Deep Point Cloud Simplification for High-quality Surface Reconstruction

Abstract: The growing size of point clouds enlarges consumptions of storage, transmission, and computation of 3D scenes. Raw data is redundant, noisy, and non-uniform. Therefore, simplifying point clouds for achieving compact, clean, and uniform points is becoming increasingly important for 3D vision and graphics tasks. Previous learning based methods aim to generate fewer points for scene understanding, regardless of the quality of surface reconstruction, leading to results with low reconstruction accuracy and bad point distribution. In this paper, we propose a novel point cloud simplification network (PCS-Net) dedicated to high-quality surface mesh reconstruction while maintaining geometric fidelity. We first learn a sampling matrix in a feature-aware simplification module to reduce the number of points. Then we propose a novel double-scale resampling module to refine the positions of the sampled points, to achieve a uniform distribution. To further retain important shape features, an adaptive sampling strategy with a novel saliency loss is designed. With our PCS-Net, the input non-uniform and noisy point cloud can be simplified in a feature-aware manner, i.e., points near salient features are consolidated but still with uniform distribution locally. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method and show that we outperform previous simplification or reconstruction-oriented upsampling methods.