Papers › PointCLIP: Point Cloud Understanding by CLIP

PointCLIP: Point Cloud Understanding by CLIP

4 Dec 2021CVPR 2022 1arXiv:2112.02413archive 2025-07-28

Renrui Zhang, Ziyu Guo, Wei zhang, Kunchang Li, Xupeng Miao, Bin Cui, Yu Qiao, Peng Gao, Hongsheng Li

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 open-vocabulary 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 CLIP-encoded point cloud and 3D category texts. Specifically, we encode a point cloud by projecting it into multi-view depth maps without rendering, and aggregate the view-wise zero-shot prediction to achieve knowledge transfer from 2D to 3D. On top of that, we design an inter-view adapter to better extract the global feature and adaptively fuse the few-shot knowledge learned from 3D into CLIP pre-trained in 2D. By just fine-tuning the lightweight adapter in the few-shot settings, the performance of PointCLIP could be largely improved. In addition, we observe the complementary property between PointCLIP and classical 3D-supervised networks. By simple ensembling, PointCLIP boosts baseline's performance and even surpasses state-of-the-art models. Therefore, PointCLIP is a promising alternative for effective 3D point cloud understanding via CLIP under low resource cost and data regime. We conduct thorough experiments on widely-adopted ModelNet10, ModelNet40 and the challenging ScanObjectNN to demonstrate the effectiveness of PointCLIP. The code is released at https://github.com/ZrrSkywalker/PointCLIP.

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Code

zrrskywalker/pointclip officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorch report
pku-dair/hetu mentioned on GitHubpytorch report

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Tasks

3D Open-Vocabulary Instance SegmentationFew-Shot LearningOpen Vocabulary Object DetectionTraining-free 3D Part SegmentationTraining-free 3D Point Cloud ClassificationTransfer LearningZero-Shot Transfer 3D Point Cloud ClassificationZero-shot 3D Point Cloud ClassificationZero-shot 3D classification

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
3D Open-Vocabulary Instance Segmentation STPLS3D PointCLIP AP50 02.6 #3 of 3 Archive leaderboard report
Training-free 3D Part Segmentation ShapeNet-Part PointCLIP Need 3D Data? No #3 of 3 Archive leaderboard report
Training-free 3D Part Segmentation ShapeNet-Part PointCLIP mIoU 31.0 #3 of 3 Archive leaderboard report
Training-free 3D Point Cloud Classification ModelNet40 PointCLIP Accuracy (%) 20.2 #7 of 7 Archive leaderboard report
Training-free 3D Point Cloud Classification ModelNet40 PointCLIP Need 3D Data? No #7 of 7 Archive leaderboard report
Training-free 3D Point Cloud Classification ScanObjectNN PointCLIP Accuracy (%) 15.4 #6 of 6 Archive leaderboard report
Training-free 3D Point Cloud Classification ScanObjectNN PointCLIP Need 3D Data? No #6 of 6 Archive leaderboard report
Zero-Shot Transfer 3D Point Cloud Classification ModelNet10 PointCLIP Accuracy (%) 30.23 #4 of 4 Archive leaderboard report
Zero-Shot Transfer 3D Point Cloud Classification ModelNet40 PointCLIP Accuracy (%) 20.18 #16 of 16 Archive leaderboard report
Zero-Shot Transfer 3D Point Cloud Classification ScanObjectNN PointCLIP OBJ_BG Accuracy(%) 21.34 #10 of 10 Archive leaderboard report
Zero-Shot Transfer 3D Point Cloud Classification ScanObjectNN PointCLIP OBJ_ONLY Accuracy(%) 19.28 #10 of 10 Archive leaderboard report
Zero-Shot Transfer 3D Point Cloud Classification ScanObjectNN PointCLIP PB_T50_RS Accuracy (%) 15.38 #10 of 10 Archive leaderboard report

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Methods

AdapterCLIP

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