This paper builds upon the current methods to increase their capability and automation for 3D surface construction from noisy and potentially sparse point clouds. It presents an analysis of an artificial neural network surface regression and mapping method, describing caveats, improvements and justification for the different approach.
An approach was suggested by @cite_8 using an image processing inspiration for surface de-noising. It removes noise by applying a Weiner filter which approximates the components of the surface as a statistical distribution. There are two problems with this algorithm in our context. First, it needs to be decided this algorithm should be applied, unnecessary smoothing might remove features that describe the underlying geometry, although there is some attempt to apply a surface based anisotropic diffusion to preserve edges. In addition, the formula used requires the user to both know and supply the noise denoted by the variance @math @cite_8 . It may not be possible to determine the noise of the data as it is an unstructured point cloud.
@cite_8
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A class of fourth-order partial differential equations (PDEs) are proposed to optimize the trade-off between noise removal and edge preservation. The time evolution of these PDEs seeks to minimize a cost functional which is an increasing function of the absolute value of the Laplacian of the image intensity function. Since the Laplacian of an image at a pixel is zero if the image is planar in its neighborhood, these PDEs attempt to remove noise and preserve edges by approximating an observed image with a piecewise planar image. Piecewise planar images look more natural than step images which anisotropic diffusion (second order PDEs) uses to approximate an observed image. So the proposed PDEs are able to avoid the blocky effects widely seen in images processed by anisotropic diffusion, while achieving the degree of noise removal and edge preservation comparable to anisotropic diffusion. Although both approaches seem to be comparable in removing speckles in the observed images, speckles are more visible in images processed by the proposed PDEs, because piecewise planar images are less likely to mask speckles than step images and anisotropic diffusion tends to generate multiple false edges. Speckles can be easily removed by simple algorithms such as the one presented in this paper.