# Separability Membrane: 3D Active Contour for Point Cloud Surface Reconstruction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.05217 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.05217/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 14 of its 70 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Mar 2025.

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

- [PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00593/) (2016)
- [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)
- [Implicit Geometric Regularization for Learning Shapes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10099/) (2020)
- [Shape As Points: A Differentiable Poisson Solver](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03452/) (2021)
- [Learning Shape Abstractions by Assembling Volumetric Primitives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00404/) (2016)
- [Bottom-up Object Detection by Grouping Extreme and Center Points](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.08043/) (2019)
- [Neural-Pull: Learning Signed Distance Functions from Point Clouds by Learning to Pull Space onto Surfaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13495/) (2020)
- [Deep Extreme Cut: From Extreme Points to Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09081/) (2017)
- [ParSeNet: A Parametric Surface Fitting Network for 3D Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12181/) (2020)
- [Supervised Fitting of Geometric Primitives to 3D Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.08988/) (2018)
- [Extreme clicking for efficient object annotation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.02750/) (2017)
- [Iterative Poisson Surface Reconstruction (iPSR) for Unoriented Points](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.09510/) (2022)
- [GeoUDF: Surface Reconstruction from 3D Point Clouds via Geometry-guided Distance Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.16762/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper proposes Separability Membrane, a robust 3D active contour for extracting a surface from 3D point cloud object. Our approach defines the surface of a 3D object as the boundary that maximizes the separability of point features, such as intensity, color, or local density, between its inner and outer regions based on Fisher's ratio. Separability Membrane identifies the exact surface of a 3D object by maximizing class separability while controlling the rigidity of the 3D surface model with an adaptive B-spline surface that adjusts its properties based on the local and global separability. A key advantage of our method is its ability to accurately reconstruct surface boundaries even when they are ambiguous due to noise or outliers, without requiring any training data or conversion to volumetric representation. Evaluations on a synthetic 3D point cloud dataset and the 3DNet dataset demonstrate the membrane's effectiveness and robustness under diverse conditions.