Directional density measure to intrinsically estimate and counteract non-uniformity in point clouds

With the emergence of affordable 3D scanning and printing devices, processing of large point clouds has to be performed in many applications. Several algorithms are available for surface reconstruction, smoothing, and parametrization. However, many of these require the sampling of the point cloud to be uniform or at least to be within certain controlled parameters. For non-uniformly sampled point clouds, some methods have been proposed that deal with the non-uniformity by adding additional information such as topological or hierarchical data. In this paper, we focus on point clouds sampling surfaces in R3. We present the notion of local directional density measure that can be intrinsically computed within the point cloud, that is without further knowledge of the geometry despite the given point samples. Specifically, we build on previous work to derive a local, directed, and discrete measure for density. Furthermore, we derive another discrete and a smooth density measure and compare these three experimentally. Each of the three considered measures gives density weights to use in discretizations of operators such that these become independent of sampling uniformity. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on both synthetic and real world data.