High-fidelity point cloud completion with low-resolution recovery and noise-aware upsampling

Abstract

Completing an unordered partial point cloud is a challenging task. Existing approaches that rely on decoding a latent feature to recover the complete shape, often lead to the completed point cloud being over-smoothing, losing details, and noisy. Instead of decoding a whole shape, we propose to decode and refine a low-resolution (low-res) point cloud first, and then perform a patch-wise noise-aware upsampling rather than interpolating the whole sparse point cloud at once, which tends to lose details. Regarding the possibility of lacking details of the initially decoded low-res point cloud, we propose an iterative refinement to recover the geometric details and a symmetrization process to preserve the trustworthy information from the input partial point cloud. After obtaining a sparse and complete point cloud, we propose a patch-wise upsampling strategy. Patch-based upsampling allows to recover fine details better rather than decoding a whole shape. The patch extraction approach is to generate training patch pairs between the sparse and ground-truth point clouds with an outlier removal step to suppress the noisy points from the sparse point cloud. Together with the low-res recovery, our whole pipeline can achieve high-fidelity point cloud completion. Comprehensive evaluations are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method and its components.