Neural 3D Morphable Models: Spiral Convolutional Networks for 3D Shape Representation Learning and Generation

Generative models for 3D geometric data arise in many important applications in 3D computer vision and graphics. In this paper, we focus on 3D deformable shapes that share a common topological structure, such as human faces and bodies. Morphable Models and their variants, despite their linear formulation, have been widely used for shape representation, while most of the recently proposed nonlinear approaches resort to intermediate representations, such as 3D voxel grids or 2D views. In this work, we introduce a novel graph convolutional operator, acting directly on the 3D mesh, that explicitly models the inductive bias of the fixed underlying graph. This is achieved by enforcing consistent local orderings of the vertices of the graph, through the spiral operator, thus breaking the permutation invariance property that is adopted by all the prior work on Graph Neural Networks. Our operator comes by construction with desirable properties (anisotropic, topology-aware, lightweight, easy-to-optimise), and by using it as a building block for traditional deep generative architectures, we demonstrate state-of-the-art results on a variety of 3D shape datasets compared to the linear Morphable Model and other graph convolutional operators.Comment: to appear at ICCV 201

Deep deformable models for 3D human body

Deformable models are powerful tools for modelling the 3D shape variations for a class of objects. However, currently the application and performance of deformable models for human body are restricted due to the limitations in current 3D datasets, annotations, and the model formulation itself. In this thesis, we address the issue by making the following contributions in the field of 3D human body modelling, monocular reconstruction and data collection/annotation. Firstly, we propose a deep mesh convolutional network based deformable model for 3D human body. We demonstrate the merit of this model in the task of monocular human mesh recovery. While outperforming current state of the art models in mesh recovery accuracy, the model is also light weighted and more flexible as it can be trained end-to-end and fine-tuned for a specific task. A second contribution is a bone level skinned model of 3D human mesh, in which bone modelling and identity-specific variation modelling are decoupled. Such formulation allows the use of mesh convolutional networks for capturing detailed identity specific variations, while explicitly controlling and modelling the pose variations through linear blend skinning with built-in motion constraints. This formulation not only significantly increases the accuracy in 3D human mesh reconstruction, but also facilitates accurate in the wild character animation and retargetting. Finally we present a large scale dataset of over 1.3 million 3D human body scans in daily clothing. The dataset contains over 12 hours of 4D recordings at 30 FPS, consisting of 7566 dynamic sequences of 3D meshes from 4205 subjects. We propose a fast and accurate sequence registration pipeline which facilitates markerless motion capture and automatic dense annotation for the raw scans, leading to automatic synthetic image and annotation generation that boosts the performance for tasks such as monocular human mesh reconstruction.Open Acces

SurfelWarp: Efficient Non-Volumetric Single View Dynamic Reconstruction

We contribute a dense SLAM system that takes a live stream of depth images as input and reconstructs non-rigid deforming scenes in real time, without templates or prior models. In contrast to existing approaches, we do not maintain any volumetric data structures, such as truncated signed distance function (TSDF) fields or deformation fields, which are performance and memory intensive. Our system works with a flat point (surfel) based representation of geometry, which can be directly acquired from commodity depth sensors. Standard graphics pipelines and general purpose GPU (GPGPU) computing are leveraged for all central operations: i.e., nearest neighbor maintenance, non-rigid deformation field estimation and fusion of depth measurements. Our pipeline inherently avoids expensive volumetric operations such as marching cubes, volumetric fusion and dense deformation field update, leading to significantly improved performance. Furthermore, the explicit and flexible surfel based geometry representation enables efficient tackling of topology changes and tracking failures, which makes our reconstructions consistent with updated depth observations. Our system allows robots to maintain a scene description with non-rigidly deformed objects that potentially enables interactions with dynamic working environments.Comment: RSS 2018. The video and source code are available on https://sites.google.com/view/surfelwarp/hom

Measuring the Discrepancy between 3D Geometric Models using Directional Distance Fields

Qualifying the discrepancy between 3D geometric models, which could be represented with either point clouds or triangle meshes, is a pivotal issue with board applications. Existing methods mainly focus on directly establishing the correspondence between two models and then aggregating point-wise distance between corresponding points, resulting in them being either inefficient or ineffective. In this paper, we propose DirDist, an efficient, effective, robust, and differentiable distance metric for 3D geometry data. Specifically, we construct DirDist based on the proposed implicit representation of 3D models, namely directional distance field (DDF), which defines the directional distances of 3D points to a model to capture its local surface geometry. We then transfer the discrepancy between two 3D geometric models as the discrepancy between their DDFs defined on an identical domain, naturally establishing model correspondence. To demonstrate the advantage of our DirDist, we explore various distance metric-driven 3D geometric modeling tasks, including template surface fitting, rigid registration, non-rigid registration, scene flow estimation and human pose optimization. Extensive experiments show that our DirDist achieves significantly higher accuracy under all tasks. As a generic distance metric, DirDist has the potential to advance the field of 3D geometric modeling. The source code is available at \url{https://github.com/rsy6318/DirDist}