English

Neighbourhood-Insensitive Point Cloud Normal Estimation Network

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2021-01-18 v3

Abstract

We introduce a novel self-attention-based normal estimation network that is able to focus softly on relevant points and adjust the softness by learning a temperature parameter, making it able to work naturally and effectively within a large neighbourhood range. As a result, our model outperforms all existing normal estimation algorithms by a large margin, achieving 94.1% accuracy in comparison with the previous state of the art of 91.2%, with a 25x smaller model and 12x faster inference time. We also use point-to-plane Iterative Closest Point (ICP) as an application case to show that our normal estimations lead to faster convergence than normal estimations from other methods, without manually fine-tuning neighbourhood range parameters. Code available at https://code.active.vision.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2008.09965,
  title  = {Neighbourhood-Insensitive Point Cloud Normal Estimation Network},
  author = {Zirui Wang and Victor Adrian Prisacariu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2008.09965},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

Accepted in BMVC 2020 as oral presentation. Code available at https://code.active.vision and project page at http://ninormal.active.vision

R2 v1 2026-06-23T18:02:35.534Z