A Review of 3D Point Clouds Parameterization Methods

3D point clouds parameterization is a very important research topic in the fields of computer graphics and computer vision, which has many applications such as texturing, remeshing and morphing, etc. Different from mesh parameterization, point clouds parameterization is a more challenging task in general as there is normally no connectivity information between points. Due to this challenge, the papers on point clouds parameterization are not as many as those on mesh parameterization. To the best of our knowledge, there are no review papers about point clouds parameterization. In this paper, we present a survey of existing methods for parameterizing 3D point clouds. We start by introducing the applications and importance of point clouds parameterization before explaining some relevant concepts. According to the organization of the point clouds, we first divide point cloud parameterization methods into two groups: organized and unorganized ones. Since various methods for unorganized point cloud parameterization have been proposed, we further divide the group of unorganized point cloud parameterization methods into some subgroups based on the technique used for parameterization. The main ideas and properties of each method are discussed aiming to provide an overview of various methods and help with the selection of different methods for various applications.