Metric-KNN is All You Need

Abstract

In this work, we propose a novel Metric-K Nearest Neighbor (-KNN) to facilitate topology aware learning in point clouds. Topology aware learning is achieved by accumulation of local features in deep-learning model. Recent work rely on Ball queries or K-Nearest-Neighbor (KNN) for local feature extraction of point clouds and finds challenges in retaining topological information. -KNN employes a generalised Minkowski distance in the KNN search algorithm for topological representation of point clouds. -KNN enables state-of-the-art point cloud methods to perform topology aware downstream tasks. We demonstrate the performance of -KNN as plugin towards point cloud classification, part-segmentation, and denoising using benchmark dataset.