Winding Clearness for Differentiable Point Cloud Optimization

We propose to explore the properties of raw point clouds through the \emph{winding clearness}, a concept we first introduce for assessing the clarity of the interior/exterior relationships represented by the winding number field of the point cloud. In geometric modeling, the winding number is a powerful tool for distinguishing the interior and exterior of a given surface $\partial \Omega$, and it has been previously used for point normal orientation and surface reconstruction. In this work, we introduce a novel approach to assess and optimize the quality of point clouds based on the winding clearness. We observe that point clouds with reduced noise tend to exhibit improved winding clearness. Accordingly, we propose an objective function that quantifies the error in winding clearness, solely utilizing the positions of the point clouds. Moreover, we demonstrate that the winding clearness error is differentiable and can serve as a loss function in optimization-based and learning-based point cloud processing. In the optimization-based method, the loss function is directly back-propagated to update the point positions, resulting in an overall improvement of the point cloud. In the learning-based method, we incorporate the winding clearness as a geometric constraint in the diffusion-based 3D generative model. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of optimizing the winding clearness in enhancing the quality of the point clouds. Our method exhibits superior performance in handling noisy point clouds with thin structures, highlighting the benefits of the global perspective enabled by the winding number.