The task of point cloud upsampling aims to acquire dense and uniform point
sets from sparse and irregular point sets. Although significant progress has
been made with deep learning models, they require ground-truth dense point sets
as the supervision information, which can only trained on synthetic paired
training data and are not suitable for training under real-scanned sparse data.
However, it is expensive and tedious to obtain large scale paired sparse-dense
point sets for training from real scanned sparse data. To address this problem,
we propose a self-supervised point cloud upsampling network, named SPU-Net, to
capture the inherent upsampling patterns of points lying on the underlying
object surface. Specifically, we propose a coarse-to-fine reconstruction
framework, which contains two main components: point feature extraction and
point feature expansion, respectively. In the point feature extraction, we
integrate self-attention module with graph convolution network (GCN) to
simultaneously capture context information inside and among local regions. In
the point feature expansion, we introduce a hierarchically learnable folding
strategy to generate the upsampled point sets with learnable 2D grids.
Moreover, to further optimize the noisy points in the generated point sets, we
propose a novel self-projection optimization associated with uniform and
reconstruction terms, as a joint loss, to facilitate the self-supervised point
cloud upsampling. We conduct various experiments on both synthetic and
real-scanned datasets, and the results demonstrate that we achieve comparable
performance to the state-of-the-art supervised methods