# Voint Cloud: Multi-View Point Cloud Representation for 3D Understanding

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.15363 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.15363/

## Key facts

- Cited by 22 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 58 of its 78 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Nov 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 58)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [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)
- [Encoder-Decoder with Atrous Separable Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.02611/) (2018)
- [ShapeNet: An Information-Rich 3D Model Repository](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03012/) (2015)
- [DeepSDF: Learning Continuous Signed Distance Functions for Shape Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.05103/) (2019)
- [Dynamic Graph CNN for Learning on Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07829/) (2018)
- [Occupancy Networks: Learning 3D Reconstruction in Function Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03828/) (2018)
- [Point Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.00931/) (2020)
- [D-NeRF: Neural Radiance Fields for Dynamic Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13961/) (2020)
- [NeRF in the Wild: Neural Radiance Fields for Unconstrained Photo Collections](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.02268/) (2020)
- [4D Spatio-Temporal ConvNets: Minkowski Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08755/) (2019)
- [KPConv: Flexible and Deformable Convolution for Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08889/) (2019)
- [Group Equivariant Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07576/) (2016)
- [PlenOctrees for Real-time Rendering of Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14024/) (2021)
- [MVSNet: Depth Inference for Unstructured Multi-view Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02505/) (2018)
- [Accelerating 3D Deep Learning with PyTorch3D](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08501/) (2020)
- [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)
- [PCT: Point cloud transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09688/) (2020)
- [Multi-View 3D Object Detection Network for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07759/) (2016)
- [Multi-view Convolutional Neural Networks for 3D Shape Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.00880/) (2015)
- [Revisiting Point Cloud Classification: A New Benchmark Dataset and Classification Model on Real-World Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.04616/) (2019)
- [Normalized Object Coordinate Space for Category-Level 6D Object Pose and Size Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.02970/) (2019)
- [Large-scale Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation with Superpoint Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09869/) (2017)
- [Relation-Shape Convolutional Neural Network for Point Cloud Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.07601/) (2019)
- [Point-Voxel CNN for Efficient 3D Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.03739/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [RVT: Robotic View Transformer for 3D Object Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14896/) (2023)
- [RVT-2: Learning Precise Manipulation from Few Demonstrations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08545/) (2024)
- [UniT3D: A Unified Transformer for 3D Dense Captioning and Visual Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.00836/) (2022)
- [EgoLoc: Revisiting 3D Object Localization from Egocentric Videos with Visual Queries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.06969/) (2022)
- [Self-supervised Learning for Pre-Training 3D Point Clouds: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.04691/) (2023)
- [Sculpting Holistic 3D Representation in Contrastive Language-Image-3D Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.01734/) (2023)
- [SPARF: Large-Scale Learning of 3D Sparse Radiance Fields from Few Input Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09100/) (2022)
- [MLLM-For3D: Adapting Multimodal Large Language Model for 3D Reasoning Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.18135/) (2025)
- [Invariant Training 2D-3D Joint Hard Samples for Few-Shot Point Cloud Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09694/) (2023)
- [TrackNeRF: Bundle Adjusting NeRF from Sparse and Noisy Views via Feature Tracks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.10739/) (2024)
- [MVTN: Learning Multi-View Transformations for 3D Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.13462/) (2022)
- [Pix4Point: Image Pretrained Standard Transformers for 3D Point Cloud Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.12259/) (2022)
- [X-Diffusion: Generating Detailed 3D MRI Volumes From a Single Image Using Cross-Sectional Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.19604/) (2024)
- [UKBOB: One Billion MRI Labeled Masks for Generalizable 3D Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.06908/) (2025)
- [Multi-View Representation is What You Need for Point-Cloud Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02558/) (2023)
- [Dynamic Clustering Transformer Network for Point Cloud Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.08073/) (2023)
- [Point Cloud Self-supervised Learning via 3D to Multi-view Masked Learner](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.10887/) (2023)
- [VSFormer: Mining Correlations in Flexible View Set for Multi-view 3D Shape Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.09254/) (2024)
- [CLAMP: Contrastive Learning for 3D Multi-View Action-Conditioned Robotic Manipulation Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.00937/) (2026)
- [ReMAP-DP: Reprojected Multi-view Aligned PointMaps for Diffusion Policy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.14977/) (2026)
- [An Optimization Framework to Enforce Multi-View Consistency for Texturing 3D Meshes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15559/) (2024)
- [Boosting Cross-Domain Point Classification via Distilling Relational Priors from 2D Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.18534/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Multi-view projection methods have demonstrated promising performance on 3D understanding tasks like 3D classification and segmentation. However, it remains unclear how to combine such multi-view methods with the widely available 3D point clouds. Previous methods use unlearned heuristics to combine features at the point level. To this end, we introduce the concept of the multi-view point cloud (Voint cloud), representing each 3D point as a set of features extracted from several view-points. This novel 3D Voint cloud representation combines the compactness of 3D point cloud representation with the natural view-awareness of multi-view representation. Naturally, we can equip this new representation with convolutional and pooling operations. We deploy a Voint neural network (VointNet) to learn representations in the Voint space. Our novel representation achieves sota performance on 3D classification, shape retrieval, and robust 3D part segmentation on standard benchmarks ( ScanObjectNN, ShapeNet Core55, and ShapeNet Parts).