# PU-Gaussian: Point Cloud Upsampling using 3D Gaussian Representation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.20207 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.20207/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 22 of its 24 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Sep 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04079/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Point Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.00931/) (2020)
- [Deep Learning for 3D Point Clouds: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.12033/) (2019)
- [Variational Dropout and the Local Reparameterization Trick](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02557/) (2015)
- [PU-Net: Point Cloud Upsampling Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.06761/) (2018)
- [PU-GAN: a Point Cloud Upsampling Adversarial Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10844/) (2019)
- [Patch-based Progressive 3D Point Set Upsampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.11286/) (2018)
- [PU-GCN: Point Cloud Upsampling using Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.03264/) (2019)
- [Point Cloud Upsampling via Disentangled Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04779/) (2021)
- [Neural Points: Point Cloud Representation with Neural Fields for Arbitrary Upsampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.04148/) (2021)
- [Grad-PU: Arbitrary-Scale Point Cloud Upsampling via Gradient Descent with Learned Distance Functions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.11846/) (2023)
- [PU-Transformer: Point Cloud Upsampling Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12242/) (2021)
- [Learning Continuous Implicit Field with Local Distance Indicator for Arbitrary-Scale Point Cloud Upsampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.15133/) (2023)
- [PUFA-GAN: A Frequency-Aware Generative Adversarial Network for 3D Point Cloud Upsampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00914/) (2022)
- [PU-EVA: An Edge Vector based Approximation Solution for Flexible-scale Point Cloud Upsampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.10750/) (2022)
- [Point Cloud Upsampling via Cascaded Refinement Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03942/) (2022)
- [PC2-PU: Patch Correlation and Point Correlation for Effective Point Cloud Upsampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.09337/) (2021)
- [Arbitrary Point Cloud Upsampling with Spherical Mixture of Gaussians](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.05274/) (2022)
- [Arbitrary-Scale Point Cloud Upsampling by Voxel-Based Network with Latent Geometric-Consistent Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05117/) (2024)
- [PU-EdgeFormer: Edge Transformer for Dense Prediction in Point Cloud Upsampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.01148/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [A Three-Dimensional Reverse-Projection Method for Sparse Point Cloud Completion and Its Application to High-Speed Train Nose Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.05758/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Point clouds produced by 3D sensors are often sparse and noisy, posing challenges for tasks requiring dense and high-fidelity 3D representations. Prior work has explored both implicit feature-based upsampling and distance-function learning to address this, but often at the expense of geometric interpretability or robustness to input sparsity. To overcome these limitations, we propose PU-Gaussian, a novel upsampling network that models the local neighborhood around each point using anisotropic 3D Gaussian distributions. These Gaussians capture the underlying geometric structure, allowing us to perform upsampling explicitly in the local geometric domain by direct point sampling. The sampling process generates a dense, but coarse, point cloud. A subsequent refinement network adjusts the coarse output to produce a more uniform distribution and sharper edges. We perform extensive testing on the PU1K and PUGAN datasets, demonstrating that PU-Gaussian achieves state-of-the-art performance. We make code and model weights publicly available at https://github.com/mvg-inatech/PU-Gaussian.git.