# Geodesic-Former: a Geodesic-Guided Few-shot 3D Point Cloud Instance Segmenter

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.10859 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.10859/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 45 of its 55 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Jul 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 45)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [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)
- [SGDR: Stochastic Gradient Descent with Warm Restarts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03983/) (2016)
- [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)
- [Deformable DETR: Deformable Transformers for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04159/) (2020)
- [ScanNet: Richly-annotated 3D Reconstructions of Indoor Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.04405/) (2017)
- [SegFormer: Simple and Efficient Design for Semantic Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.15203/) (2021)
- [Pyramid Vision Transformer: A Versatile Backbone for Dense Prediction without Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12122/) (2021)
- [FCOS: Fully Convolutional One-Stage Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01355/) (2019)
- [Point Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.00931/) (2020)
- [Tokens-to-Token ViT: Training Vision Transformers from Scratch on ImageNet](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.11986/) (2021)
- [Segmenter: Transformer for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05633/) (2021)
- [3D Semantic Segmentation with Submanifold Sparse Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10275/) (2017)
- [Generalised Dice overlap as a deep learning loss function for highly unbalanced segmentations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.03237/) (2017)
- [Conditional DETR for Fast Training Convergence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.06152/) (2021)
- [An End-to-End Transformer Model for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.08141/) (2021)
- [PointGroup: Dual-Set Point Grouping for 3D Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.01658/) (2020)
- [Conditional Convolutions for Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.05664/) (2020)
- [3D-SIS: 3D Semantic Instance Segmentation of RGB-D Scans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.07003/) (2018)
- [3D Object Detection with Pointformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.11409/) (2020)
- [Meta R-CNN : Towards General Solver for Instance-level Few-shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.13032/) (2019)
- [You Only Look at One Sequence: Rethinking Transformer in Vision through Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.00666/) (2021)
- [SGPN: Similarity Group Proposal Network for 3D Point Cloud Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.08588/) (2017)
- [Learning Object Bounding Boxes for 3D Instance Segmentation on Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.01140/) (2019)
- [GSPN: Generative Shape Proposal Network for 3D Instance Segmentation in Point Cloud](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03320/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [A Survey of Label-Efficient Deep Learning for 3D Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.19812/) (2023)
- [NeuroGF: A Neural Representation for Fast Geodesic Distance and Path Queries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00658/) (2023)
- [GeoMM: On Geodesic Perspective for Multi-modal Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.11216/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper introduces a new problem in 3D point cloud: few-shot instance segmentation. Given a few annotated point clouds exemplified a target class, our goal is to segment all instances of this target class in a query point cloud. This problem has a wide range of practical applications where point-wise instance segmentation annotation is prohibitively expensive to collect. To address this problem, we present Geodesic-Former -- the first geodesic-guided transformer for 3D point cloud instance segmentation. The key idea is to leverage the geodesic distance to tackle the density imbalance of LiDAR 3D point clouds. The LiDAR 3D point clouds are dense near the object surface and sparse or empty elsewhere making the Euclidean distance less effective to distinguish different objects. The geodesic distance, on the other hand, is more suitable since it encodes the scene's geometry which can be used as a guiding signal for the attention mechanism in a transformer decoder to generate kernels representing distinct features of instances. These kernels are then used in a dynamic convolution to obtain the final instance masks. To evaluate Geodesic-Former on the new task, we propose new splits of the two common 3D point cloud instance segmentation datasets: ScannetV2 and S3DIS. Geodesic-Former consistently outperforms strong baselines adapted from state-of-the-art 3D point cloud instance segmentation approaches with a significant margin. Code is available at https://github.com/VinAIResearch/GeoFormer.