Mesh Denoising with Facet Graph Convolutions

We examine the problem of mesh denoising, which consists of removing noise from corrupted 3D meshes while preserving existing geometric features. Most mesh denoising methods require a lot of mesh-specific parameter fine-tuning, to account for specific features and noise types. In recent years, data-driven methods have demonstrated their robustness and effectiveness with respect to noise and feature properties on a wide variety of geometry and image problems. Most existing mesh denoising methods still use hand-crafted features, and locally denoise facets rather than examine the mesh globally. In this work, we propose the use of a fully end-to-end learning strategy based on graph convolutions, where meaningful features are learned directly by our network. It operates on a graph of facets, directly on the existing topology of the mesh, without resampling, and follows a multi-scale design to extract geometric features at different resolution levels. Similar to most recent pipelines, given a noisy mesh, we first denoise face normals with our novel approach, then update vertex positions accordingly. Our method performs significantly better than the current state-of-the-art learning-based methods. Additionally, we show that it can be trained on noisy data, without explicit correspondence between noisy and ground-truth facets. We also propose a multi-scale denoising strategy, better suited to correct noise with a low spatial frequency.