Variational Autoencoding of Dental Point Clouds
This work addresses challenges in digital dentistry by providing a novel probabilistic method for point cloud tasks, though it is incremental as it builds on existing variational autoencoder frameworks.
The paper tackles the problem of probabilistic modeling for point clouds in digital dentistry by introducing Variational FoldingNet (VF-Net), which replaces Chamfer distance optimization with a suitable encoder, resulting in lower reconstruction error and state-of-the-art performance in dental sample generation.
Digital dentistry has made significant advancements, yet numerous challenges remain. This paper introduces the FDI 16 dataset, an extensive collection of tooth meshes and point clouds. Additionally, we present a novel approach: Variational FoldingNet (VF-Net), a fully probabilistic variational autoencoder for point clouds. Notably, prior latent variable models for point clouds lack a one-to-one correspondence between input and output points. Instead, they rely on optimizing Chamfer distances, a metric that lacks a normalized distributional counterpart, rendering it unsuitable for probabilistic modeling. We replace the explicit minimization of Chamfer distances with a suitable encoder, increasing computational efficiency while simplifying the probabilistic extension. This allows for straightforward application in various tasks, including mesh generation, shape completion, and representation learning. Empirically, we provide evidence of lower reconstruction error in dental reconstruction and interpolation, showcasing state-of-the-art performance in dental sample generation while identifying valuable latent representations