# CarveNet: Carving Point-Block for Complex 3D Shape Completion

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.13452 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.13452/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 29 of its 50 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Jul 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00593/) (2016)
- [PointNet++: Deep Hierarchical Feature Learning on Point Sets in a Metric Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02413/) (2017)
- [ShapeNet: An Information-Rich 3D Model Repository](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03012/) (2015)
- [KPConv: Flexible and Deformable Convolution for Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08889/) (2019)
- [A Point Set Generation Network for 3D Object Reconstruction from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00603/) (2016)
- [PV-RCNN: Point-Voxel Feature Set Abstraction for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.13192/) (2019)
- [PointCNN: Convolution On X-Transformed Points](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07791/) (2018)
- [PointConv: Deep Convolutional Networks on 3D Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.07246/) (2018)
- [Deep Learning for 3D Point Clouds: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.12033/) (2019)
- [AtlasNet: A Papier-Mach'e Approach to Learning 3D Surface Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05384/) (2018)
- [PCN: Point Completion Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.00671/) (2018)
- [Shape Completion using 3D-Encoder-Predictor CNNs and Shape Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00101/) (2016)
- [SO-Net: Self-Organizing Network for Point Cloud Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.04249/) (2018)
- [PointNetVLAD: Deep Point Cloud Based Retrieval for Large-Scale Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.03492/) (2018)
- [GRNet: Gridding Residual Network for Dense Point Cloud Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.03761/) (2020)
- [PointFusion: Deep Sensor Fusion for 3D Bounding Box Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10871/) (2017)
- [PF-Net: Point Fractal Network for 3D Point Cloud Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00410/) (2020)
- [Morphing and Sampling Network for Dense Point Cloud Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.00280/) (2019)
- [Cascaded Refinement Network for Point Cloud Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.03327/) (2020)
- [Point Cloud Completion by Skip-attention Network with Hierarchical Folding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.03871/) (2020)
- [Variational Relational Point Completion Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10154/) (2021)
- [PMP-Net: Point Cloud Completion by Learning Multi-step Point Moving Paths](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.03408/) (2020)
- [High-Resolution Shape Completion Using Deep Neural Networks for Global Structure and Local Geometry Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.07599/) (2017)
- [A Closer Look at Local Aggregation Operators in Point Cloud Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.01294/) (2020)
- [RL-GAN-Net: A Reinforcement Learning Agent Controlled GAN Network for Real-Time Point Cloud Shape Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.12304/) (2019)
- [VConv-DAE: Deep Volumetric Shape Learning Without Object Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.03755/) (2016)
- [PointHop: An Explainable Machine Learning Method for Point Cloud Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.12766/) (2019)
- [Point Cloud Rendering after Coding: Impacts on Subjective and Objective Quality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.09137/) (2019)
- [Point Cloud Completion by Learning Shape Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.00394/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [From Physical Degradation Models to Task-Aware All-in-One Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.10192/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

3D point cloud completion is very challenging because it heavily relies on the accurate understanding of the complex 3D shapes (e.g., high-curvature, concave/convex, and hollowed-out 3D shapes) and the unknown & diverse patterns of the partially available point clouds. In this paper, we propose a novel solution,i.e., Point-block Carving (PC), for completing the complex 3D point cloud completion. Given the partial point cloud as the guidance, we carve a3D block that contains the uniformly distributed 3D points, yielding the entire point cloud. To achieve PC, we propose a new network architecture, i.e., CarveNet. This network conducts the exclusive convolution on each point of the block, where the convolutional kernels are trained on the 3D shape data. CarveNet determines which point should be carved, for effectively recovering the details of the complete shapes. Furthermore, we propose a sensor-aware method for data augmentation,i.e., SensorAug, for training CarveNet on richer patterns of partial point clouds, thus enhancing the completion power of the network. The extensive evaluations on the ShapeNet and KITTI datasets demonstrate the generality of our approach on the partial point clouds with diverse patterns. On these datasets, CarveNet successfully outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.