under Corruptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03377/) (2022)
- [ViewRefer: Grasp the Multi-view Knowledge for 3D Visual Grounding with GPT and Prototype Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16894/) (2023)
- [Instance-aware Dynamic Prompt Tuning for Pre-trained Point Cloud Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07221/) (2023)
- [LidarGait: Benchmarking 3D Gait Recognition with Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10598/) (2022)
- [Joint-MAE: 2D-3D Joint Masked Autoencoders for 3D Point Cloud Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.14007/) (2023)
- [Neural Point Light Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01473/) (2021)
- [Shape-invariant 3D Adversarial Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.04041/) (2022)
- [A Comprehensive Survey on Deep Gait Recognition: Algorithms, Datasets and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.13732/) (2022)
- [Towards Compact 3D Representations via Point Feature Enhancement Masked Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.10726/) (2023)
- [Self-positioning Point-based Transformer for Point Cloud Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16450/) (2023)
- [Frozen Transformers in Language Models Are Effective Visual Encoder Layers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.12973/) (2023)
- [Parameter is Not All You Need: Starting from Non-Parametric Networks for 3D Point Cloud Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08134/) (2023)
- [PointAD: Comprehending 3D Anomalies from Points and Pixels for Zero-shot 3D Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.00320/) (2024)
- [Revisiting pre-trained remote sensing model benchmarks: resizing and normalization matters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13456/) (2023)
- [Isometric 3D Adversarial Examples in the Physical World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.15291/) (2022)
- [Take-A-Photo: 3D-to-2D Generative Pre-training of Point Cloud Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.14971/) (2023)
- [Let Images Give You More:Point Cloud Cross-Modal Training for Shape Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.04208/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Processing point cloud data is an important component of many real-world systems. As such, a wide variety of point-based approaches have been proposed, reporting steady benchmark improvements over time. We study the key ingredients of this progress and uncover two critical results. First, we find that auxiliary factors like different evaluation schemes, data augmentation strategies, and loss functions, which are independent of the model architecture, make a large difference in performance. The differences are large enough that they obscure the effect of architecture. When these factors are controlled for, PointNet++, a relatively older network, performs competitively with recent methods. Second, a very simple projection-based method, which we refer to as SimpleView, performs surprisingly well. It achieves on par or better results than sophisticated state-of-the-art methods on ModelNet40 while being half the size of PointNet++. It also outperforms state-of-the-art methods on ScanObjectNN, a real-world point cloud benchmark, and demonstrates better cross-dataset generalization. Code is available at https://github.com/princeton-vl/SimpleView.