# Masked Surfel Prediction for Self-Supervised Point Cloud Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.03111 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.03111/

## Key facts

- Cited by 15 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 59 of its 76 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Jul 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 59)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00593/) (2016)
- [SGDR: Stochastic Gradient Descent with Warm Restarts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03983/) (2016)
- [Bootstrap your own latent: A new approach to self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07733/) (2020)
- [PointNet++: Deep Hierarchical Feature Learning on Point Sets in a Metric Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02413/) (2017)
- [ScanNet: Richly-annotated 3D Reconstructions of Indoor Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.04405/) (2017)
- [Domain-Adversarial Training of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.07818/) (2015)
- [Fast R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.08083/) (2015)
- [ShapeNet: An Information-Rich 3D Model Repository](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03012/) (2015)
- [Improved Baselines with Momentum Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.04297/) (2020)
- [Dynamic Graph CNN for Learning on Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07829/) (2018)
- [Unsupervised Representation Learning by Predicting Image Rotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.07728/) (2018)
- [FCOS: Fully Convolutional One-Stage Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01355/) (2019)
- [Point Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.00931/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Visual Representations by Solving Jigsaw Puzzles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.09246/) (2016)
- [Beyond a Gaussian Denoiser: Residual Learning of Deep CNN for Image Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03981/) (2016)
- [VideoMAE: Masked Autoencoders are Data-Efficient Learners for Self-Supervised Video Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12602/) (2022)
- [Image Super-Resolution Using Deep Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1501.00092/) (2014)
- [KPConv: Flexible and Deformable Convolution for Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08889/) (2019)
- [In Search of Lost Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.01434/) (2020)
- [A Point Set Generation Network for 3D Object Reconstruction from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00603/) (2016)
- [PointCNN: Convolution On X-Transformed Points](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07791/) (2018)
- [PCT: Point cloud transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09688/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [MedShapeNet -- A Large-Scale Dataset of 3D Medical Shapes for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.16139/) (2023)
- [Self-supervised Learning for Pre-Training 3D Point Clouds: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.04691/) (2023)
- [3D Feature Prediction for Masked-AutoEncoder-Based Point Cloud Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06911/) (2023)
- [MM-3DScene: 3D Scene Understanding by Customizing Masked Modeling with Informative-Preserved Reconstruction and Self-Distilled Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09948/) (2022)
- [Point-DAE: Denoising Autoencoders for Self-supervised Point Cloud Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.06841/) (2022)
- [Regress Before Construct: Regress Autoencoder for Point Cloud Self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03670/) (2023)
- [PointGame: Geometrically and Adaptively Masked Auto-Encoder on Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13100/) (2023)
- [MaskLRF: Self-supervised Pretraining via Masked Autoencoding of Local Reference Frames for Rotation-invariant 3D Point Set Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.00206/) (2024)
- [Multi-View Representation is What You Need for Point-Cloud Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02558/) (2023)
- [Token Adaptation via Side Graph Convolution for Efficient Fine-tuning of 3D Point Cloud Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14142/) (2025)
- [Masked Clustering Prediction for Unsupervised Point Cloud Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.08910/) (2025)
- [HFBRI-MAE: Handcrafted Feature Based Rotation-Invariant Masked Autoencoder for 3D Point Cloud Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.14132/) (2025)
- [Physics-Driven Local-Whole Elastic Deformation Modeling for Point Cloud Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.13812/) (2025)
- [Self-Supervised Learning for Point Clouds Data: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11881/) (2023)
- [Geometry Aware Field-to-field Transformations for 3D Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05133/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Masked auto-encoding is a popular and effective self-supervised learning approach to point cloud learning. However, most of the existing methods reconstruct only the masked points and overlook the local geometry information, which is also important to understand the point cloud data. In this work, we make the first attempt, to the best of our knowledge, to consider the local geometry information explicitly into the masked auto-encoding, and propose a novel Masked Surfel Prediction (MaskSurf) method. Specifically, given the input point cloud masked at a high ratio, we learn a transformer-based encoder-decoder network to estimate the underlying masked surfels by simultaneously predicting the surfel positions (i.e., points) and per-surfel orientations (i.e., normals). The predictions of points and normals are supervised by the Chamfer Distance and a newly introduced Position-Indexed Normal Distance in a set-to-set manner. Our MaskSurf is validated on six downstream tasks under three fine-tuning strategies. In particular, MaskSurf outperforms its closest competitor, Point-MAE, by 1.2% on the real-world dataset of ScanObjectNN under the OBJ-BG setting, justifying the advantages of masked surfel prediction over masked point cloud reconstruction. Codes will be available at https://github.com/YBZh/MaskSurf.