Variational Autoencoders for Deforming 3D Mesh Models

3D geometric contents are becoming increasingly popular. In this paper, we study the problem of analyzing deforming 3D meshes using deep neural networks. Deforming 3D meshes are flexible to represent 3D animation sequences as well as collections of objects of the same category, allowing diverse shapes with large-scale non-linear deformations. We propose a novel framework which we call mesh variational autoencoders (mesh VAE), to explore the probabilistic latent space of 3D surfaces. The framework is easy to train, and requires very few training examples. We also propose an extended model which allows flexibly adjusting the significance of different latent variables by altering the prior distribution. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our general framework is able to learn a reasonable representation for a collection of deformable shapes, and produce competitive results for a variety of applications, including shape generation, shape interpolation, shape space embedding and shape exploration, outperforming state-of-the-art methods.Comment: CVPR 201

CHORUS Deliverable 4.4: Report of the 2nd CHORUS Conference

The Second CHORUS Conference and third Yahoo! Research Workshop on the Future of Web Search was held during April 4-5, 2008, in Granvalira, Andorra to discuss future directions in multi-medial information access and other specialised topics in the near future of retrieval. Attendance was at capacity, with 97 participants from 11 countries and 3 continents

3D Human Video Retrieval: from Pose to Motion Matching

International audience3D video retrieval is a challenging problem lying at the heart of many primary research areas in computer graphics and computer vision applications. In this paper, we present a new 3D human shape matching and motion retrieval framework. Our approach is formulated using Extremal Human Curve (EHC) descriptor extracted from the body surface and a local motion retrieval achieved after motion segmentation. Matching is performed by an efficient method which takes advantage of a compact EHC representation in open curve Shape Space and an elastic distance measure. Moreover, local 3D video retrieval is performed by dynamic time warping (DTW) algorithm in the feature space vectors. Experiments on both synthetic and real 3D human video sequences show that our approach provides an accurate shape similarity in video compared to the best state-of-the-art approaches. Finally, results on motion retrieval are promising and show the potential of this approach