Self-Sampling for Neural Point Cloud Consolidation

In this paper, we introduce a deep learning technique for consolidating and sharp feature generation of point clouds using only the input point cloud itself. Rather than explicitly define a prior that describes typical shape characteristics (i.e., piecewise-smoothness), or a heuristic policy for generating novel sharp points, we opt to learn both using a neural network with shared-weights. Instead of relying on a large collection of manually annotated data, we use the self-supervision present within a single shape, i.e., self-prior, to train the network, and learn the underlying distribution of sharp features specific to the given input point cloud. By learning to map a low-curvature subset of the input point cloud to a disjoint high-curvature subset, the network formalizes the shape-specific characteristics and infers how to generate sharp points. During test time, the network is repeatedly fed a random subset of points from the input and displaces them to generate an arbitrarily large set of novel sharp feature points. The local shared weights are optimized over the entire shape, learning non-local statistics and exploiting the recurrence of local-scale geometries. We demonstrate the ability to generate coherent sets of sharp feature points on a variety of shapes, while eliminating outliers and noise.