Hashed, binned A-buffer for real-time outlier removal and rendering of noisy point clouds

Abstract

Typical point-based rendering algorithms cannot directly handle large outliers or high amounts of noise without either a costly pre-processing of the point cloud or using multiple render passes. In this paper, we propose an A-buffer-based approach that directly renders unprocessed point clouds and filters out outliers in real time, without introducing additional render passes. The core concept of our approach uses bins along each pixel ray in which intermediate information is accumulated. To improve storage efficiency, we extend the binned A-buffer approach using per-ray bin hashing. Our method significantly improves visual quality when rendering noisy point clouds with varying noise levels and large outliers, while only requiring little performance and memory overhead compared to traditional point rendering methods.