CircNet: Meshing 3D Point Clouds with Circumcenter Detection

Reconstructing 3D point clouds into triangle meshes is a key problem in computational geometry and surface reconstruction. Point cloud triangulation solves this problem by providing edge information to the input points. Since no vertex interpolation is involved, it is beneficial to preserve sharp details on the surface. Taking advantage of learning-based techniques in triangulation, existing methods enumerate the complete combinations of candidate triangles, which is both complex and inefficient. In this paper, we leverage the duality between a triangle and its circumcenter, and introduce a deep neural network that detects the circumcenters to achieve point cloud triangulation. Specifically, we introduce multiple anchor priors to divide the neighborhood space of each point. The neural network then learns to predict the presences and locations of circumcenters under the guidance of those anchors. We extract the triangles dual to the detected circumcenters to form a primitive mesh, from which an edge-manifold mesh is produced via simple post-processing. Unlike existing learning-based triangulation methods, the proposed method bypasses an exhaustive enumeration of triangle combinations and local surface parameterization. We validate the efficiency, generalization, and robustness of our method on prominent datasets of both watertight and open surfaces.