# Point Cloud to Mesh Reconstruction: Methods, Trade-offs, and Implementation Guide

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.10977 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.10977/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 29 of its 65 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Dec 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [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)
- [DeepSDF: Learning Continuous Signed Distance Functions for Shape Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.05103/) (2019)
- [Dynamic Graph CNN for Learning on Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07829/) (2018)
- [Density estimation using Real NVP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.08803/) (2016)
- [Occupancy Networks: Learning 3D Reconstruction in Function Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03828/) (2018)
- [Generalized Intersection over Union: A Metric and A Loss for Bounding Box Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09630/) (2019)
- [NICE: Non-linear Independent Components Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1410.8516/) (2014)
- [A Point Set Generation Network for 3D Object Reconstruction from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00603/) (2016)
- [3D-R2N2: A Unified Approach for Single and Multi-view 3D Object Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.00449/) (2016)
- [PointNeXt: Revisiting PointNet++ with Improved Training and Scaling Strategies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.04670/) (2022)
- [PCN: Point Completion Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.00671/) (2018)
- [BSP-Net: Generating Compact Meshes via Binary Space Partitioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.06971/) (2019)
- [Thingi10K: A Dataset of 10,000 3D-Printing Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.04797/) (2016)
- [Deep Geometric Prior for Surface Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.10943/) (2018)
- [Benchmarking in Manipulation Research: The YCB Object and Model Set and Benchmarking Protocols](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03143/) (2015)
- [ParSeNet: A Parametric Surface Fitting Network for 3D Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12181/) (2020)
- [Neural Mesh Flow: 3D Manifold Mesh Generation via Diffeomorphic Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.10973/) (2020)
- [3DN: 3D Deformation Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.03322/) (2019)
- [Generative PointNet: Deep Energy-Based Learning on Unordered Point Sets for 3D Generation, Reconstruction and Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.01301/) (2020)
- [CaDeX: Learning Canonical Deformation Coordinate Space for Dynamic Surface Representation via Neural Homeomorphism](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16529/) (2022)
- [Meshing Point Clouds with Predicted Intrinsic-Extrinsic Ratio Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.09267/) (2020)
- [HPNet: Deep Primitive Segmentation Using Hybrid Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.10620/) (2021)
- [PointTriNet: Learned Triangulation of 3D Point Sets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.02138/) (2020)
- [Learning Parallel Dense Correspondence from Spatio-Temporal Descriptors for Efficient and Robust 4D Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16341/) (2021)
- [Fast Point Cloud to Mesh Reconstruction for Deformable Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.02749/) (2023)
- [Isomorphic mesh generation from point clouds with multilayer perceptrons](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.14157/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Reconstructing meshes from point clouds is a fundamental task in computer vision with applications spanning robotics, autonomous systems, and medical imaging. Selecting an appropriate learning-based method requires understanding trade-offs between computational efficiency, geometric accuracy, and output constraints. This paper categorizes over fifteen methods into five paradigms -- PointNet family, autoencoder architectures, deformation-based methods, point-move techniques, and primitive-based approaches -- and provides practical guidance for method selection. We contribute: (1) a decision framework mapping input/output requirements to suitable paradigms, (2) a failure mode analysis to assist practitioners in debugging implementations, (3) standardized comparisons on ShapeNet benchmarks, and (4) a curated list of maintained codebases with implementation resources. By synthesizing both theoretical foundations and practical considerations, this work serves as an entry point for practitioners and researchers new to learning-based 3D mesh reconstruction.