Shape and surface completion: research map
332 accepted papers on Shape and surface completion in Point clouds, from ICML, NeurIPS, ICLR, CVPR and AAAI (2016–2026), grouped into 2 clusters and 6 approaches. The busiest year so far is 2025.
Within Point clouds, its share grew from 19.5% in 2023–24 to 22.2% in 2025–26 (89 → 113 papers at ICML, NeurIPS, CVPR and AAAI, the venues with data for all four years).
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Approaches and key papers
reconstruction · implicit · meshes · 260 papers
Approaches in this cluster:
- Unsupervised shape correspondence (102 papers)
Learn dense shape correspondence and implicit structure from raw point clouds. - Point cloud upsampling and normals (64 papers)
Upsample point clouds and estimate normals with learned surface refinement. - Distance-function surface reconstruction (50 papers)
Reconstruct surfaces by learning signed or unsigned distance functions from point clouds. - Point cloud diffusion generation (44 papers)
Generate 3D shapes with diffusion models over point clouds and latent spaces.
Most cited and most cited since 2024:
- A Point Set Generation Network for 3D Object Reconstruction From a Single Image (CVPR 2017 · 2,524 citations)
- PU-Net: Point Cloud Upsampling Network (CVPR 2018 · 689 citations)
- Point2CAD: Reverse Engineering CAD Models from 3D Point Clouds (CVPR 2024 · 42 citations)
- A Conditional Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Model for Point Cloud Upsampling (CVPR 2024 · 32 citations)
cloud completion · complete · shape completion · 72 papers
Approaches in this cluster:
- Point cloud completion networks (50 papers)
Complete partial point clouds with refinement, folding and cycle-based unpaired learning. - Structure-guided completion (22 papers)
Complete shapes using skip-attention, structure priors, diffusion refinement and CLIP guidance.
Most cited and most cited since 2024:
- TopNet: Structural Point Cloud Decoder (CVPR 2019 · 532 citations)
- PF-Net: Point Fractal Network for 3D Point Cloud Completion (CVPR 2020 · 510 citations)
- PointAttN: You Only Need Attention for Point Cloud Completion (AAAI 2024 · 78 citations)
- Orthogonal Dictionary Guided Shape Completion Network for Point Cloud (AAAI 2024 · 31 citations)
