A Holistic Method for Superquadric Fitting Using Unsupervised Clustering Analysis

TL;DR

This paper introduces a robust, unsupervised clustering-based method for fitting both rigid and deformable superquadrics to noisy point clouds, improving stability and efficiency over prior approaches.

Contribution

The authors propose a unified, clustering-inspired optimization framework for superquadric fitting that handles noise, outliers, and deformations with analytical solutions and convergence guarantees.

Findings

Achieves robust superquadric fitting in noisy, outlier-rich point clouds.

Provides closed-form solutions for fuzzy membership and covariance matrices.

Demonstrates improved convergence and ability to escape local minima.

Abstract

This work presents a novel method for fitting superquadrics to point clouds under the contamination of noise and outliers, which has many applications for shape modeling across diverse fields. Unlike prior approaches that either exclusively focus on fitting rigid or deformable superquadrics, or suffer from robustness and numerical instability issues, our method redefines the problem from a new unsupervised clustering perspective, enabling the holistic fitting of both rigid and deformable superquadrics within a unified framework. Central to our approach is a stable optimization function inspired by unsupervised clustering analysis, where we formulate the point cloud data and samples from the potential parametric surface as clustering members and centroids, respectively. Then, the clustering process with dynamic updates to centroid locations serves as a direct proxy for optimizing superquadric parameters, establishing a principled link between geometric fitting and clustering dynamics. We further derive the relationship between pairwise computations of clustering centroids and clustering members to orthogonal distances, effectively eliminating the need for the time-consuming surface sampling process. Moreover, our formulation provides closed-form analytical solutions for both the fuzzy membership degree vector and the covariance matrix, ensuring efficient iteration optimization and enabling more effective handling of geometric deformations. In addition, we provide a theoretical certificate of convergence analysis and demonstrate that the clustering-inspired fitting method can escape local minima by inherently increasing the convexity of the objective function. The implementation is publicly available at https://github.com/zikai1/SuperquadricFitting.