Denoising 3D point cloud strives to remove noise from noisy data. Existing methods address the problem by estimating point-wise displacement from the point feature or by learning the distribution of noise. In this paper, we propose to embed the point cloud through a novel multi-resolution hash encoding, and utilize the embedding to learn an optimum transport plan between noisy and corresponding clean point cloud via transformer encoder and a shared-MLP based decoder. The multi-resolution hash encoding uses hierarchical hash-based representations to efficiently capture geometric details at multiple resolutions. Hence, it enables removal of noise while encoding global-to-local structural details. The transformer encoder further improves the model’s ability to learn long-range dependencies and contextual relationships, facilitating improved denoising performance. The optimum transport plan is devised by simulating a denoising diffusion probabilistic model through Schrödinger bridge problem. The proposed method advances state-of-the-art methods through extensive experiments and offers new insights into the synergy between hash encoding, and transformer architectures in the diffusion framework.

Point cloud completion aims to reconstruct complete 3D shapes from partial observations, often requiring multiple views or complete data for training. In this paper, we propose an attention-driven, self-supervised autoencoder network that completes 3D point clouds from a single partial observation. Multi-head self-attention captures robust contextual relationships, while residual connections in the autoencoder enhance geometric feature learning. In addition to this, we incorporate a contrastive learning-based loss, which encourages the network to better distinguish structural patterns even in highly incomplete observations. Experimental results on benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art performance in single-view point cloud completion.

Atmospheric medium often constrains the visibility of outdoor scenes due to scattering of light rays. This causes attenuation in the irradiance reaching the imaging device along with an additive component to render a hazy effect in the image. The visibility is further reduced for poorly illuminated scenes. The attenuation becomes wavelength dependent in underwater scenario, causing undesired color cast along with hazy effect. In order to suppress the effect of different atmospheric/underwater conditions such as haze and to enhance the contrast of such images, we reformulate local haziness in a generalized manner. The parameters are estimated by harnessing the similarity of patches within a local neighborhood. Unlike existing methods, our approach is developed based on the assumption that for outdoor scenes the depth of patches changes gradually in a local neighborhood surrounding the patch. This change in depth can be approximated by patch similarity in that neighborhood. As the attenuation in irradiance of an image in presence of atmospheric medium relies on the depth of the scene, the coefficients related to the attenuation are estimated from the weights of patch similarity. The additive haze effect is deduced using non-local mean of the patch. Our experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in reducing the haze component as well as in enhancing the image under different conditions of haze (daytime, nighttime, and underwater).

Depth map sensed by low-cost active sensor is often limited in resolution, whereas depth information achieved from structure from motion or sparse depth scanning techniques may result in a sparse point cloud. Achieving a high-resolution (HR) depth map from a low resolution (LR) depth map or densely reconstructing a sparse non-uniformly sampled depth map are fundamentally similar problems with different types of upsampling requirements. The first problem involves upsampling in a uniform grid, whereas the second type of problem requires an upsampling in a non-uniform grid. In this paper, we propose a new approach to address such issues in a unified framework, based on sparse representation. Unlike, most of the approaches of depth map restoration, our approach does not require an HR intensity image. Based on example depth maps, sub-dictionaries of exemplars are constructed, and are used to restore HR/dense depth map. In the case of uniform upsampling of LR depth map, an edge preserving constraint is used for preserving the discontinuity present in the depth map, and a pyramidal reconstruction strategy is applied in order to deal with higher upsampling factors. For upsampling of non-uniformly sampled sparse depth map, we compute the missing information in local patches from that from similar exemplars. Furthermore, we also suggest an alternative method of reconstructing dense depth map from very sparse non-uniformly sampled depth data by sequential cascading of uniform and non-uniform upsampling techniques. We provide a variety of qualitative and quantitative results to demonstrate the efficacy of our approach for depth map restoration.

We propose an example-based approach for enhancing resolution of range-images. Unlike most existing methods on range-image superresolution (SR), we do not employ a colour image counterpart for the range-image. Moreover, we use only a small set of range-images to construct a dictionary of exemplars. Considering the importance of edges in range-image SR, our formulation involves an edge-based constraint to better weight appropriate patches from the dictionary in a sparse-representation framework. Moreover, realizing the need for large up-sampling factors in case of range-images, we follow a hierarchical strategy for estimating the high-resolution range-images. We demonstrate that our strategy yields considerable improvements over the state-of-the-art approaches for range-image SR.

Quality of an image is associated with edge of the image. It is important to preserve the edge of the image while deriving high resolution (HR) image from low resolution (LR) image, also known as superresolution (SR) problem. This paper proposes an edge preserving constraint, which preserve the edge information of image by minimizing the differences between edges of LR image and the edges of the reconstructed image (down-sampled version), in sparse coding based SR problem. Partial edge evidences, derived using 1-D processing of image, are used separately in the constraints. The experimental results show that proposed approach preserves the edges of image as well as outperforms objectively the existing SR approaches.