Viktoria Heimann

Viktoria Heimann, Andreas Spruck, André Kaup

The demand for high-resolution point clouds has increased throughout the last years. However, capturing high-resolution point clouds is expensive and thus, frequently replaced by upsampling of low-resolution data. Most state-of-the-art methods are either restricted to a rastered grid, incorporate normal vectors, or are trained for a single use case. We propose to use the frequency selectivity principle, where a frequency model is estimated locally that approximates the surface of the point cloud. Then, additional points are inserted into the approximated surface. Our novel frequency-selective geometry upsampling shows superior results in terms of subjective as well as objective quality compared to state-of-the-art methods for scaling factors of 2 and 4. On average, our proposed method shows a 4.4 times smaller point-to-point error than the second best state-of-the-art PU-Net for a scale factor of 4.

Viktoria Heimann, Andreas Spruck, André Kaup

With the increasing demand of capturing our environment in three-dimensions for AR/ VR applications and autonomous driving among others, the importance of high-resolution point clouds rises. As the capturing process is a complex task, point cloud upsampling is often desired. We propose Frequency-Selective Upsampling (FSU), an upsampling scheme that upsamples geometry and attribute information of point clouds jointly in a sequential manner with overlapped support areas. The point cloud is partitioned into blocks with overlapping support area first. Then, a continuous frequency model is generated that estimates the point cloud's surface locally. The model is sampled at new positions for upsampling. In a subsequent step, another frequency model is created that models the attribute signal. Here, knowledge from the geometry upsampling is exploited for a simplified projection of the points in two dimensions. The attribute model is evaluated for the upsampled geometry positions. In our extensive evaluation, we evaluate geometry and attribute upsampling independently and show joint results. The geometry results show best performances for our proposed FSU in terms of point-to-plane error and plane-to-plane angular similarity. Moreover, FSU outperforms other color upsampling schemes by 1.9 dB in terms of color PSNR. In addition, the visual appearance of the point clouds clearly increases with FSU.

Andreas Spruck, Viktoria Heimann, André Kaup

Neural networks are widely used for almost any task of recognizing image content. Even though much effort has been put into investigating efficient network architectures, optimizers, and training strategies, the influence of image interpolation on the performance of neural networks is not well studied. Furthermore, research has shown that neural networks are often sensitive to minor changes in the input image leading to drastic drops of their performance. Therefore, we propose the use of keypoint agnostic frequency selective mesh-to-grid resampling (FSMR) for the processing of input data for neural networks in this paper. This model-based interpolation method already showed that it is capable of outperforming common interpolation methods in terms of PSNR. Using an extensive experimental evaluation we show that depending on the network architecture and classification task the application of FSMR during training aids the learning process. Furthermore, we show that the usage of FSMR in the application phase is beneficial. The classification accuracy can be increased by up to 4.31 percentage points for ResNet50 and the Oxflower17 dataset.