PD-Flow: A Point Cloud Denoising Framework with Normalizing Flows

Aihua Mao, Zihui Du, Yu-Hui Wen, Jun Xuan, Yong-Jin Liu ;

"Point cloud denoising aims to restore clean point clouds from raw observations corrupted by noise and outliers while preserving the fine-grained details. We present a novel deep learning-based denoising model, that incorporates normalizing flows and noise disentanglement techniques to achieve high denoising accuracy. Unlike the existing works that extract features of point clouds for point-wise correction, we formulate the denoising process from the perspective of distribution learning and feature disentanglement. By considering noisy point clouds as a joint distribution of clean points and noise, the denoised results can be derived from disentangling the noise counterpart from latent point representation, whereas the mapping between Euclidean and latent spaces is modeled by normalizing flows. We evaluate our method on synthesized 3D models and real-world datasets with various noise settings. Qualitative and quantitative results show that our method surpasses previous state-of-the-art deep learning-based approaches in terms of detail preservation and distribution uniformity. The source code is available at https://github.com/unknownue/pdflow."