Test-time Adaptation for Point Cloud Denoising under Unseen Noise

Abstract

Although deep learning-based point cloud denoising methods have demonstrated impressive results in recent years, their effectiveness usually degrades substantially in real-world scenarios where the noise distribution of test point clouds deviates from that of the training set. To address this challenge, we propose a test-time adaptive denoising (TTAD) framework that enables existing denoising approaches to adapt to unknown noise patterns at test time without relying on additional supervision or retraining from source data. Taking a pre-trained denoising model and a test noisy point cloud as input, TTAD first employs a residual-driven noise modeling (RDNM) module to estimate the sample-specific noise distribution through analyzing the deviation between the noisy input and its pseudo-clean version denoised by the initial model. Then, a noise-aware contrastive adaptation (NACA) module is designed to build sample-specific noisy-noisier test-time training pair from the denoised point cloud, and update the model parameters over a few adaptation steps per sample at test time through contrastive learning. Furthermore, TTAD naturally extends to a continual TTAD (CTTAD) setting, facilitating efficient progressive refinement across sequential test samples with consistent noise distributions, while reducing the computational cost per sample. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that our approach significantly improves the generalization ability of existing denoising models under unseen noise, achieving superior performance across multiple evaluation metrics.