From 3D Point Clouds to Pose-Normalised Depth Maps

We consider the problem of generating either pairwise-aligned or pose-normalised depth maps from noisy 3D point clouds in a relatively unrestricted poses. Our system is deployed in a 3D face alignment application and consists of the following four stages: (i) data filtering, (ii) nose tip identification and sub-vertex localisation, (iii) computation of the (relative) face orientation, (iv) generation of either a pose aligned or a pose normalised depth map. We generate an implicit radial basis function (RBF) model of the facial surface and this is employed within all four stages of the process. For example, in stage (ii), construction of novel invariant features is based on sampling this RBF over a set of concentric spheres to give a spherically-sampled RBF (SSR) shape histogram. In stage (iii), a second novel descriptor, called an isoradius contour curvature signal, is defined, which allows rotational alignment to be determined using a simple process of 1D correlation. We test our system on both the University of York (UoY) 3D face dataset and the Face Recognition Grand Challenge (FRGC) 3D data. For the more challenging UoY data, our SSR descriptors significantly outperform three variants of spin images, successfully identifying nose vertices at a rate of 99.6%. Nose localisation performance on the higher quality FRGC data, which has only small pose variations, is 99.9%. Our best system successfully normalises the pose of 3D faces at rates of 99.1% (UoY data) and 99.6% (FRGC data)

Data-Driven Shape Analysis and Processing

Data-driven methods play an increasingly important role in discovering geometric, structural, and semantic relationships between 3D shapes in collections, and applying this analysis to support intelligent modeling, editing, and visualization of geometric data. In contrast to traditional approaches, a key feature of data-driven approaches is that they aggregate information from a collection of shapes to improve the analysis and processing of individual shapes. In addition, they are able to learn models that reason about properties and relationships of shapes without relying on hard-coded rules or explicitly programmed instructions. We provide an overview of the main concepts and components of these techniques, and discuss their application to shape classification, segmentation, matching, reconstruction, modeling and exploration, as well as scene analysis and synthesis, through reviewing the literature and relating the existing works with both qualitative and numerical comparisons. We conclude our report with ideas that can inspire future research in data-driven shape analysis and processing.Comment: 10 pages, 19 figure

Learning Material-Aware Local Descriptors for 3D Shapes

Material understanding is critical for design, geometric modeling, and analysis of functional objects. We enable material-aware 3D shape analysis by employing a projective convolutional neural network architecture to learn material- aware descriptors from view-based representations of 3D points for point-wise material classification or material- aware retrieval. Unfortunately, only a small fraction of shapes in 3D repositories are labeled with physical mate- rials, posing a challenge for learning methods. To address this challenge, we crowdsource a dataset of 3080 3D shapes with part-wise material labels. We focus on furniture models which exhibit interesting structure and material variabil- ity. In addition, we also contribute a high-quality expert- labeled benchmark of 115 shapes from Herman-Miller and IKEA for evaluation. We further apply a mesh-aware con- ditional random field, which incorporates rotational and reflective symmetries, to smooth our local material predic- tions across neighboring surface patches. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our learned descriptors for automatic texturing, material-aware retrieval, and physical simulation. The dataset and code will be publicly available.Comment: 3DV 201