PointCLIP: Point Cloud Understanding by CLIP

Recently, zero-shot and few-shot learning via Contrastive Vision-Language Pre-training (CLIP) have shown inspirational performance on 2D visual recognition, which learns to match images with their corresponding texts in openvocabulary settings. However, it remains under explored that whether CLIP, pre-trained by large-scale image-text pairs in 2D, can be generalized to 3D recognition. In this paper, we identify such a setting is feasible by proposing PointCLIP, which conducts alignment between CLIPencoded point clouds and 3D category texts. Specifically, we encode a point cloud by projecting it onto multi-view depth maps and aggregate the view-wise zero-shot prediction in an end-to-end manner, which achieves efficient knowledge transfer from 2D to 3D. We further design an inter-view adapter to better extract the global feature and adaptively fuse the 3D few-shot knowledge into CLIP pre-trained in 2D. By just fine-tuning the adapter under few-shot settings, the performance of PointCLIP could be largely improved. In addition, we observe the knowledge complementary property between PointCLIP and classical 3D-supervised networks. Via simple ensemble during inference, PointCLIP contributes to favorable performance enhancement over state-of-the-art 3D networks. Therefore, PointCLIP is a promising alternative for effective 3D point cloud understanding under low data regime with marginal resource cost. We conduct thorough experiments on ModelNet10, ModelNet40 and ScanObjectNN to demonstrate the effectiveness of PointCLIP. Code is available at https: //github.com/ZrrSkywalker/PointCLIP.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.02413