# CloudWalker: Random walks for 3D point cloud shape analysis

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.01050 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01050/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 36 of its 67 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Dec 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 36)

- [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)
- [Learning Phrase Representations using RNN Encoder-Decoder for Statistical Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.1078/) (2014)
- [Dynamic Graph CNN for Learning on Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07829/) (2018)
- [Point Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.00931/) (2020)
- [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)
- [DeepGCNs: Can GCNs Go as Deep as CNNs?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03751/) (2019)
- [Relation-Shape Convolutional Neural Network for Point Cloud Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.07601/) (2019)
- [OctNet: Learning Deep 3D Representations at High Resolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05009/) (2016)
- [3D-FUTURE: 3D Furniture shape with TextURE](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.09633/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Volumetric and Multi-View CNNs for Object Classification on 3D Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.03265/) (2016)
- [PAConv: Position Adaptive Convolution with Dynamic Kernel Assembling on Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14635/) (2021)
- [Walk in the Cloud: Learning Curves for Point Clouds Shape Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.01288/) (2021)
- [Escape from Cells: Deep Kd-Networks for the Recognition of 3D Point Cloud Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.01222/) (2017)
- [DensePoint: Learning Densely Contextual Representation for Efficient Point Cloud Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.03669/) (2019)
- [Point2Sequence: Learning the Shape Representation of 3D Point Clouds with an Attention-based Sequence to Sequence Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.02565/) (2018)
- [PCPNET: Learning Local Shape Properties from Raw Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.04954/) (2017)
- [Learning shape correspondence with anisotropic convolutional neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.06437/) (2016)
- [MeshNet: Mesh Neural Network for 3D Shape Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.11424/) (2018)
- [Learning Geometry-Disentangled Representation for Complementary Understanding of 3D Object Point Cloud](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.10921/) (2020)
- [Octree guided CNN with Spherical Kernels for 3D Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.00343/) (2019)
- [Dense-Resolution Network for Point Cloud Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.06734/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Fast and Simple Explainability for Point Cloud Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07706/) (2024)
- [PatchContrast: Self-Supervised Pre-training for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06985/) (2023)
- [Robustifying Point Cloud Networks by Refocusing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.05525/) (2023)
- [Random Walk on Point Clouds for Feature Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.20474/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Point clouds are gaining prominence as a method for representing 3D shapes, but their irregular structure poses a challenge for deep learning methods. In this paper we propose CloudWalker, a novel method for learning 3D shapes using random walks. Previous works attempt to adapt Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) or impose a grid or mesh structure to 3D point clouds. This work presents a different approach for representing and learning the shape from a given point set. The key idea is to impose structure on the point set by multiple random walks through the cloud for exploring different regions of the 3D object. Then we learn a per-point and per-walk representation and aggregate multiple walk predictions at inference. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art results for two 3D shape analysis tasks: classification and retrieval.