Differentiable Iterative Surface Normal Estimation

This paper presents an end-to-end differentiable algorithm for anisotropic surface normal estimation on unstructured point-clouds. We utilize graph neural networks to iteratively infer point weights for a plane fitting algorithm applied to local neighborhoods. The approach retains the interpretability and efficiency of traditional sequential plane fitting while benefiting from a data-dependent deep-learning parameterization. This results in a state-of-the-art surface normal estimator that is robust to noise, outliers and point density variation and that preserves sharp features through anisotropic kernels and a local spatial transformer. Contrary to previous deep learning methods, the proposed approach does not require any hand-crafted features while being faster and more parameter efficient.