Differentiable algorithms with data-driven parameterization in 3D vision

This thesis is concerned with designing and analyzing efficient differentiable data flow for representations in the field of 3D vision and applying it to different 3D vision tasks. To this end, the topic is looked upon from the perspective of differentiable algorithms, a more general variant of Deep Learning, utilizing the recently emerged tools in the field of differentiable programming. Contributions are made in the subfields of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), differentiable matrix decompositions and implicit neural functions, which serve as important building blocks for differentiable algorithms in 3D vision. The contributions include SplineCNN, a neural network consisting of operators for continuous convolution on irregularly structured data, Local Spatial Graph Transformers, a GNN to infer local surface orientations on point clouds, and a parallel GPU solver for Eigendecomposition on a large number of symmetric matrices. For all methods, efficient forward and backward GPU implementations are provided. Consequently, two differentiable algorithms are introduced, composed of building blocks from these concept areas. The first algorithm, Differentiable Iterative Surface Normal Estimation, is an iterative algorithm for surface normal estimation on unstructured point clouds. The second algorithm, Group Equivariant Capsule Networks, is a version of capsule networks grounded in group theory for unsupervised pose estimation and, in general, for inferring disentangled representations from 2D and 3D data. The thesis concludes that a favorable trade-off in the metrics of efficiency, quality and interpretability can be found by combining prior geometric knowledge about algorithms and data types with the representational power of Deep Learning

A Novel Self-Intersection Penalty Term for Statistical Body Shape Models and Its Applications in 3D Pose Estimation

Statistical body shape models are widely used in 3D pose estimation due to their low-dimensional parameters representation. However, it is difficult to avoid self-intersection between body parts accurately. Motivated by this fact, we proposed a novel self-intersection penalty term for statistical body shape models applied in 3D pose estimation. To avoid the trouble of computing self-intersection for complex surfaces like the body meshes, the gradient of our proposed self-intersection penalty term is manually derived from the perspective of geometry. First, the self-intersection penalty term is defined as the volume of the self-intersection region. To calculate the partial derivatives with respect to the coordinates of the vertices, we employed detection rays to divide vertices of statistical body shape models into different groups depending on whether the vertex is in the region of self-intersection. Second, the partial derivatives could be easily derived by the normal vectors of neighboring triangles of the vertices. Finally, this penalty term could be applied in gradient-based optimization algorithms to remove the self-intersection of triangular meshes without using any approximation. Qualitative and quantitative evaluations were conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness and generality of our proposed method compared with previous approaches. The experimental results show that our proposed penalty term can avoid self-intersection to exclude unreasonable predictions and improves the accuracy of 3D pose estimation indirectly. Further more, the proposed method could be employed universally in triangular mesh based 3D reconstruction

The Use of Separated Reflection Components in Estimating Geometrical Parameters of Curved Surface Elements

Iterative least-squares estimation, requires accurate reflectance models to retrieve geometrical parameters of curved surface elements from an image projection. We investigate the use of separating the diffuse (body) reflection from the specular (surface) reflection being responsible for image highlights. Experiments show that the (smooth) diffuse component yields the best convergence properties, while the (sharp) specular component can contribute to the improvement of the noise insensitivit