Cascaded normal filtering neural network for geometry-aware mesh denoising of measurement surfaces

Mesh denoising is a fundamental component of many disparate reverse engineering applications of measurement surfaces. This article presents a cascaded normal filtering neural network (termed a CNF-Net) for geometry-aware mesh denoising of measurement surfaces. CNF-Net leverages the geometry domain knowledge (GDK) that, a mesh approximates to its underlying surface compactly if all mesh facets at most lie on the surface intersections while not crossing them. Benefiting from the well-estimated underlying geometry of noisy mesh facets, a multiscale guidedly filtered normal descriptor (M-GFND) is formulated, and multiple height maps are constructed from the M-GFND. The height maps can be effectively fed into CNF-Net for learning the transformation matrices between the M-GFND and the ground-truth facet normal. CNF-Net can automatically handle meshes with multiscale geometric features yet corrupted by the noise of different distributions, while existing learning-based wisdoms commonly pursue an overall normal estimation accuracy yet fail to preserve surface significant features. Both visual and numerical evaluations on synthetic and real noise data sets consistently show the clear improvements of CNF-Net over the state-of-the-arts. Copyright © 2021 IEEE.