# Dynamic Clustering Transformer Network for Point Cloud Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.08073 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.08073/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 33 of its 62 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 May 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 33)

- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Dynamic Graph CNN for Learning on Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07829/) (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)
- [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)
- [PCT: Point cloud transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09688/) (2020)
- [PointConv: Deep Convolutional Networks on 3D Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.07246/) (2018)
- [PointNeXt: Revisiting PointNet++ with Improved Training and Scaling Strategies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.04670/) (2022)
- [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)
- [OctNet: Learning Deep 3D Representations at High Resolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05009/) (2016)
- [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)
- [SGPN: Similarity Group Proposal Network for 3D Point Cloud Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.08588/) (2017)
- [Stratified Transformer for 3D Point Cloud Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14508/) (2022)
- [Point Convolutional Neural Networks by Extension Operators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.10091/) (2018)
- [3DMV: Joint 3D-Multi-View Prediction for 3D Semantic Scene Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.10409/) (2018)
- [Superpoint Transformer for 3D Scene Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.15766/) (2022)
- [DensePoint: Learning Densely Contextual Representation for Efficient Point Cloud Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.03669/) (2019)
- [Not All Tokens Are Equal: Human-centric Visual Analysis via Token Clustering Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08680/) (2022)
- [Virtual Multi-view Fusion for 3D Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.13138/) (2020)
- [Interpolated Convolutional Networks for 3D Point Cloud Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.04512/) (2019)
- [Toronto-3D: A Large-scale Mobile LiDAR Dataset for Semantic Segmentation of Urban Roadways](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.08284/) (2020)
- [DeepGCNs: Making GCNs Go as Deep as CNNs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.06849/) (2019)
- [Learning Multi-View Aggregation In the Wild for Large-Scale 3D Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.07548/) (2022)
- [PVT: Point-Voxel Transformer for Point Cloud Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.06076/) (2021)
- [Dual Transformer for Point Cloud Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13044/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [3D Learnable Supertoken Transformer for LiDAR Point Cloud Scene Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.15826/) (2024)
- [4D-CS: Exploiting Cluster Prior for 4D Spatio-Temporal LiDAR Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.02937/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Point cloud segmentation is one of the most important tasks in computer vision with widespread scientific, industrial, and commercial applications. The research thereof has resulted in many breakthroughs in 3D object and scene understanding. Previous methods typically utilized hierarchical architectures for feature representation. However, the commonly used sampling and grouping methods in hierarchical networks are only based on point-wise three-dimensional coordinates, ignoring local semantic homogeneity of point clusters. Additionally, the prevalent Farthest Point Sampling (FPS) method is often a computational bottleneck. To address these issues, we propose a novel 3D point cloud representation network, called Dynamic Clustering Transformer Network (DCTNet). It has an encoder-decoder architecture, allowing for both local and global feature learning. Specifically, we propose novel semantic feature-based dynamic sampling and clustering methods in the encoder, which enables the model to be aware of local semantic homogeneity for local feature aggregation. Furthermore, in the decoder, we propose an efficient semantic feature-guided upsampling method. Our method was evaluated on an object-based dataset (ShapeNet), an urban navigation dataset (Toronto-3D), and a multispectral LiDAR dataset, verifying the performance of DCTNet across a wide variety of practical engineering applications. The inference speed of DCTNet is 3.8-16.8× faster than existing State-of-the-Art (SOTA) models on the ShapeNet dataset, while achieving an instance-wise mIoU of 86.6%, the current top score. Our method similarly outperforms previous methods on the other datasets, verifying it as the new State-of-the-Art in point cloud segmentation.