# CMG-Net: Robust Normal Estimation for Point Clouds via Chamfer Normal Distance and Multi-scale Geometry

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.09154 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.09154/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 14 of its 41 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Dec 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [PointNet++: Deep Hierarchical Feature Learning on Point Sets in a Metric Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02413/) (2017)
- [Point Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.00931/) (2020)
- [Pointwise Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.05245/) (2017)
- [Pointfilter: Point Cloud Filtering via Encoder-Decoder Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05968/) (2020)
- [Nesti-Net: Normal Estimation for Unstructured 3D Point Clouds using Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.00709/) (2018)
- [DeepFit: 3D Surface Fitting via Neural Network Weighted Least Squares](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.10826/) (2020)
- [NeAF: Learning Neural Angle Fields for Point Normal Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.16869/) (2022)
- [Deep Feature-preserving Normal Estimation for Point Cloud Filtering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.11563/) (2020)
- [AdaFit: Rethinking Learning-based Normal Estimation on Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05836/) (2021)
- [Refine-Net: Normal Refinement Neural Network for Noisy Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12514/) (2022)
- [HSurf-Net: Normal Estimation for 3D Point Clouds by Learning Hyper Surfaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07158/) (2022)
- [GraphFit: Learning Multi-scale Graph-Convolutional Representation for Point Cloud Normal Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.11484/) (2022)
- [Rethinking the Approximation Error in 3D Surface Fitting for Point Cloud Normal Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17167/) (2023)
- [Neighbourhood-Insensitive Point Cloud Normal Estimation Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.09965/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [PFF-Net: Patch Feature Fitting for Point Cloud Normal Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.21365/) (2025)
- [Learning Normals of Noisy Points by Local Gradient-Aware Surface Filtering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.03394/) (2025)
- [LiSu: A Dataset and Method for LiDAR Surface Normal Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.08601/) (2025)
- [Refining 3D Point Cloud Normal Estimation via Sample Selection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.18541/) (2024)
- [OCMG-Net: Neural Oriented Normal Refinement for Unstructured Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.01100/) (2024)
- [MambaH-Fit: Rethinking Hyper-surface Fitting-based Point Cloud Normal Estimation via State Space Modelling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.09088/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This work presents an accurate and robust method for estimating normals from point clouds. In contrast to predecessor approaches that minimize the deviations between the annotated and the predicted normals directly, leading to direction inconsistency, we first propose a new metric termed Chamfer Normal Distance to address this issue. This not only mitigates the challenge but also facilitates network training and substantially enhances the network robustness against noise. Subsequently, we devise an innovative architecture that encompasses Multi-scale Local Feature Aggregation and Hierarchical Geometric Information Fusion. This design empowers the network to capture intricate geometric details more effectively and alleviate the ambiguity in scale selection. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves the state-of-the-art performance on both synthetic and real-world datasets, particularly in scenarios contaminated by noise. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/YingruiWoo/CMG-Net_Pytorch.