PIE-NET: Parametric inference of point cloud edges

We introduce an end-to-end learnable technique to robustly identify feature edges in 3D point cloud data. We represent these edges as a collection of parametric curves (i.e., lines, circles, and B-splines). Accordingly, our deep neural network, coined PIE-NET, is trained for parametric inference of edges. The network relies on a region proposal architecture, where a first module proposes an over-complete collection of edge and corner points, and a second module ranks each proposal to decide whether it should be considered. We train and evaluate our method on the ABC dataset, the largest publicly available dataset of CAD models, via ablation studies and compare our results to those produced by traditional (non-learning) processing pipelines, as well as a recent deep learning-based edge detector (EC-Net). Our results significantly improve over the state-of-the-art, both quantitatively and qualitatively, and generalize well to novel shape categories.