  We present a neural-network-based architecture for 3D point cloud denoising
called neural projection denoising (NPD). In our previous work, we proposed a
two-stage denoising algorithm, which first estimates reference planes and
follows by projecting noisy points to estimated reference planes. Since the
estimated reference planes are inevitably noisy, multi-projection is applied to
stabilize the denoising performance. NPD algorithm uses a neural network to
estimate reference planes for points in noisy point clouds. With more accurate
estimations of reference planes, we are able to achieve better denoising
performances with only one-time projection. To the best of our knowledge, NPD
is the first work to denoise 3D point clouds with deep learning techniques. To
conduct the experiments, we sample 40000 point clouds from the 3D data in
ShapeNet to train a network and sample 350 point clouds from the 3D data in
ModelNet10 to test. Experimental results show that our algorithm can estimate
normal vectors of points in noisy point clouds. Comparing to five competitive
methods, the proposed algorithm achieves better denoising performance and
produces much smaller variances.

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition;Signal Processing