Deep Exemplar 2D-3D Detection by Adapting from Real to Rendered Views

This paper presents an end-to-end convolutional neural network (CNN) for 2D-3D exemplar detection. We demonstrate that the ability to adapt the features of natural images to better align with those of CAD rendered views is critical to the success of our technique. We show that the adaptation can be learned by compositing rendered views of textured object models on natural images. Our approach can be naturally incorporated into a CNN detection pipeline and extends the accuracy and speed benefits from recent advances in deep learning to 2D-3D exemplar detection. We applied our method to two tasks: instance detection, where we evaluated on the IKEA dataset, and object category detection, where we out-perform Aubry et al. for "chair" detection on a subset of the Pascal VOC dataset.Comment: To appear in CVPR 201

3D Shape Descriptor-Based Facial Landmark Detection: A Machine Learning Approach

Facial landmark detection on 3D human faces has had numerous applications in the literature such as establishing point-to-point correspondence between 3D face models which is itself a key step for a wide range of applications like 3D face detection and authentication, matching, reconstruction, and retrieval, to name a few. Two groups of approaches, namely knowledge-driven and data-driven approaches, have been employed for facial landmarking in the literature. Knowledge-driven techniques are the traditional approaches that have been widely used to locate landmarks on human faces. In these approaches, a user with sucient knowledge and experience usually denes features to be extracted as the landmarks. Data-driven techniques, on the other hand, take advantage of machine learning algorithms to detect prominent features on 3D face models. Besides the key advantages, each category of these techniques has limitations that prevent it from generating the most reliable results. In this work we propose to combine the strengths of the two approaches to detect facial landmarks in a more ecient and precise way. The suggested approach consists of two phases. First, some salient features of the faces are extracted using expert systems. Afterwards, these points are used as the initial control points in the well-known Thin Plate Spline (TPS) technique to deform the input face towards a reference face model. Second, by exploring and utilizing multiple machine learning algorithms another group of landmarks are extracted. The data-driven landmark detection step is performed in a supervised manner providing an information-rich set of training data in which a set of local descriptors are computed and used to train the algorithm. We then, use the detected landmarks for establishing point-to-point correspondence between the 3D human faces mainly using an improved version of Iterative Closest Point (ICP) algorithms. Furthermore, we propose to use the detected landmarks for 3D face matching applications

Feature Driven Learning Techniques for 3D Shape Segmentation

Segmentation is a fundamental problem in 3D shape analysis and machine learning. The abil-ity to partition a 3D shape into meaningful or functional parts is a vital ingredient of many down stream applications like shape matching, classification and retrieval. Early segmentation methods were based on approaches like fitting primitive shapes to parts or extracting segmen-tations from feature points. However, such methods had limited success on shapes with more complex geometry. Observing this, research began using geometric features to aid the segmen-tation, as certain features (e.g. Shape Diameter Function (SDF)) are less sensitive to complex geometry. This trend was also incorporated in the shift to set-wide segmentations, called co-segmentation, which provides a consistent segmentation throughout a shape dataset, meaning similar parts have the same segment identifier. The idea of co-segmentation is that a set of same class shapes (i.e. chairs) contain more information about the class than a single shape would, which could lead to an overall improvement to the segmentation of the individual shapes. Over the past decade many different approaches of co-segmentation have been explored covering supervised, unsupervised and even user-driven active learning. In each of the areas, there has been widely adopted use of geometric features to aid proposed segmentation algorithms, with each method typically using different combinations of features. The aim of this thesis is to ex-plore these different areas of 3D shape segmentation, perform an analysis of the effectiveness of geometric features in these areas and tackle core issues that currently exist in the literature.Initially, we explore the area of unsupervised segmentation, specifically looking at co-segmentation, and perform an analysis of several different geometric features. Our analysis is intended to compare the different features in a single unsupervised pipeline to evaluate their usefulness and determine their strengths and weaknesses. Our analysis also includes several features that have not yet been explored in unsupervised segmentation but have been shown effective in other areas.Later, with the ever increasing popularity of deep learning, we explore the area of super-vised segmentation and investigate the current state of Neural Network (NN) driven techniques. We specifically observe limitations in the current state-of-the-art and propose a novel Convolu-tional Neural Network (CNN) based method which operates on multi-scale geometric features to gain more information about the shapes being segmented. We also perform an evaluation of several different supervised segmentation methods using the same input features, but with vary-ing complexity of model design. This is intended to see if the more complex models provide a significant performance increase.Lastly, we explore the user-driven area of active learning, to tackle the large amounts of inconsistencies in current ground truth segmentation, which are vital for most segmentation methods. Active learning has been used to great effect for ground truth generation in the past, so we present a novel active learning framework using deep learning and geometric features to assist the user in co-segmentation of a dataset. Our method emphasises segmentation accu-racy while minimising user effort, providing an interactive visualisation for co-segmentation analysis and the application of automated optimisation tools.In this thesis we explore the effectiveness of different geometric features across varying segmentation tasks, providing an in-depth analysis and comparison of state-of-the-art methods