# Towards realistic symmetry-based completion of previously unseen point clouds

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.01858 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.01858/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 8 of its 32 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Jan 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00593/) (2016)
- [ShapeNet: An Information-Rich 3D Model Repository](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03012/) (2015)
- [A Point Set Generation Network for 3D Object Reconstruction from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00603/) (2016)
- [Open3D: A Modern Library for 3D Data Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.09847/) (2018)
- [PCN: Point Completion Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.00671/) (2018)
- [GRNet: Gridding Residual Network for Dense Point Cloud Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.03761/) (2020)
- [Morphing and Sampling Network for Dense Point Cloud Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.00280/) (2019)
- [Learning quadrangulated patches for 3D shape parameterization and completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.06868/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [SymmCompletion: High-Fidelity and High-Consistency Point Cloud Completion with Symmetry Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.18007/) (2025)
- [Symmetry Informative and Agnostic Feature Disentanglement for 3D Shapes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.14804/) (2026)
- [ROMA: LLM System for Real-World Object-Centric Multi-Sensory Active Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.06955/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

3D scanning is a complex multistage process that generates a point cloud of an object typically containing damaged parts due to occlusions, reflections, shadows, scanner motion, specific properties of the object surface, imperfect reconstruction algorithms, etc. Point cloud completion is specifically designed to fill in the missing parts of the object and obtain its high-quality 3D representation. The existing completion approaches perform well on the academic datasets with a predefined set of object classes and very specific types of defects; however, their performance drops significantly in the real-world settings and degrades even further on previously unseen object classes. We propose a novel framework that performs well on symmetric objects, which are ubiquitous in man-made environments. Unlike learning-based approaches, the proposed framework does not require training data and is capable of completing non-critical damages occurring in customer 3D scanning process using e.g. Kinect, time-of-flight, or structured light scanners. With thorough experiments, we demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art efficiency in point cloud completion of real-world customer scans. We benchmark the framework performance on two types of datasets: properly augmented existing academic dataset and the actual 3D scans of various objects.