# Iterative Poisson Surface Reconstruction (iPSR) for Unoriented Points

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.09510 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.09510/

## Key facts

- Cited by 31 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 20 Sep 2022.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 31)

- [Neural-Singular-Hessian: Implicit Neural Representation of Unoriented Point Clouds by Enforcing Singular Hessian](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.01793/) (2023)
- [Robust Zero Level-Set Extraction from Unsigned Distance Fields Based on Double Covering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03431/) (2023)
- [NeurCADRecon: Neural Representation for Reconstructing CAD Surfaces by Enforcing Zero Gaussian Curvature](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.13420/) (2024)
- [MultiPull: Detailing Signed Distance Functions by Pulling Multi-Level Queries at Multi-Step](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.01208/) (2024)
- [Learning Signed Hyper Surfaces for Oriented Point Cloud Normal Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05873/) (2023)
- [NeurCross: A Neural Approach to Computing Cross Fields for Quad Mesh Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.13745/) (2024)
- [Point normal orientation and surface reconstruction by incorporating isovalue constraints to Poisson equation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.15619/) (2022)
- [2S-UDF: A Novel Two-stage UDF Learning Method for Robust Non-watertight Model Reconstruction from Multi-view Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15368/) (2023)
- [MeshMosaic: Scaling Artist Mesh Generation via Local-to-Global Assembly](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.19995/) (2025)
- [Details Enhancement in Unsigned Distance Field Learning for High-fidelity 3D Surface Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.00346/) (2024)
- [GSurf: Learning Signed Distance Fields from Splatting Opaque Gaussians for High-quality 3D Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15723/) (2024)
- [Monge-Ampere Regularization for Learning Arbitrary Shapes from Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18477/) (2024)
- [Toward Robust Neural Reconstruction from Sparse Point Sets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.16361/) (2024)
- [Consistent Point Orientation for Manifold Surfaces via Boundary Integration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.03165/) (2024)
- [DCUDF2: Improving Efficiency and Accuracy in Extracting Zero Level Sets from Unsigned Distance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.17284/) (2024)
- [PPSURF: Combining Patches and Point Convolutions for Detailed Surface Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.08518/) (2024)
- [FlatCAD: Fast Curvature Regularization of Neural SDFs for CAD Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.16627/) (2025)
- [Learning Self-Prior for Mesh Inpainting Using Self-Supervised Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.00635/) (2023)
- [Neural Poisson Surface Reconstruction: Resolution-Agnostic Shape Reconstruction from Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.01766/) (2023)
- [Stochastic Poisson Surface Reconstruction with One Solve using Geometric Gaussian Processes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.19136/) (2025)
- [A Geometric Algorithm for Blood Vessel Reconstruction from Skeletal Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.12797/) (2024)
- [SplatCo: Structure-View Collaborative Gaussian Splatting for Detail-Preserving Rendering of Large-Scale Unbounded Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.17951/) (2025)
- [A Divide-and-Conquer Approach for Global Orientation of Non-Watertight Scene-Level Point Clouds Using 0-1 Integer Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23469/) (2025)
- [Voronoi-Assisted Optimization for Diffusing Unsigned Distance Fields from Unoriented Points](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.12524/) (2025)
- [Polyhedral Surface: Self-supervised Point Cloud Reconstruction Based on Polyhedral Surface](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.14560/) (2023)
- [Separability Membrane: 3D Active Contour for Point Cloud Surface Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.05217/) (2025)
- [Approximating Signed Distance Fields With Sparse Ellipsoidal Radial Basis Function Networks: A Dynamic Multi-Objective Optimization Strategy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.02350/) (2025)
- [Wavelet-based Global Orientation and Surface Reconstruction for Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.16299/) (2025)
- [Neural Visibility of Point Sets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.24150/) (2025)
- [Three-dimensional narrow volume reconstruction method with unconditional stability based on a phase-field Lagrange multiplier approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.00508/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Poisson surface reconstruction (PSR) remains a popular technique for reconstructing watertight surfaces from 3D point samples thanks to its efficiency, simplicity, and robustness. Yet, the existing PSR method and subsequent variants work only for oriented points. This paper intends to validate that an improved PSR, called iPSR, can completely eliminate the requirement of point normals and proceed in an iterative manner. In each iteration, iPSR takes as input point samples with normals directly computed from the surface obtained in the preceding iteration, and then generates a new surface with better quality. Extensive quantitative evaluation confirms that the new iPSR algorithm converges in 5-30 iterations even with randomly initialized normals. If initialized with a simple visibility based heuristic, iPSR can further reduce the number of iterations. We conduct comprehensive comparisons with PSR and other powerful implicit-function based methods. Finally, we confirm iPSR's effectiveness and scalability on the AIM@SHAPE dataset and challenging (indoor and outdoor) scenes. Code and data for this paper are at https://github.com/houfei0801/ipsr.