StraightPCF: Straight Point Cloud Filtering
This addresses noise removal in 3D vision for applications like robotics and AR/VR, offering an incremental improvement in efficiency and performance.
The paper tackles point cloud filtering by introducing StraightPCF, a deep learning method that moves noisy points along straight paths to reduce discretization errors and achieve faster convergence, achieving state-of-the-art results with a lightweight network of ~530K parameters, 17% the size of a recent baseline.
Point cloud filtering is a fundamental 3D vision task, which aims to remove noise while recovering the underlying clean surfaces. State-of-the-art methods remove noise by moving noisy points along stochastic trajectories to the clean surfaces. These methods often require regularization within the training objective and/or during post-processing, to ensure fidelity. In this paper, we introduce StraightPCF, a new deep learning based method for point cloud filtering. It works by moving noisy points along straight paths, thus reducing discretization errors while ensuring faster convergence to the clean surfaces. We model noisy patches as intermediate states between high noise patch variants and their clean counterparts, and design the VelocityModule to infer a constant flow velocity from the former to the latter. This constant flow leads to straight filtering trajectories. In addition, we introduce a DistanceModule that scales the straight trajectory using an estimated distance scalar to attain convergence near the clean surface. Our network is lightweight and only has $\sim530K$ parameters, being 17% of IterativePFN (a most recent point cloud filtering network). Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world data show our method achieves state-of-the-art results. Our method also demonstrates nice distributions of filtered points without the need for regularization. The implementation code can be found at: https://github.com/ddsediri/StraightPCF.