# NoiseTrans: Point Cloud Denoising with Transformers

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.11812 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.11812/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 32 of its 50 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Apr 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 32)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Sequence to Sequence Learning with Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.3215/) (2014)
- [Point Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.00931/) (2020)
- [Rethinking Semantic Segmentation from a Sequence-to-Sequence Perspective with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15840/) (2020)
- [A Point Set Generation Network for 3D Object Reconstruction from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00603/) (2016)
- [On Layer Normalization in the Transformer Architecture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.04745/) (2020)
- [Pre-Trained Image Processing Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.00364/) (2020)
- [Uformer: A General U-Shaped Transformer for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03106/) (2021)
- [Accelerating 3D Deep Learning with PyTorch3D](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08501/) (2020)
- [Transformer Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15436/) (2021)
- [A Survey of Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04554/) (2021)
- [Deep Learning for Generic Object Detection: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02165/) (2018)
- [PoinTr: Diverse Point Cloud Completion with Geometry-Aware Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08839/) (2021)
- [PU-Net: Point Cloud Upsampling Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.06761/) (2018)
- [Point2Sequence: Learning the Shape Representation of 3D Point Clouds with an Attention-based Sequence to Sequence Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.02565/) (2018)
- [PointCleanNet: Learning to Denoise and Remove Outliers from Dense Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.01060/) (2019)
- [PCPNET: Learning Local Shape Properties from Raw Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.04954/) (2017)
- [Score-Based Point Cloud Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.10981/) (2021)
- [3D Point Cloud Processing and Learning for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00601/) (2020)
- [Total Denoising: Unsupervised Learning of 3D Point Cloud Cleaning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.07615/) (2019)
- [Differentiable Manifold Reconstruction for Point Cloud Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.13551/) (2020)
- [3D Point Cloud Denoising using Graph Laplacian Regularization of a Low Dimensional Manifold Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.07252/) (2018)
- [Feature Graph Learning for 3D Point Cloud Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.09138/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Deep Learning for 3D Point Cloud Enhancement: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.00857/) (2024)
- [Denoising-While-Completing Network (DWCNet): Robust Point Cloud Completion Under Corruption](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.16743/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Point clouds obtained from capture devices or 3D reconstruction techniques are often noisy and interfere with downstream tasks. The paper aims to recover the underlying surface of noisy point clouds. We design a novel model, NoiseTrans, which uses transformer encoder architecture for point cloud denoising. Specifically, we obtain structural similarity of point-based point clouds with the assistance of the transformer's core self-attention mechanism. By expressing the noisy point cloud as a set of unordered vectors, we convert point clouds into point embeddings and employ Transformer to generate clean point clouds. To make the Transformer preserve details when sensing the point cloud, we design the Local Point Attention to prevent the point cloud from being over-smooth. In addition, we also propose sparse encoding, which enables the Transformer to better perceive the structural relationships of the point cloud and improve the denoising performance. Experiments show that our model outperforms state-of-the-art methods in various datasets and noise environments.