An End-to-End Shape-Preserving Point Completion Network

IEEE Comput Graph Appl. 2021 May-Jun;41(3):20-33. doi: 10.1109/MCG.2021.3065533. Epub 2021 May 7.

Abstract

Shape completion for 3-D point clouds is an important issue in the literature of computer graphics and computer vision. We propose an end-to-end shape-preserving point completion network through encoder-decoder architecture, which works directly on incomplete 3-D point clouds and can restore their overall shapes and fine-scale structures. To achieve this task, we design a novel encoder that encodes information from neighboring points in different orientations and scales, as well as a decoder that outputs dense and uniform complete point clouds. We augment a 3-D object dataset based on ModelNet40 and validate the effectiveness of our shape-preserving completion network. Experimental results demonstrate that the recovered point clouds lie close to ground truth points. Our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in terms of Chamfer distance (CD) error and earth mover's distance (EMD) error. Furthermore, our end-to-end completion network is robust to model noise, the different levels of incomplete data, and can also generalize well to unseen objects and real-world data.