$p$-Poisson surface reconstruction in curl-free flow from point clouds

The aim of this paper is the reconstruction of a smooth surface from an unorganized point cloud sampled by a closed surface, with the preservation of geometric shapes, without any further information other than the point cloud. Implicit neural representations (INRs) have recently emerged as a promising approach to surface reconstruction. However, the reconstruction quality of existing methods relies on ground truth implicit function values or surface normal vectors. In this paper, we show that proper supervision of partial differential equations and fundamental properties of differential vector fields are sufficient to robustly reconstruct high-quality surfaces. We cast the $p$-Poisson equation to learn a signed distance function (SDF) and the reconstructed surface is implicitly represented by the zero-level set of the SDF. For efficient training, we develop a variable splitting structure by introducing a gradient of the SDF as an auxiliary variable and impose the $p$-Poisson equation directly on the auxiliary variable as a hard constraint. Based on the curl-free property of the gradient field, we impose a curl-free constraint on the auxiliary variable, which leads to a more faithful reconstruction. Experiments on standard benchmark datasets show that the proposed INR provides a superior and robust reconstruction. The code is available at https://github.com/Yebbi/PINC.