# TCFNet: Bidirectional face-bone transformation via a Transformer-based coarse-to-fine point movement network

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.14373 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.14373/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 25 of its 57 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Aug 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00593/) (2016)
- [Dynamic Graph CNN for Learning on Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07829/) (2018)
- [Point Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.00931/) (2020)
- [3D Semantic Segmentation with Submanifold Sparse Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10275/) (2017)
- [PCT: Point cloud transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09688/) (2020)
- [PointConv: Deep Convolutional Networks on 3D Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.07246/) (2018)
- [Point Transformer V3: Simpler, Faster, Stronger](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.10035/) (2023)
- [Point Transformer V2: Grouped Vector Attention and Partition-based Pooling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.05666/) (2022)
- [Swin3D: A Pretrained Transformer Backbone for 3D Indoor Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06906/) (2023)
- [Density-aware Chamfer Distance as a Comprehensive Metric for Point Cloud Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12702/) (2021)
- [FaceVerse: a Fine-grained and Detail-controllable 3D Face Morphable Model from a Hybrid Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14057/) (2022)
- [PMP-Net: Point Cloud Completion by Learning Multi-step Point Moving Paths](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.03408/) (2020)
- [FlatFormer: Flattened Window Attention for Efficient Point Cloud Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.08739/) (2023)
- [AdaPoinTr: Diverse Point Cloud Completion with Adaptive Geometry-Aware Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.04545/) (2023)
- [PMP-Net++: Point Cloud Completion by Transformer-Enhanced Multi-step Point Moving Paths](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.09507/) (2022)
- [OA-CNNs: Omni-Adaptive Sparse CNNs for 3D Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14418/) (2024)
- [Learning Complete 3D Morphable Face Models from Images and Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.01679/) (2020)
- [Modeling Local Geometric Structure of 3D Point Clouds using Geo-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.07782/) (2018)
- [MPED: Quantifying Point Cloud Distortion based on Multiscale Potential Energy Discrepancy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.02850/) (2021)
- [Neural Implicit Surface Reconstruction of Freehand 3D Ultrasound Volume with Geometric Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.05915/) (2024)
- [P2P-NET: Bidirectional Point Displacement Net for Shape Transform](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.09263/) (2018)
- [Language-based Photo Color Adjustment for Graphic Designs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03059/) (2023)
- [SketchMetaFace: A Learning-based Sketching Interface for High-fidelity 3D Character Face Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.00804/) (2023)
- [UTSRMorph: A Unified Transformer and Superresolution Network for Unsupervised Medical Image Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.20348/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Tracking spatial temporal details in ultrasound long video via wavelet analysis and memory bank](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.15066/) (2025)
- [PhysSFI-Net: Physics-informed Geometric Learning of Skeletal and Facial Interactions for Orthognathic Surgical Outcome Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.02088/) (2026)
- [Surface-to-Skeleton 3D Cephalometry: Estimating Hidden Skeletal Landmarks from CT-Derived External Soft-Tissue Surfaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.12537/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Computer-aided surgical simulation is a critical component of orthognathic surgical planning, where accurately simulating face-bone shape transformations is significant. The traditional biomechanical simulation methods are limited by their computational time consumption levels, labor-intensive data processing strategies and low accuracy. Recently, deep learning-based simulation methods have been proposed to view this problem as a point-to-point transformation between skeletal and facial point clouds. However, these approaches cannot process large-scale points, have limited receptive fields that lead to noisy points, and employ complex preprocessing and postprocessing operations based on registration. These shortcomings limit the performance and widespread applicability of such methods. Therefore, we propose a Transformer-based coarse-to-fine point movement network (TCFNet) to learn unique, complicated correspondences at the patch and point levels for dense face-bone point cloud transformations. This end-to-end framework adopts a Transformer-based network and a local information aggregation network (LIA-Net) in the first and second stages, respectively, which reinforce each other to generate precise point movement paths. LIA-Net can effectively compensate for the neighborhood precision loss of the Transformer-based network by modeling local geometric structures (edges, orientations and relative position features). The previous global features are employed to guide the local displacement using a gated recurrent unit. Inspired by deformable medical image registration, we propose an auxiliary loss that can utilize expert knowledge for reconstructing critical organs.Compared with the existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods on gathered datasets, TCFNet achieves outstanding evaluation metrics and visualization results. The code is available at https://github.com/Runshi-Zhang/TCFNet.