OPTNet: Ordering Point Transformer Network for Post-disaster 3D Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Nhut Le, Ehsan Karimi, Maryam Rahnemoonfar
Organizations: Computer Science and Engineering, Lehigh University, Bethlehem PA 18015, US · Civil and Environmental Engineering, Lehigh University, Bethlehem PA 18015, US
Abstract
Post-disaster damage assessment requires rapid and accurate semantic segmentation of 3D point clouds to identify critical infrastructure such as damaged buildings and roads. Early Point Transformers (e.g., PTv1, PTv2) relied on computationally expensive neighbor searching (k-NN) and Farthest Point Sampling (FPS). To improve efficiency, recent architectures like Point Transformer V3 (PTv3) adopted static serialization methods, such as Hilbert curves or Z-order, to organize unstructured points for window-based attention. However, these fixed orderings are not optimal for capturing the complex geometry of disaster scenes. In this paper, we propose OPTNet (Ordering Point Transformer Network), which introduces a learnable Point Sorter module. OPTNet utilizes a self-supervised ordering loss to dynamically predict an optimal permutation that maximizes the locality of the attention mechanism. We evaluate our method on the 3DAeroRelief dataset, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art baselines.
Point cloud semantic segmentation requires architectures that capture both fine-grained local geometry and broad global scene structure. Transformer-based networks have demonstrated strong performance by focusing on detailed local feature aggregation; however, global context is conveyed primarily through skip connections across encoder-decoder stages, which we argue is insufficient for full scene understanding. We hypothesize that augmenting skip connections with a learnable global feature extraction module allows the network to acquire scene-level knowledge before descending into local detail, leading to richer and more contextually grounded representations. To this end, we propose Point Transformer with Wavelet Neural Operato (PT-WNO), which integrates a shared Wavelet Neural Operator (WNO) branch alongside the skip connections of a point cloud transformer backbone. At each encoder-decoder transition, point features are projected onto a dense 3D volumetric grid where the WNO captures multi-scale global spectral context through learnable wavelet decomposition and reconstruction. These global features are fused back into the network via lightweight adapters, complementing rather than replacing the existing skip connections. Experiments on four large-scale 3D point cloud benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of PT-WNO. On S3DIS (Area 5), PT-WNO achieves 71.59% mIoU, outperforming the Point Transformer v3 (PTv3) baseline by +1.03 points. On DALES it achieves 81.05% mIoU (+1.47 over the baseline). On ScanNet~v2, PT-WNO obtains 76.19% mIoU, remaining competitive with the baseline (76.36%).
3D point cloud perception remains tightly coupled to custom CUDA operators for spatial operations, limiting portability and efficiency on non-NVIDIA, AMD, and embedded hardware. We introduce PointTransformerX (PTX), a fully PyTorch-native vision transformer backbone for 3D point clouds, removing all custom CUDA operators and external libraries while retaining competitive accuracy. PTX introduces 3D-GS-RoPE, a rotary positional embedding that encodes 3D spatial relationships directly in self-attention without neighborhood construction, and further replaces sparse convolutional patch embedding with a linear projection. PTX explores inference-time scaling of attention windows to improve accuracy without retraining. With a redesigned feed-forward network, PTX achieves 98.7% of PointTransformer V3's accuracy on ScanNet with 79.2% fewer parameters and executing 1.6\times faster while requiring just 253 MB memory. PTX runs natively on NVIDIA GPUs, AMD GPUs (ROCm), and CPUs, providing an efficient and portable foundation for point cloud perception.
Laurenz Reichardt, Nikolas Ebert, Oliver Wasenmüller
Point clouds are a fundamental 3D representation in computer vision, enabling a wide range of perception tasks. However, real-world point clouds often suffer from degradations such as incompleteness, noise, outliers, and irregular density, caused by sensor limitations or occlusions. Recovering clean and detailed shapes from such degraded data is crucial for downstream applications. While existing learning-based methods achieve progress on individual tasks like completion or denoising, they typically rely on global bottleneck features, which lose fine-grained geometry and remain sensitive to varying input quality. We propose a unified 3D restoration network that directly takes point clouds as input and adaptively reconstructs high-quality geometry under diverse degradation scenarios. At the core of our approach is a Pseudo-Query module, implemented within a Transformer backbone, which reformulates geometric translation into two cooperative stages to enhance structural clarity, robustness, and local detail preservation. Extensive experiments on curated benchmarks demonstrate that our approach surpasses state-of-the-art performance in general 3D restoration. It effectively handles complex combinations of completion, deformation, and denoising degradations. With this work, we provide a novel unified, point-only backbone for robust 3D restoration, enabling more versatile 3D perception.