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Poster
Shape As Points: A Differentiable Poisson Solver
Songyou Peng · Chiyu Jiang · Yiyi Liao · Michael Niemeyer · Marc Pollefeys · Andreas Geiger

Thu Dec 09 08:30 AM -- 10:00 AM (PST) @ Virtual
in Poster Session 6 »

In recent years, neural implicit representations gained popularity in 3D reconstruction due to their expressiveness and flexibility. However, the implicit nature of neural implicit representations results in slow inference times and requires careful initialization. In this paper, we revisit the classic yet ubiquitous point cloud representation and introduce a differentiable point-to-mesh layer using a differentiable formulation of Poisson Surface Reconstruction (PSR) which allows for a GPU-accelerated fast solution of the indicator function given an oriented point cloud. The differentiable PSR layer allows us to efficiently and differentiably bridge the explicit 3D point representation with the 3D mesh via the implicit indicator field, enabling end-to-end optimization of surface reconstruction metrics such as Chamfer distance. This duality between points and meshes hence allows us to represent shapes as oriented point clouds, which are explicit, lightweight and expressive. Compared to neural implicit representations, our Shape-As-Points (SAP) model is more interpretable, lightweight, and accelerates inference time by one order of magnitude. Compared to other explicit representations such as points, patches, and meshes, SAP produces topology-agnostic, watertight manifold surfaces. We demonstrate the effectiveness of SAP on the task of surface reconstruction from unoriented point clouds and learning-based reconstruction.

Keywords: Optimization

Author Information

Songyou Peng (ETH Zurich & MPI for Intelligent Systems)
Chiyu Jiang (Waymo)
Yiyi Liao (University of Tübingen)
Michael Niemeyer (Max Planck for Intelligent Systems)
Marc Pollefeys (ETH Zurich)
Andreas Geiger (MPI Tübingen)

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