EIDU-Net: edge-preserved inception DenseGCN U-Net for LiDAR point cloud segmentation

With the development of laser scanners and machine learning, point cloud semantic segmentation plays a significant role in autonomous driving, scene reconstruction, human-computer interaction, and other fields. In recent years, point cloud semantic segmentation based on deep learning has become one of the key research directions in point cloud processing. Due to the limited ability to exploit geometric details and contextual information in point clouds, most methods that adopt encoder-decoder architecture lose local structural information easily, especially detailed features, and extract features insufficiently. To address this issue, the edge-preserving inception DenseGCN U-Net (entitled as EIDU-Net) is proposed. EIDU-Net makes full use of the complementation between geometric details in the original point cloud and high-level features. The edge-preserved graph pooling (EGP) layer, the key module of the EIDU-Net, is designed to retain additional edge feature information from the original point cloud during pooling operations. Accordingly, the edge-preserved graph unpooling (EGU) layer can restore the feature graph more efficiently based on the additionally retained edge features. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed EIDU-Net has remarkable improvements on semantic segmentation tasks under whatever S3DIS or Terracotta Warrior fragments. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/caoxin918/EIDU-Net .