# HFBRI-MAE: Handcrafted Feature Based Rotation-Invariant Masked Autoencoder for 3D Point Cloud Analysis

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.14132 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.14132/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 34 of its 45 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Apr 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 34)

- [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)
- [PointNet++: Deep Hierarchical Feature Learning on Point Sets in a Metric Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02413/) (2017)
- [ShapeNet: An Information-Rich 3D Model Repository](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03012/) (2015)
- [Dynamic Graph CNN for Learning on Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07829/) (2018)
- [Decoupled Weight Decay Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.05101/) (2017)
- [Point Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.00931/) (2020)
- [PCT: Point cloud transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09688/) (2020)
- [SE(3)-Transformers: 3D Roto-Translation Equivariant Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10503/) (2020)
- [Deep Learning for 3D Point Clouds: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.12033/) (2019)
- [Revisiting Point Cloud Classification: A New Benchmark Dataset and Classification Model on Real-World Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.04616/) (2019)
- [PointContrast: Unsupervised Pre-training for 3D Point Cloud Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.10985/) (2020)
- [Masked Autoencoders for Point Cloud Self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.06604/) (2022)
- [PointNeXt: Revisiting PointNet++ with Improved Training and Scaling Strategies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.04670/) (2022)
- [Point-M2AE: Multi-scale Masked Autoencoders for Hierarchical Point Cloud Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14401/) (2022)
- [CrossPoint: Self-Supervised Cross-Modal Contrastive Learning for 3D Point Cloud Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00680/) (2022)
- [Walk in the Cloud: Learning Curves for Point Clouds Shape Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.01288/) (2021)
- [PointGPT: Auto-regressively Generative Pre-training from Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11487/) (2023)
- [Deep Learning for Image and Point Cloud Fusion in Autonomous Driving: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05224/) (2020)
- [Rotation Invariant Convolutions for 3D Point Clouds Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.06297/) (2019)
- [Self-Supervised Few-Shot Learning on Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.14168/) (2020)
- [A Rotation-Invariant Framework for Deep Point Cloud Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.07238/) (2020)
- [Rotation-Invariant Local-to-Global Representation Learning for 3D Point Cloud](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.03318/) (2020)
- [Equivariant Point Cloud Analysis via Learning Orientations for Message Passing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14486/) (2022)
- [RIConv++: Effective Rotation Invariant Convolutions for 3D Point Clouds Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.13094/) (2022)
- [Global Context Aware Convolutions for 3D Point Cloud Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.02986/) (2020)
- [3D Medical Point Transformer: Introducing Convolution to Attention Networks for Medical Point Cloud Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.04863/) (2021)
- [The Devil is in the Pose: Ambiguity-free 3D Rotation-invariant Learning via Pose-aware Convolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.15210/) (2022)
- [Masked Surfel Prediction for Self-Supervised Point Cloud Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.03111/) (2022)
- [RI-MAE: Rotation-Invariant Masked AutoEncoders for Self-Supervised Point Cloud Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.00353/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Beyond Random Masking: A Dual-Stream Approach for Rotation-Invariant Point Cloud Masked Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.14975/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Self-supervised learning (SSL) has demonstrated remarkable success in 3D point cloud analysis, particularly through masked autoencoders (MAEs). However, existing MAE-based methods lack rotation invariance, leading to significant performance degradation when processing arbitrarily rotated point clouds in real-world scenarios. To address this limitation, we introduce Handcrafted Feature-Based Rotation-Invariant Masked Autoencoder (HFBRI-MAE), a novel framework that refines the MAE design with rotation-invariant handcrafted features to ensure stable feature learning across different orientations. By leveraging both rotation-invariant local and global features for token embedding and position embedding, HFBRI-MAE effectively eliminates rotational dependencies while preserving rich geometric structures. Additionally, we redefine the reconstruction target to a canonically aligned version of the input, mitigating rotational ambiguities. Extensive experiments on ModelNet40, ScanObjectNN, and ShapeNetPart demonstrate that HFBRI-MAE consistently outperforms existing methods in object classification, segmentation, and few-shot learning, highlighting its robustness and strong generalization ability in real-world 3D applications.
