# Shape Completion with Points in the Shadow

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.08345 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.08345/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 24 of its 31 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Sep 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [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)
- [PCN: Point Completion Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.00671/) (2018)
- [PoinTr: Diverse Point Cloud Completion with Geometry-Aware Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08839/) (2021)
- [What Do Single-view 3D Reconstruction Networks Learn?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.03678/) (2019)
- [GRNet: Gridding Residual Network for Dense Point Cloud Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.03761/) (2020)
- [SnowflakeNet: Point Cloud Completion by Snowflake Point Deconvolution with Skip-Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.04444/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Density-aware Chamfer Distance as a Comprehensive Metric for Point Cloud Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12702/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Detail Preserved Point Cloud Completion via Separated Feature Aggregation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.02374/) (2020)
- [Deep Part Induction from Articulated Object Pairs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.07417/) (2018)
- [PMP-Net++: Point Cloud Completion by Transformer-Enhanced Multi-step Point Moving Paths](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.09507/) (2022)
- [Comprehensive Review of Deep Learning-Based 3D Point Cloud Completion Processing and Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03311/) (2022)
- [ASFM-Net: Asymmetrical Siamese Feature Matching Network for Point Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09587/) (2021)
- [RPM-Net: Recurrent Prediction of Motion and Parts from Point Cloud](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.14865/) (2020)
- [ME-PCN: Point Completion Conditioned on Mask Emptiness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08187/) (2021)
- [Front2Back: Single View 3D Shape Reconstruction via Front to Back Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.10589/) (2019)
- [P2P-NET: Bidirectional Point Displacement Net for Shape Transform](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.09263/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [SVDFormer: Complementing Point Cloud via Self-view Augmentation and Self-structure Dual-generator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.08492/) (2023)
- [PointSea: Point Cloud Completion via Self-structure Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.17053/) (2025)
- [SPAC-Net: Rethinking Point Cloud Completion with Structural Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15066/) (2024)
- [MAGE: View-guided Point Cloud Completion with Efficient Modality Alignment and Adaptive Geometry Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.02568/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Single-view point cloud completion aims to recover the full geometry of an object based on only limited observation, which is extremely hard due to the data sparsity and occlusion. The core challenge is to generate plausible geometries to fill the unobserved part of the object based on a partial scan, which is under-constrained and suffers from a huge solution space. Inspired by the classic shadow volume technique in computer graphics, we propose a new method to reduce the solution space effectively. Our method considers the camera a light source that casts rays toward the object. Such light rays build a reasonably constrained but sufficiently expressive basis for completion. The completion process is then formulated as a point displacement optimization problem. Points are initialized at the partial scan and then moved to their goal locations with two types of movements for each point: directional movements along the light rays and constrained local movement for shape refinement. We design neural networks to predict the ideal point movements to get the completion results. We demonstrate that our method is accurate, robust, and generalizable through exhaustive evaluation and comparison. Moreover, it outperforms state-of-the-art methods qualitatively and quantitatively on MVP datasets.