Multiscale Mesh Deformation Component Analysis with Attention-based Autoencoders

Deformation component analysis is a fundamental problem in geometry processing and shape understanding. Existing approaches mainly extract deformation components in local regions at a similar scale while deformations of real-world objects are usually distributed in a multi-scale manner. In this paper, we propose a novel method to exact multiscale deformation components automatically with a stacked attention-based autoencoder. The attention mechanism is designed to learn to softly weight multi-scale deformation components in active deformation regions, and the stacked attention-based autoencoder is learned to represent the deformation components at different scales. Quantitative and qualitative evaluations show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, with the multiscale deformation components extracted by our method, the user can edit shapes in a coarse-to-fine fashion which facilitates effective modeling of new shapes.Comment: 15 page

SDM-NET: Deep Generative Network for Structured Deformable Mesh

We introduce SDM-NET, a deep generative neural network which produces structured deformable meshes. Specifically, the network is trained to generate a spatial arrangement of closed, deformable mesh parts, which respect the global part structure of a shape collection, e.g., chairs, airplanes, etc. Our key observation is that while the overall structure of a 3D shape can be complex, the shape can usually be decomposed into a set of parts, each homeomorphic to a box, and the finer-scale geometry of the part can be recovered by deforming the box. The architecture of SDM-NET is that of a two-level variational autoencoder (VAE). At the part level, a PartVAE learns a deformable model of part geometries. At the structural level, we train a Structured Parts VAE (SP-VAE), which jointly learns the part structure of a shape collection and the part geometries, ensuring a coherence between global shape structure and surface details. Through extensive experiments and comparisons with the state-of-the-art deep generative models of shapes, we demonstrate the superiority of SDM-NET in generating meshes with visual quality, flexible topology, and meaningful structures, which benefit shape interpolation and other subsequently modeling tasks.Comment: Conditionally Accepted to Siggraph Asia 201

Investigating human-perceptual properties of "shapes" using 3D shapes and 2D fonts

Shapes are generally used to convey meaning. They are used in video games, films and other multimedia, in diverse ways. 3D shapes may be destined for virtual scenes or represent objects to be constructed in the real-world. Fonts add character to an otherwise plain block of text, allowing the writer to make important points more visually prominent or distinct from other text. They can indicate the structure of a document, at a glance. Rather than studying shapes through traditional geometric shape descriptors, we provide alternative methods to describe and analyse shapes, from a lens of human perception. This is done via the concepts of Schelling Points and Image Specificity. Schelling Points are choices people make when they aim to match with what they expect others to choose but cannot communicate with others to determine an answer. We study whole mesh selections in this setting, where Schelling Meshes are the most frequently selected shapes. The key idea behind image Specificity is that different images evoke different descriptions; but ‘Specific’ images yield more consistent descriptions than others. We apply Specificity to 2D fonts. We show that each concept can be learned and predict them for fonts and 3D shapes, respectively, using a depth image-based convolutional neural network. Results are shown for a range of fonts and 3D shapes and we demonstrate that font Specificity and the Schelling meshes concept are useful for visualisation, clustering, and search applications. Overall, we find that each concept represents similarities between their respective type of shape, even when there are discontinuities between the shape geometries themselves. The ‘context’ of these similarities is in some kind of abstract or subjective meaning which is consistent among different people

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