Structural Feature-Preserving Point Cloud Denoising Method for Aero-Engine Profile

The ex-service and old type aero-engines are valuable for education. In many cases, these aero-engines only have physical objects, but lack geometric models. This brings difficulties to talent cultivation. Therefore, the education department needs to reconstruct geometric models of above aero-engines. The laser scanning devices provide raw data of aero-engine profile, but noise directly affects reconstruction accuracy. In order to ensure that noise is removed without blurring or distorting structural features, a structural feature-preserving point cloud denoising method is proposed. The noisy point cloud is divided into casing feature data, pipeline feature data and complex shape feature data. According to shape characteristics of each feature data, three denoising networks are designed to estimate position correction vectors of noisy points and project them back onto underlying surfaces. Qualitative and quantitative experiments show that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, both in terms of preservation and restoration of structural features.