MFFTNet: A Novel 3D Point Cloud Segmentation Network Based on Multi-Scale Feature Fusion and Transformer Architecture

Intelligent analysis of 3D point clouds has become a frontier in emerging fields such as autonomous driving, digital twins, and the metaverse. Precise segmentation of 3D point clouds is particularly important within these domains; however, it faces several challenges: (1) point cloud data inherently lacks structured topological information; (2) point cloud shapes are complex and highly variable, making it difficult to utilize semantic priors; and (3) the sampling process of point clouds may result in sparse and uneven data. To address these issues, this paper proposes a novel Point Cloud Segmentation Network based on multi-scale feature fusion and Transformer architecture (MFFTNet). MFFTNet enhances the performance of existing segmentation methods by globally modeling the overall point cloud shape and embedding local point cloud details. Specifically, MFFTNet divides the segmentation task into encoding and decoding stages. The encoder is designed as a hierarchical pyramid structure that extracts relatively sparse local center points and fuses local features during progressive downsampling. It also utilizes a Transformer for global feature modeling to establish multi-scale topological and semantic information of the point cloud. Subsequently, multi-scale feature fusion further enhances the network’s perception of local features and global structure. The decoder progressively upsamples to restore the original point cloud and injects multi-scale feature information to achieve precise segmentation. Based on the aforementioned encoding-decoding structure and multi-scale feature fusion, MFFTNet outperforms existing methods on the point cloud semantic segmentation datasets ShapeNetPart and S3DIS.