Normal estimation for point clouds: a comparison study for a Voronoi based method

Many applications that process a point cloud data benefit from a reliable normal estimation step. Given a point cloud presumably sampled from an unknown surface, the problem is to estimate the normals of the surface at the data points. Two approaches, one based on numerical optimizations and another based on Voronoi diagrams are known for the problem. Variations of numerical approaches work well even when point clouds are contaminated with noise. Recently a variation of the Voronoi based method is proposed for noisy point clouds. The centrality of the normal estimation step in point cloud processing begs a thorough study of the two approaches so that one knows which approach is appropriate for what circumstances. This paper presents such results.