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

Shape Completion using 3D-Encoder-Predictor CNNs and Shape Synthesis

We introduce a data-driven approach to complete partial 3D shapes through a combination of volumetric deep neural networks and 3D shape synthesis. From a partially-scanned input shape, our method first infers a low-resolution -- but complete -- output. To this end, we introduce a 3D-Encoder-Predictor Network (3D-EPN) which is composed of 3D convolutional layers. The network is trained to predict and fill in missing data, and operates on an implicit surface representation that encodes both known and unknown space. This allows us to predict global structure in unknown areas at high accuracy. We then correlate these intermediary results with 3D geometry from a shape database at test time. In a final pass, we propose a patch-based 3D shape synthesis method that imposes the 3D geometry from these retrieved shapes as constraints on the coarsely-completed mesh. This synthesis process enables us to reconstruct fine-scale detail and generate high-resolution output while respecting the global mesh structure obtained by the 3D-EPN. Although our 3D-EPN outperforms state-of-the-art completion method, the main contribution in our work lies in the combination of a data-driven shape predictor and analytic 3D shape synthesis. In our results, we show extensive evaluations on a newly-introduced shape completion benchmark for both real-world and synthetic data