Papers › Point-Voxel CNN for Efficient 3D Deep Learning

Point-Voxel CNN for Efficient 3D Deep Learning

8 Jul 2019NeurIPS 2019 12arXiv:1907.03739archive 2025-07-28

Zhijian Liu, Haotian Tang, Yujun Lin, Song Han

We present Point-Voxel CNN (PVCNN) for efficient, fast 3D deep learning. Previous work processes 3D data using either voxel-based or point-based NN models. However, both approaches are computationally inefficient. The computation cost and memory footprints of the voxel-based models grow cubically with the input resolution, making it memory-prohibitive to scale up the resolution. As for point-based networks, up to 80% of the time is wasted on structuring the sparse data which have rather poor memory locality, not on the actual feature extraction. In this paper, we propose PVCNN that represents the 3D input data in points to reduce the memory consumption, while performing the convolutions in voxels to reduce the irregular, sparse data access and improve the locality. Our PVCNN model is both memory and computation efficient. Evaluated on semantic and part segmentation datasets, it achieves much higher accuracy than the voxel-based baseline with 10x GPU memory reduction; it also outperforms the state-of-the-art point-based models with 7x measured speedup on average. Remarkably, the narrower version of PVCNN achieves 2x speedup over PointNet (an extremely efficient model) on part and scene segmentation benchmarks with much higher accuracy. We validate the general effectiveness of PVCNN on 3D object detection: by replacing the primitives in Frustrum PointNet with PVConv, it outperforms Frustrum PointNet++ by 2.4% mAP on average with 1.5x measured speedup and GPU memory reduction.

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Syntology Ran 5 of 8 code samples harvested from 3 repositories linked to this paper; 3 have no recorded run. Of those that ran: 3 ran · our draft was wrong; 1 ran · fixture could not drive it; 1 ran with no contract checked.

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mit-han-lab/pvcnn officialmentioned on GitHubpytorchMIT report
zghera/pvcnn-tf mentioned on GitHubtfMIT report
zghera/voxel-tf-ops mentioned on GitHubtf report

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8 samples harvested; 5 ran; 0 honoured the contract we drafted; 3 have no recorded run. Read from Syntology's graph 2026-09-24; that is when this build read the record, not when the samples ran.

3ran · our draft was wrong
1ran · fixture could not drive it
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get_box_corners_3d mit-han-lab/pvcnn/modules/frustum.py official repository ran MIT (permissive) · 3ae68d06c43d9791 · report
avg_voxelize isl-org/Open3D-ML/ml3d/torch/models/pvcnn.py community (archive-listed) ran · our draft was wrong licence not identified · pointer only · f9f83c192bb3e2e3 · report
create_mlp_components isl-org/Open3D-ML/ml3d/torch/models/pvcnn.py community (archive-listed) ran · fixture could not drive it fingerprinted licence not identified · pointer only · 036bac0272d01074 · report
get_custom_data isl-org/Open3D-ML/examples/vis_pred.py community (archive-listed) ran · our draft was wrong licence not identified · pointer only · 1b8b6b6a0e49e37a · report
pred_custom_data isl-org/Open3D-ML/examples/vis_pred.py community (archive-listed) ran · our draft was wrong licence not identified · pointer only · 2dca674dcca0eafc · report
create_pointnet_components isl-org/Open3D-ML/ml3d/torch/models/pvcnn.py community (archive-listed) unverified licence not identified · pointer only · 90409a9ab7881c14 · report
get_configs zghera/pvcnn-tf/utils/common.py community (archive-listed) unverified MIT (permissive) · d642449ac8f7c2e2 · report
replace_nans_with_norm zghera/pvcnn-tf/modeling/layers/nan_replace.py community (archive-listed) unverified MIT (permissive) · 81cd1d449e518459 · report

Tasks

3D Object Detection3D Semantic SegmentationDeep LearningObject DetectionScene Segmentationobject-detection

1 archive task tag without a task page not shown.

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
3D Object Detection KITTI Cars Easy val PVCNN AP 84.02 #7 of 11 Archive leaderboard report
3D Object Detection KITTI Cars Hard val PVCNN AP 63.81 #7 of 10 Archive leaderboard report
3D Object Detection KITTI Cars Moderate val PVCNN AP 71.54 #8 of 11 Archive leaderboard report
3D Object Detection KITTI Cyclist Easy val PVCNN AP 81.4 #2 of 4 Archive leaderboard report
3D Object Detection KITTI Cyclist Hard val PVCNN AP 56.24 #2 of 4 Archive leaderboard report
3D Object Detection KITTI Cyclist Moderate val PVCNN AP 59.97 #2 of 4 Archive leaderboard report
3D Object Detection KITTI Pedestrian Easy val PVCNN AP 73.2 #1 of 4 Archive leaderboard report
3D Object Detection KITTI Pedestrian Hard val PVCNN AP 56.78 #1 of 4 Archive leaderboard report
3D Object Detection KITTI Pedestrian Moderate val PVCNN AP 64.71 #1 of 4 Archive leaderboard report
3D Part Segmentation ShapeNet-Part PVCNN volumetric Instance Average IoU 86.2 #32 of 67 Archive leaderboard report
3D Semantic Segmentation S3DIS PVCNN++ mIoU (6-Fold) 58.98 #6 of 6 Archive leaderboard report

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