Mesh Total Generalized Variation for Denoising

Recent studies have shown that the Total Generalized Variation (TGV) is highly effective in preserving sharp features as well as smooth transition variations for image processing tasks. However, currently there is no existing work that is suitable for applying TGV to 3D data, in particular, triangular meshes. In this article, we develop a novel framework for discretizing second-order TGV on triangular meshes. Further, we propose a TGV-based variational method for the denoising of face normal fields on triangular meshes. The TGV regularizer in our method is composed of a first-order term and a second-order term, which are automatically balanced. The first-order term allows our TGV regularizer to locate and preserve sharp features, while the second-order term allows our regularizer to recognize and recover smoothly curved regions. To solve the optimization problem, we introduce an efficient iterative algorithm based on variable-splitting and augmented Lagrangian method. Extensive results and comparisons on synthetic and real scanning data validate that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art visually and numerically.