Diffusion-Driven Inter-Outer Surface Separation for Point Clouds with Open Boundaries

TL;DR

This paper introduces a diffusion-based method for accurately separating inter and outer surfaces in double-layered point clouds with open boundaries, addressing artifacts caused by TSDF truncation in 3D reconstruction.

Contribution

It presents a novel diffusion-driven algorithm capable of extracting true inter surfaces from open-boundary point clouds, improving robustness over existing methods.

Findings

Successfully separates inter and outer layers in 20,000-point datasets within 10 seconds.

Effectively handles open boundaries and topological holes in point clouds.

Applicable to indoor scene modeling and medical imaging with double-layered point clouds.

Abstract

We propose a diffusion-based algorithm for separating the inter and outer layer surfaces from double-layered point clouds, particularly those exhibiting the "double surface artifact" caused by truncation in Truncated Signed Distance Function (TSDF) fusion during indoor or medical 3D reconstruction. This artifact arises from asymmetric truncation thresholds, leading to erroneous inter and outer shells in the fused volume, which our method addresses by extracting the true inter layer to mitigate challenges like overlapping surfaces and disordered normals. We focus on point clouds with \emph{open boundaries} (i.e., sampled surfaces with topological openings/holes through which particles may escape), rather than point clouds with \emph{missing surface regions} where no samples exist. Our approach enables robust processing of both watertight and open-boundary models, achieving extraction of the inter layer from 20,000 inter and 20,000 outer points in approximately 10 seconds. This solution is particularly effective for applications requiring accurate surface representations, such as indoor scene modeling and medical imaging, where double-layered point clouds are prevalent, and it accommodates both closed (watertight) and open-boundary surface geometries. Our goal is \emph{post-hoc} inter/outer shell separation as a lightweight module after TSDF fusion; we do not aim to replace full variational or learning-based reconstruction pipelines.