Numerical analysis of differential operators on raw point clouds

International audience3D acquisition devices acquire object surfaces with growing accuracy by obtaining 3D point samples of the surface. This sampling depends on the geometry of the device and of the scanned object and is therefore very irregular. Many numerical schemes have been proposed for applying PDEs to regularly meshed 3D data. Nevertheless, for high precision applications it remains necessary to compute differential operators on raw point clouds prior to any meshing. Indeed differential operators such as the mean curvature or the principal curvatures provide crucial information for the orientation and meshing process itself.This paper reviews a half dozen local schemes which have been proposed to compute discrete curvature-like shape indicators on raw point clouds. All of them will be analyzed mathematically in a unified framework by computing their asymptotic form when the size of the neighborhood tends to zero. They are given in terms of the principal curvatures or of higher order intrinsic differential operators which, in return, characterize the discrete operators. All considered local schemes are of two kinds: either they perform a polynomial local regression, or they compute directly local moments. But the polynomial regression of order 1 is demonstrated to play a special role, because its iterations yield a scale space. This analysis is completed with numerical experiments comparing the accuracies of these schemes. We demonstrate that this accuracy is enhanced for all operators by applying previously the scale space