Mutual Information Maximization Based Similarity Operation for 3D Point Cloud Completion Network

Abstract

Reconstructing the incomplete point cloud into the complete and uniform one is a fundamental task in 3D point cloud processing. Some existing studies have explored the use of deep learning networks and representation learning to implement point cloud completion, but the completed shapes still appear unrealistic and non-uniform. To address this issue, we propose the idea of simulating the process of point cloud completion with local-to-global reasoning (LGR). Motivated to achieve the fine LGR, a novel mutual information (MI) maximization-based similarity operation is proposed, which realizes the reconstruction from incomplete point cloud to complete one by maximizing MI between global features and the prior features from the same 3D object. We adopt the Jenson-Shannon MI estimator to maximize the MI between global features and the priors in specific dimensions, which effectively increases the similarity of global and prior features. Compared with other existing works and similarity operations, the superior results indicate the efficacy of the proposed method and its advantages over existing ones in both the synthetic and real-world datasets. Our source code is available at <uri xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">https://github.com/wendydidi/MISO-PCN</uri> .