PCFEx: Point Cloud Feature Extraction for Graph Neural Networks

Abstract: Graph neural networks (GNNs) have gained significant attention for their effectiveness across various domains. This study focuses on applying GNN to process 3D point cloud data for human pose estimation (HPE) and human activity recognition (HAR). We propose novel point cloud feature extraction (PCFEx) techniques to capture meaningful information at the point, edge, and graph levels of the point cloud by considering point cloud as a graph. Moreover, we introduce a GNN architecture designed to efficiently process these features. Our approach is evaluated on four most popular publicly available millimeter wave radar datasets, three for HPE and one for HAR. The results show substantial improvements, with significantly reduced errors in all three HPE benchmarks, and an overall accuracy of 98.8% in mmWave-based HAR, outperforming the existing state of the art models. This work demonstrates the great potential of feature extraction incorporated with GNN modeling approach to enhance the precision of point cloud processing.