Constructing Laplace Operator from Point Clouds

We present an algorithm for approximating the LaplaceBeltrami operator from an arbitrary point cloud obtained from a k-dimensional manifold embedded in the ddimensional space. We show that this PCD Laplace (PointCloud Data Laplace) operator converges to the LaplaceBeltrami operator on the underlying manifold as the point cloud becomes denser. Unlike the previous work, we do not assume that the data samples are independent identically distributed from a probability distribution and do not require a global mesh. The resulting algorithm is easy to implement. We present experimental results indicating that even for point sets sampled from a uniform distribution, PCD Laplace converges faster than the weighted graph Laplacian. We also show that using our PCD Laplacian we can directly estimate certain geometric invariants, such as manifold area.