Efficient Curvature Estimation for Oriented Point Clouds

There is an immense literature focused on estimating the curvature of an unknown surface from point cloud dataset. Most existing algorithms estimate the curvature indirectly, that is, to estimate the surface locally by some basis functions and then calculate the curvature of such surface as an estimate of the curvature. Recently several methods have been proposed to estimate the curvature directly. However, these algorithms lack of theoretical guarantee on estimation error on small to moderate datasets. In this paper, we propose a direct and efficient method to estimate the curvature for oriented point cloud data without any surface approximation. In fact, we estimate the Weingarten map using a least square method, so that Gaussian curvature, mean curvature and principal curvatures can be obtained automatically from the Weingarten map. We show the convergence rate of our Weingarten Map Estimation (WME) algorithm is $n^{-2/3}$ both theoretically and numerically. Finally, we apply our method to point cloud simplification and surface reconstruction.