# Projection-based Point Convolution for Efficient Point Cloud Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.01991 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.01991/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 43 of its 55 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Feb 2022.

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

- [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)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00593/) (2016)
- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12877/) (2020)
- [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)
- [PointPillars: Fast Encoders for Object Detection from Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.05784/) (2018)
- [Point Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.00931/) (2020)
- [VoxelNet: End-to-End Learning for Point Cloud Based 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.06396/) (2017)
- [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)
- [PointCNN: Convolution On X-Transformed Points](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07791/) (2018)
- [Convolutional Occupancy Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.04618/) (2020)
- [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)
- [RandLA-Net: Efficient Semantic Segmentation of Large-Scale Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11236/) (2019)
- [Multi-view Convolutional Neural Networks for 3D Shape Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.00880/) (2015)
- [Searching Efficient 3D Architectures with Sparse Point-Voxel Convolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.16100/) (2020)
- [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)
- [SpiderCNN: Deep Learning on Point Sets with Parameterized Convolutional Filters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.11527/) (2018)
- [PAConv: Position Adaptive Convolution with Dynamic Kernel Assembling on Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14635/) (2021)
- [Tangent Convolutions for Dense Prediction in 3D](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.02443/) (2018)
- [End-to-End Multi-View Fusion for 3D Object Detection in LiDAR Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.06528/) (2019)
- [(AF)2-S3Net: Attentive Feature Fusion with Adaptive Feature Selection for Sparse Semantic Segmentation Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.04530/) (2021)
- [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)

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

- [Enhancing 3D Point Cloud Classification with ModelNet-R and Point-SkipNet](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.05198/) (2025)
- [SAMBLE: Shape-Specific Point Cloud Sampling for an Optimal Trade-Off Between Local Detail and Global Uniformity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.19581/) (2025)
- [NPNet: A Non-Parametric Network with Adaptive Gaussian-Fourier Positional Encoding for 3D Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.00542/) (2026)
- [Region-Transformer: Self-Attention Region Based Class-Agnostic Point Cloud Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.01407/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Understanding point cloud has recently gained huge interests following the development of 3D scanning devices and the accumulation of large-scale 3D data. Most point cloud processing algorithms can be classified as either point-based or voxel-based methods, both of which have severe limitations in processing time or memory, or both. To overcome these limitations, we propose Projection-based Point Convolution (PPConv), a point convolutional module that uses 2D convolutions and multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs) as its components. In PPConv, point features are processed through two branches: point branch and projection branch. Point branch consists of MLPs, while projection branch transforms point features into a 2D feature map and then apply 2D convolutions. As PPConv does not use point-based or voxel-based convolutions, it has advantages in fast point cloud processing. When combined with a learnable projection and effective feature fusion strategy, PPConv achieves superior efficiency compared to state-of-the-art methods, even with a simple architecture based on PointNet++. We demonstrate the efficiency of PPConv in terms of the trade-off between inference time and segmentation performance. The experimental results on S3DIS and ShapeNetPart show that PPConv is the most efficient method among the compared ones. The code is available at github.com/pahn04/PPConv.