# Shape Completion with Prediction of Uncertain Regions

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.00377 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.00377/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 26 of its 38 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Aug 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00593/) (2016)
- [On Calibration of Modern Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.04599/) (2017)
- [Dropout as a Bayesian Approximation: Representing Model Uncertainty in Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02142/) (2015)
- [ShapeNet: An Information-Rich 3D Model Repository](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03012/) (2015)
- [DeepSDF: Learning Continuous Signed Distance Functions for Shape Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.05103/) (2019)
- [Occupancy Networks: Learning 3D Reconstruction in Function Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03828/) (2018)
- [A Point Set Generation Network for 3D Object Reconstruction from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00603/) (2016)
- [Convolutional Occupancy Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.04618/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Implicit Functions in Feature Space for 3D Shape Reconstruction and Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.01456/) (2020)
- [BOP: Benchmark for 6D Object Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.08319/) (2018)
- [Deep Object Pose Estimation for Semantic Robotic Grasping of Household Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.10790/) (2018)
- [Shape Completion using 3D-Encoder-Predictor CNNs and Shape Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00101/) (2016)
- [BOP Challenge 2020 on 6D Object Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.07378/) (2020)
- [Shape Completion Enabled Robotic Grasping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.08546/) (2016)
- [Implicit-PDF: Non-Parametric Representation of Probability Distributions on the Rotation Manifold](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05965/) (2021)
- [Deep Directional Statistics: Pose Estimation with Uncertainty Quantification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.03430/) (2018)
- [Learning Continuous 3D Reconstructions for Geometrically Aware Grasping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.00983/) (2019)
- [Pixels, voxels, and views: A study of shape representations for single view 3D object shape prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.06032/) (2018)
- [Fast Uncertainty Quantification for Deep Object Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.07748/) (2020)
- [Robust Grasp Planning Over Uncertain Shape Completions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.00645/) (2019)
- [TransSC: Transformer-based Shape Completion for Grasp Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.00511/) (2021)
- [Diverse Plausible Shape Completions from Ambiguous Depth Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.09390/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Combining Shape Completion and Grasp Prediction for Fast and Versatile Grasping with a Multi-Fingered Hand](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.20350/) (2023)
- [Conditional Latent Diffusion Models for Zero-Shot Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.04122/) (2025)
- [FFHFlow: Diverse and Uncertainty-Aware Dexterous Grasp Generation via Flow Variational Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.15161/) (2024)
- [Evaluating Latent Generative Paradigms for High-Fidelity 3D Shape Completion from a Single Depth Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.11074/) (2025)
- [Object Reconstruction under Occlusion with Generative Priors and Contact-induced Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.05079/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Shape completion, i.e., predicting the complete geometry of an object from a partial observation, is highly relevant for several downstream tasks, most notably robotic manipulation. When basing planning or prediction of real grasps on object shape reconstruction, an indication of severe geometric uncertainty is indispensable. In particular, there can be an irreducible uncertainty in extended regions about the presence of entire object parts when given ambiguous object views. To treat this important case, we propose two novel methods for predicting such uncertain regions as straightforward extensions of any method for predicting local spatial occupancy, one through postprocessing occupancy scores, the other through direct prediction of an uncertainty indicator. We compare these methods together with two known approaches to probabilistic shape completion. Moreover, we generate a dataset, derived from ShapeNet, of realistically rendered depth images of object views with ground-truth annotations for the uncertain regions. We train on this dataset and test each method in shape completion and prediction of uncertain regions for known and novel object instances and on synthetic and real data. While direct uncertainty prediction is by far the most accurate in the segmentation of uncertain regions, both novel methods outperform the two baselines in shape completion and uncertain region prediction, and avoiding the predicted uncertain regions increases the quality of grasps for all tested methods.