# Bidirectional Feature Globalization for Few-shot Semantic Segmentation of 3D Point Cloud Scenes

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2208.06671 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.06671/

## Key facts

- Cited by 23 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 25 of its 34 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Aug 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00593/) (2016)
- [Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning for Fast Adaptation of Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.03400/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Matching Networks for One Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04080/) (2016)
- [Dynamic Graph CNN for Learning on Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07829/) (2018)
- [KPConv: Flexible and Deformable Convolution for Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08889/) (2019)
- [Learning to Compare: Relation Network for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.06025/) (2017)
- [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)
- [RandLA-Net: Efficient Semantic Segmentation of Large-Scale Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11236/) (2019)
- [Large-scale Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation with Superpoint Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09869/) (2017)
- [One-Shot Learning for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.03410/) (2017)
- [CANet: Class-Agnostic Segmentation Networks with Iterative Refinement and Attentive Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.02351/) (2019)
- [PAConv: Position Adaptive Convolution with Dynamic Kernel Assembling on Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14635/) (2021)
- [SG-One: Similarity Guidance Network for One-Shot Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.09091/) (2018)
- [Point Convolutional Neural Networks by Extension Operators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.10091/) (2018)
- [Task-Agnostic Meta-Learning for Few-shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.07722/) (2018)
- [DensePoint: Learning Densely Contextual Representation for Efficient Point Cloud Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.03669/) (2019)
- [Superpixel Sampling Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.10174/) (2018)
- [Few-shot 3D Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.12052/) (2020)
- [ConvPoint: Continuous Convolutions for Point Cloud Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.02375/) (2019)
- [PointSIFT: A SIFT-like Network Module for 3D Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.00652/) (2018)
- [Beyond single receptive field: A receptive field fusion-and-stratification network for airborne laser scanning point cloud classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.10278/) (2022)
- [Semantic Segmentation for Point Cloud Scenes via Dilated Graph Feature Aggregation and Pyramid Decoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.04944/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 23 of 23)

- [Multimodality Helps Few-shot 3D Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.22489/) (2024)
- [Rethinking Few-shot 3D Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.00592/) (2024)
- [No Time to Train: Empowering Non-Parametric Networks for Few-shot 3D Scene Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.04050/) (2024)
- [Generalized Few-shot 3D Point Cloud Segmentation with Vision-Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.16282/) (2025)
- [Taylor Series-Inspired Local Structure Fitting Network for Few-shot Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.02454/) (2025)
- [Breaking Immutable: Information-Coupled Prototype Elaboration for Few-Shot Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14782/) (2022)
- [Generalized Few-Shot Point Cloud Segmentation Via Geometric Words](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.11222/) (2023)
- [PointCaM: Cut-and-Mix for Open-Set Point Cloud Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.02011/) (2022)
- [Not Just Learning from Others but Relying on Yourself: A New Perspective on Few-Shot Segmentation in Remote Sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.12452/) (2023)
- [Prompt-and-Transfer: Dynamic Class-aware Enhancement for Few-shot Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.10389/) (2024)
- [AbsTopK: Rethinking Sparse Autoencoders For Bidirectional Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.00404/) (2025)
- [AgMTR: Agent Mining Transformer for Few-shot Segmentation in Remote Sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.17453/) (2024)
- [MSDNet: Multi-Scale Decoder for Few-Shot Semantic Segmentation via Transformer-Guided Prototyping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.11316/) (2024)
- [LiDAR Remote Sensing Meets Weak Supervision: Concepts, Methods, and Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.18384/) (2025)
- [Towards Robust Few-shot Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.11228/) (2023)
- [SDL-MVS: View Space and Depth Deformable Learning Paradigm for Multi-View Stereo Reconstruction in Remote Sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.17140/) (2024)
- [Self-guided Few-shot Semantic Segmentation for Remote Sensing Imagery Based on Large Vision Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.13200/) (2023)
- [TAFormer: A Unified Target-Aware Transformer for Video and Motion Joint Prediction in Aerial Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.18238/) (2024)
- [SCOPE: Scene-Contextualized Incremental Few-Shot 3D Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.06572/) (2026)
- [Dynamic Prototype Adaptation with Distillation for Few-shot Point Cloud Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.16051/) (2024)
- [UniRiT: Towards Few-Shot Non-Rigid Point Cloud Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.22909/) (2024)
- [Few to Big: Prototype Expansion Network via Diffusion Learner for Point Cloud Few-shot Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.12878/) (2025)
- [Query-aware Hub Prototype Learning for Few-Shot 3D Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.08253/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Few-shot segmentation of point cloud remains a challenging task, as there is no effective way to convert local point cloud information to global representation, which hinders the generalization ability of point features. In this study, we propose a bidirectional feature globalization (BFG) approach, which leverages the similarity measurement between point features and prototype vectors to embed global perception to local point features in a bidirectional fashion. With point-to-prototype globalization (Po2PrG), BFG aggregates local point features to prototypes according to similarity weights from dense point features to sparse prototypes. With prototype-to-point globalization (Pr2PoG), the global perception is embedded to local point features based on similarity weights from sparse prototypes to dense point features. The sparse prototypes of each class embedded with global perception are summarized to a single prototype for few-shot 3D segmentation based on the metric learning framework. Extensive experiments on S3DIS and ScanNet demonstrate that BFG significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.