  Exploring contextual information in the local region is important for shape
understanding and analysis. Existing studies often employ hand-crafted or
explicit ways to encode contextual information of local regions. However, it is
hard to capture fine-grained contextual information in hand-crafted or explicit
manners, such as the correlation between different areas in a local region,
which limits the discriminative ability of learned features. To resolve this
issue, we propose a novel deep learning model for 3D point clouds, named
Point2Sequence, to learn 3D shape features by capturing fine-grained contextual
information in a novel implicit way. Point2Sequence employs a novel sequence
learning model for point clouds to capture the correlations by aggregating
multi-scale areas of each local region with attention. Specifically,
Point2Sequence first learns the feature of each area scale in a local region.
Then, it captures the correlation between area scales in the process of
aggregating all area scales using a recurrent neural network (RNN) based
encoder-decoder structure, where an attention mechanism is proposed to
highlight the importance of different area scales. Experimental results show
that Point2Sequence achieves state-of-the-art performance in shape
classification and segmentation tasks.
