Data diversity and abundance are essential for improving the performance and generalization of models in natural language processing and 2D vision. However, the 3D vision domain suffers from a lack of 3D data, and simply combining multiple 3D datasets for pretraining a 3D backbone does not yield significant improvement, due to the domain discrepancies among different 3D datasets that impede effective feature learning. In this work, we identify the main sources of the domain discrepancies between 3D indoor scene datasets, and propose Swin3D++, an enhanced architecture based on Swin3D for efficient pretraining on multi-source 3D point clouds. Swin3D++ introduces domain-specific mechanisms to Swin3D’s modules to address domain discrepancies and enhance the network capability on multi-source pretraining. Moreover, we devise a simple source-augmentation strategy to increase the pretraining data scale and facilitate supervised pretraining. We validate the effectiveness of our design, and demonstrate that Swin3D++ surpasses the state-of-the-art 3D pretraining methods on typical indoor scene understanding tasks.

The use of pretrained backbones with fine-tuning has shown success for 2D vision and natural language processing tasks, with advantages over task-specific networks. In this paper, we introduce a pretrained 3D backbone, called Swin3D, for 3D indoor scene understanding. We designed a 3D Swin Transformer as our backbone network, which enables efficient self-attention on sparse voxels with linear memory complexity, making the backbone scalable to large models and datasets. We also introduce a generalized contextual relative positional embedding scheme to capture various irregularities of point signals for improved network performance. We pretrained a large Swin3D model on a synthetic Structured3D dataset, which is an order of magnitude larger than the ScanNet dataset. Our model pretrained on the synthetic dataset not only generalizes well to downstream segmentation and detection on real 3D point datasets but also outperforms state-of-the-art methods on downstream tasks with +2.3 mIoU and +2.2 mIoU on S3DIS Area5 and 6-fold semantic segmentation, respectively, +1.8 mIoU on ScanNet segmentation (val), +1.9 mAP@0.5 on ScanNet detection, and +8.1 mAP@0.5 on S3DIS detection. A series of extensive ablation studies further validated the scalability, generality, and superior performance enabled by our approach.