Parallel-SA: Point Cloud Processing Acceleration via Parallel Set Abstraction

Point-based networks achieve high accuracy by preserving the intrinsic spatial structure of point clouds. The spatial information is effectively extracted by set abstraction, a critical module for feature learning in point-based networks. However, set abstraction introduces a computational bottleneck, and naive parallelization often degrades sampling quality, leading to accuracy loss. To address these challenges, we propose Parallel-SA, a framework that accelerates point-based networks by transforming set abstraction from sequential to parallel processing without sacrificing accuracy. Parallel-SA leverages a multi-scale sampling distribution approximation to preserve sampling quality under parallel execution. In addition, it employs distribution-aware balanced partitioning and adaptive load-balancing refinement to further improve efficiency. Experiments show that Parallel-SA achieves an average 2.38× speedup in set abstraction with minimal accuracy degradation. © 2026 EDAA.