Point clouds, as a form of Lagrangian representation, allow for powerful and flexible applications in a large number of computational disciplines. We propose a novel deep-learning method to learn stable and temporally coherent feature spaces for points clouds that change over time. We identify a set of inherent problems with these approaches: without knowledge of the time dimension, the inferred solutions can exhibit strong flickering, and easy solutions to suppress this flickering can result in undesirable local minima that manifest themselves as halo structures. We propose a novel temporal loss function that takes into account higher time derivatives of the point positions, and encourages mingling, i.e., to prevent the aforementioned halos. We combine these techniques in a super-resolution method with a truncation approach to flexibly adapt the size of the generated positions. We show that our method works for large, deforming point sets from different sources to demonstrate the flexibility of our approach.

[Lukas Prantl, Nuttapong Chentanez, Stefan Jeschke, Nils Thuerey]

[Source] [Web] [Paper]

3D Results

Our method applied to an animation of a walking man. The input point cloud is shown in cyan (left), and the output of our method in yellow (right). Note that our method preserves the shape with only a few outliers and results in a temporally coherent and even distribution of points.