FractalCloud: A Fractal-Inspired Architecture for Efficient Large-Scale Point Cloud Processing

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2511.07665v1
• Date: Wed, 12 Nov 2025 01:10:05 GMT
• Title: FractalCloud: A Fractal-Inspired Architecture for Efficient Large-Scale Point Cloud Processing
• Authors: Yuzhe Fu, Changchun Zhou, Hancheng Ye, Bowen Duan, Qiyu Huang, Chiyue Wei, Cong Guo, Hai "Helen'' Li, Yiran Chen,
• Abstract summary: Three-dimensional (3D) point clouds are increasingly used in applications such as autonomous driving, robotics, and virtual reality (VR)<n>Point-based neural networks (PNNs) have demonstrated strong performance in point cloud analysis, originally targeting small-scale inputs.<n>FractalCloud is a fractal-inspired hardware architecture for efficient large-scale 3D point cloud processing.
• Score: 13.217596969807062
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Three-dimensional (3D) point clouds are increasingly used in applications such as autonomous driving, robotics, and virtual reality (VR). Point-based neural networks (PNNs) have demonstrated strong performance in point cloud analysis, originally targeting small-scale inputs. However, as PNNs evolve to process large-scale point clouds with hundreds of thousands of points, all-to-all computation and global memory access in point cloud processing introduce substantial overhead, causing $O(n^2)$ computational complexity and memory traffic where n is the number of points}. Existing accelerators, primarily optimized for small-scale workloads, overlook this challenge and scale poorly due to inefficient partitioning and non-parallel architectures. To address these issues, we propose FractalCloud, a fractal-inspired hardware architecture for efficient large-scale 3D point cloud processing. FractalCloud introduces two key optimizations: (1) a co-designed Fractal method for shape-aware and hardware-friendly partitioning, and (2) block-parallel point operations that decompose and parallelize all point operations. A dedicated hardware design with on-chip fractal and flexible parallelism further enables fully parallel processing within limited memory resources. Implemented in 28 nm technology as a chip layout with a core area of 1.5 $mm^2$, FractalCloud achieves 21.7x speedup and 27x energy reduction over state-of-the-art accelerators while maintaining network accuracy, demonstrating its scalability and efficiency for PNN inference.

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