DiffCD: A Symmetric Differentiable Chamfer Distance for Neural Implicit Surface Fitting

Linus Härenstam-Nielsen, Lu Sang, Abhishek Saroha, Nikita Araslanov, Daniel Cremers

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

Neural implicit surfaces can be used to recover accurate 3D geometry from imperfect point clouds. In this work, we show that state-of-the-art techniques work by minimizing an approximation of a one-sided Chamfer distance. This shape metric is not symmetric, as it only ensures that the point cloud is near the surface but not vice versa. As a consequence, existing methods can produce inaccurate reconstructions with spurious surfaces. Although one approach against spurious surfaces has been widely used in the literature, we theoretically and experimentally show that it is equivalent to regularizing the surface area, resulting in over-smoothing. As a more appealing alternative, we propose DiffCD, a novel loss function corresponding to the symmetric Chamfer distance. In contrast to previous work, DiffCD also assures that the surface is near the point cloud, which eliminates spurious surfaces without the need for additional regularization. We experimentally show that DiffCD reliably recovers a high degree of shape detail, substantially outperforming existing work across varying surface complexity and noise levels.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationComputer Vision – ECCV 2024 - 18th European Conference, Proceedings
EditorsAleš Leonardis, Elisa Ricci, Stefan Roth, Olga Russakovsky, Torsten Sattler, Gül Varol
PublisherSpringer Science and Business Media Deutschland GmbH
Pages432-447
Number of pages16
ISBN (Print)9783031734632
DOIs
StatePublished - 2025
Event18th European Conference on Computer Vision, ECCV 2024 - Milan, Italy
Duration: 29 Sep 20244 Oct 2024

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume15131 LNCS
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

Conference18th European Conference on Computer Vision, ECCV 2024
Country/TerritoryItaly
CityMilan
Period29/09/244/10/24

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'DiffCD: A Symmetric Differentiable Chamfer Distance for Neural Implicit Surface Fitting'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this