SPU-Net: Self-Supervised Point Cloud Upsampling by Coarse-to-Fine Reconstruction with Self-Projection Optimization

The task of point cloud upsampling aims to acquire dense and uniform point sets from sparse and irregular point sets. Although significant progress has been made with deep learning models, they require ground-truth dense point sets as the supervision information, which can only trained on synthetic paired training data and are not suitable for training under real-scanned sparse data. However, it is expensive and tedious to obtain large scale paired sparse-dense point sets for training from real scanned sparse data. To address this problem, we propose a self-supervised point cloud upsampling network, named SPU-Net, to capture the inherent upsampling patterns of points lying on the underlying object surface. Specifically, we propose a coarse-to-fine reconstruction framework, which contains two main components: point feature extraction and point feature expansion, respectively. In the point feature extraction, we integrate self-attention module with graph convolution network (GCN) to simultaneously capture context information inside and among local regions. In the point feature expansion, we introduce a hierarchically learnable folding strategy to generate the upsampled point sets with learnable 2D grids. Moreover, to further optimize the noisy points in the generated point sets, we propose a novel self-projection optimization associated with uniform and reconstruction terms, as a joint loss, to facilitate the self-supervised point cloud upsampling. We conduct various experiments on both synthetic and real-scanned datasets, and the results demonstrate that we achieve comparable performance to the state-of-the-art supervised methods.