3D Point Cloud Denoising via Bipartite Graph Approximation and Reweighted Graph Laplacian

Abstract: Point cloud is a collection of 3D coordinates that are discrete geometric samples of an object's 2D surfaces. Imperfection in the acquisition process means that point clouds are often corrupted with noise. Building on recent advances in graph signal processing, we design local algorithms for 3D point cloud denoising. Specifically, we design a reweighted graph Laplacian regularizer (RGLR) for surface normals and demonstrate its merits in rotation invariance, promotion of piecewise smoothness, and ease of optimization. Using RGLR as a signal prior, we formulate an optimization problem with a general lp-norm fidelity term that can explicitly model two types of independent noise: small but non-sparse noise (using l2 fidelity term) and large but sparser noise (using l1 fidelity term). To establish a linear relationship between normals and 3D point coordinates, we first perform bipartite graph approximation to divide the point cloud into two disjoint node sets (red and blue). We then optimize the red and blue nodes' coordinates alternately. For l2-norm fidelity term, we iteratively solve an unconstrained quadratic programming (QP) problem, efficiently computed using conjugate gradient with a bounded condition number to ensure numerical stability. For l1-norm fidelity term, we iteratively minimize an l1-l2 cost function sing accelerated proximal gradient (APG), where a good step size is chosen via Lipschitz continuity analysis. Finally, we propose simple mean and median filters for flat patches of a given point cloud to estimate the noise variance given the noise type, which in turn is used to compute a weight parameter trading off the fidelity term and signal prior in the problem formulation. Extensive experiments show state-of-the-art denoising performance among local methods using our proposed algorithms.