PatchAugment: Local Neighborhood Augmentation in Point Cloud Classification

Recent deep neural network models trained on smaller and less diverse datasets use data augmentation to alleviate limitations such as overfitting, reduced robustness, and lower generalization. Methods using 3D datasets are among the most common to use data augmentation techniques such as random point drop, scaling, translation, rotations, and jittering. However, these data augmentation techniques are fixed and are often applied to the entire object, ignoring the object’s local geometry. Different local neighborhoods on the object surface hold a different amount of geometric complexity. Applying the same data augmentation techniques at the object level is less effective in augmenting local neighborhoods with complex structures. This paper presents PatchAugment, a data augmentation framework to apply different augmentation techniques to the local neighborhoods. Our experimental studies on PointNet++ and DGCNN models demonstrate the effectiveness of PatchAugment on the task of 3D Point Cloud Classification. We evaluated our technique against these models using four benchmark datasets, ModelNet40 (synthetic), ModelNet10 (synthetic), SHREC’16 (synthetic) and ScanObjectNN (real-world).