Weighted Multi-projection: 3D Point Cloud Denoising with Estimated Tangent Planes

Abstract: As a collection of 3D points sampled from surfaces of objects, a 3D point cloud is widely used in robotics, autonomous driving and augmented reality. Due to the physical limitations of 3D sensing devices, 3D point clouds are usually noisy, which influences subsequent computations, such as surface reconstruction, recognition and many others. To denoise a 3D point cloud, we present a novel algorithm, called weighted multi-projection. Compared to many previous works on denoising, instead of directly smoothing the coordinates of 3D points, we use a two-fold smoothing: We first estimate a local tangent plane at each 3D point and then reconstruct each 3D point by weighted averaging of its projections on multiple tangent planes. We also provide the theoretical analysis for the surface normal estimation and achieve a tighter bound than in a previous work. We validate the empirical performance on the dataset of ShapeNetCore and show that weighted multi-projection outperforms its competitors in all nine classes.