Fast 3D Point Cloud Denoising via Bipartite Graph Approximation & Total Variation

Abstract: Acquired 3D point cloud data, whether from active sensors directly or from stereo-matching algorithms indirectly, typically contain non-negligible noise. To address the point cloud denoising problem, we propose a fast graph-based local algorithm. Specifically, given a k-nearest-neighbor graph of the 3D points, we first approximate it with a bipartite graph(independent sets of red and blue nodes) using a KL divergence criterion. For each partite of nodes (say red), we first define surface normal of each red node using 3D coordinates of neighboring blue nodes, so that red node normals n can be written as a linear function of red node coordinates p. We then formulate a convex optimization problem, with a quadratic fidelity term ||p-q||_2^2 given noisy observed red coordinates q and a graph total variation (GTV) regularization term for surface normals of neighboring red nodes. We minimize the resulting l2-l1-norm using alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) and proximal gradient descent. The two partites of nodes are alternately optimized until convergence. Experimental results show that compared to state-of-the-art schemes with similar complexity, our proposed algorithm achieves the best overall denoising performance objectively and subjectively.