MSECNet: Accurate and Robust Normal Estimation for 3D Point Clouds by Multi-Scale Edge Conditioning

TL;DR

MSECNet is a novel method for estimating surface normals in 3D point clouds that enhances accuracy in regions with rapid normal variation by integrating multi-scale edge detection and conditioning.

Contribution

It introduces a multi-scale edge conditioning framework that improves normal estimation in challenging regions, outperforming existing methods in accuracy and speed.

Findings

Outperforms existing methods on synthetic and real datasets.

Runs significantly faster than comparable approaches.

Effective in surface reconstruction tasks.

Abstract

Estimating surface normals from 3D point clouds is critical for various applications, including surface reconstruction and rendering. While existing methods for normal estimation perform well in regions where normals change slowly, they tend to fail where normals vary rapidly. To address this issue, we propose a novel approach called MSECNet, which improves estimation in normal varying regions by treating normal variation modeling as an edge detection problem. MSECNet consists of a backbone network and a multi-scale edge conditioning (MSEC) stream. The MSEC stream achieves robust edge detection through multi-scale feature fusion and adaptive edge detection. The detected edges are then combined with the output of the backbone network using the edge conditioning module to produce edge-aware representations. Extensive experiments show that MSECNet outperforms existing methods on both synthetic (PCPNet) and real-world (SceneNN) datasets while running significantly faster. We also conduct various analyses to investigate the contribution of each component in the MSEC stream. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in surface reconstruction.