Adaptive and Iterative Point Cloud Denoising with Score-Based Diffusion Model

Point cloud denoising task aims to recover the clean point cloud from the scanned data coupled with different levels or patterns of noise. The recent state-of-the-art methods often train deep neural networks to update the point locations towards the clean point cloud, and empirically repeat the denoising process several times in order to obtain the denoised results. It is not clear how to efficiently arrange the iterative denoising processes to deal with different levels or patterns of noise. In this paper, we propose an adaptive and iterative point cloud denoising method based on the score-based diffusion model. For a given noisy point cloud, we first estimate the noise variation and determine an adaptive denoising schedule with appropriate step sizes, then invoke the trained network iteratively to update point clouds following the adaptive schedule. To facilitate this adaptive and iterative denoising process, we design the network architecture and a two-stage sampling strategy for the network training to enable feature fusion and gradient fusion for iterative denoising. Compared to the state-of-the-art point cloud denoising methods, our approach obtains clean and smooth denoised point clouds, while preserving the shape boundary and details better. Our results not only outperform the other methods both qualitatively and quantitatively, but also are preferable on the synthetic dataset with different patterns of noises, as well as the real-scanned dataset.