Multi-view Based 3D Point Cloud Completion Algorithm for Vehicles

3D vehicle shape completion is a key task in urban environment reconstruction, since the available sensors and 3D scanning procedures (such as Mobile Laser Scanning) in an outdoor city scene cannot usually extract the entire car shapes, which can be necessary for specifying their geometric properties for further analysis or realistic visualization. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-view based 3D object point cloud completion technique. In contrast to existing approaches, our method operates on 2D images formed by projecting the point cloud from several virtual camera positions around the object of interest. Both color and geometrical information is considered during the process, generating dense textured point clouds, displaying realistic patterns in the missing regions from the partial inputs. We present both quantitative and qualitative tests on various synthetic and real laser scanned vehicle point clouds, which demonstrate that our method surpasses existing state-of-the-art approaches. By applying it to vehicles from the Shapenet dataset, our approach outperforms recent techniques in terms of Earth Mover's Distance (EMD) and Chamfer Distance (CD) by 43.8% and 12.17%, respectively.