GATF-PCQA: A Graph Attention Transformer Fusion Network for Point Cloud Quality Assessment

Abstract

Point cloud quality assessment remains a critical challenge due to the high dimensionality and irregular structure of 3D data, as well as the need to align objective predictions with human perception. To solve this, we suggest a novel graph-based learning architecture that integrates perceptual features with advanced graph neural networks. Our method consists of four main stages: First, key perceptual features, including curvature, saliency, and color, are extracted to capture relevant geometric and visual distortions. Second, a graph-based representation of the point cloud is created using these characteristics, where nodes represent perceptual clusters and weighted edges encode their feature similarities, yielding a structured adjacency matrix. Third, a novel Graph Attention Network Transformer Fusion (GATF) module dynamically refines the importance of these features and generates a unified, view-specific representation. Finally, a Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) regresses the fused features into a final quality score. We validate our approach on three benchmark datasets: ICIP2020, WPC, and SJTU-PCQA. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves high correlation with human subjective scores, outperforming existing state-of-the-art metrics by effectively modeling the perceptual mechanisms of quality judgment.