Reality3DSketch: Rapid 3D Modeling of Objects from Single Freehand Sketches

The emerging trend of AR/VR places great demands on 3D content. However, most existing software requires expertise and is difficult for novice users to use. In this paper, we aim to create sketch-based modeling tools for user-friendly 3D modeling. We introduce Reality3DSketch with a novel application of an immersive 3D modeling experience, in which a user can capture the surrounding scene using a monocular RGB camera and can draw a single sketch of an object in the real-time reconstructed 3D scene. A 3D object is generated and placed in the desired location, enabled by our novel neural network with the input of a single sketch. Our neural network can predict the pose of a drawing and can turn a single sketch into a 3D model with view and structural awareness, which addresses the challenge of sparse sketch input and view ambiguity. We conducted extensive experiments synthetic and real-world datasets and achieved state-of-the-art (SOTA) results in both sketch view estimation and 3D modeling performance. According to our user study, our method of performing 3D modeling in a scene is $>$5x faster than conventional methods. Users are also more satisfied with the generated 3D model than the results of existing methods.Comment: IEEE Transactions on MultiMedi

DifferSketching: How Differently Do People Sketch 3D Objects?

Multiple sketch datasets have been proposed to understand how people draw 3D objects. However, such datasets are often of small scale and cover a small set of objects or categories. In addition, these datasets contain freehand sketches mostly from expert users, making it difficult to compare the drawings by expert and novice users, while such comparisons are critical in informing more effective sketch-based interfaces for either user groups. These observations motivate us to analyze how differently people with and without adequate drawing skills sketch 3D objects. We invited 70 novice users and 38 expert users to sketch 136 3D objects, which were presented as 362 images rendered from multiple views. This leads to a new dataset of 3,620 freehand multi-view sketches, which are registered with their corresponding 3D objects under certain views. Our dataset is an order of magnitude larger than the existing datasets. We analyze the collected data at three levels, i.e., sketch-level, stroke-level, and pixel-level, under both spatial and temporal characteristics, and within and across groups of creators. We found that the drawings by professionals and novices show significant differences at stroke-level, both intrinsically and extrinsically. We demonstrate the usefulness of our dataset in two applications: (i) freehand-style sketch synthesis, and (ii) posing it as a potential benchmark for sketch-based 3D reconstruction. Our dataset and code are available at https://chufengxiao.github.io/DifferSketching/.Comment: SIGGRAPH Asia 2022 (Journal Track

Developing serious games for cultural heritage: a state-of-the-art review

Although the widespread use of gaming for leisure purposes has been well documented, the use of games to support cultural heritage purposes, such as historical teaching and learning, or for enhancing museum visits, has been less well considered. The state-of-the-art in serious game technology is identical to that of the state-of-the-art in entertainment games technology. As a result, the field of serious heritage games concerns itself with recent advances in computer games, real-time computer graphics, virtual and augmented reality and artificial intelligence. On the other hand, the main strengths of serious gaming applications may be generalised as being in the areas of communication, visual expression of information, collaboration mechanisms, interactivity and entertainment. In this report, we will focus on the state-of-the-art with respect to the theories, methods and technologies used in serious heritage games. We provide an overview of existing literature of relevance to the domain, discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the described methods and point out unsolved problems and challenges. In addition, several case studies illustrating the application of methods and technologies used in cultural heritage are presented

Serious Games in Cultural Heritage

Although the widespread use of gaming for leisure purposes has been well documented, the use of games to support cultural heritage purposes, such as historical teaching and learning, or for enhancing museum visits, has been less well considered. The state-of-the-art in serious game technology is identical to that of the state-of-the-art in entertainment games technology. As a result the field of serious heritage games concerns itself with recent advances in computer games, real-time computer graphics, virtual and augmented reality and artificial intelligence. On the other hand, the main strengths of serious gaming applications may be generalised as being in the areas of communication, visual expression of information, collaboration mechanisms, interactivity and entertainment. In this report, we will focus on the state-of-the-art with respect to the theories, methods and technologies used in serious heritage games. We provide an overview of existing literature of relevance to the domain, discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the described methods and point out unsolved problems and challenges. In addition, several case studies illustrating the application of methods and technologies used in cultural heritage are presented

Integration of sketch-based ideation and 3D modeling with CAD systems

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.This thesis is concerned with the study of how sketch-based systems can be improved to enhance idea generation process in conceptual design stage. It is also concerned with achieving a kind of integration between sketch-based systems and CAD systems to complete the digitization of the design process as sketching phase is still not integrated with other phases due to the different nature of it and the incomplete digitization of sketching phase itself. Previous studies identified three main related issues: sketching process, sketch-based modeling, and the integration between the digitized design phases. Here, the thesis is motivated from the desire to improve sketch-based modeling to support idea generation process but unlike previous studies that only focused on the technical or drawing part of sketching, this thesis attempts to concentrate more on the mental part of the sketching process which play a key role in developing ideas in design. Another motivation of this thesis is to produce a kind of integration between sketch-based systems and CAD systems to enable 3D models produced by sketching to be edited in detailed design stage. As such, there are two main contributions have been addressed in this thesis. The first contribution is the presenting of a new approach in designing sketch-based systems that enable more support for idea generation by separating thinking and developing ideas from the 3D modeling process. This kind of separation allows designers to think freely and concentrate more on their ideas rather than 3D modeling. the second contribution is achieving a kind of integration between gesture-based systems and CAD systems by using an IGES file in exchanging data between systems and a new method to organize data within the file in an order that make it more understood by feature recognition embedded in commercial CAD systems.This study is funded by the Ministry of Higher Education of Egypt

Deep3DSketch+\+: High-Fidelity 3D Modeling from Single Free-hand Sketches

The rise of AR/VR has led to an increased demand for 3D content. However, the traditional method of creating 3D content using Computer-Aided Design (CAD) is a labor-intensive and skill-demanding process, making it difficult to use for novice users. Sketch-based 3D modeling provides a promising solution by leveraging the intuitive nature of human-computer interaction. However, generating high-quality content that accurately reflects the creator's ideas can be challenging due to the sparsity and ambiguity of sketches. Furthermore, novice users often find it challenging to create accurate drawings from multiple perspectives or follow step-by-step instructions in existing methods. To address this, we introduce a groundbreaking end-to-end approach in our work, enabling 3D modeling from a single free-hand sketch, Deep3DSketch+$\backslash$+. The issue of sparsity and ambiguity using single sketch is resolved in our approach by leveraging the symmetry prior and structural-aware shape discriminator. We conducted comprehensive experiments on diverse datasets, including both synthetic and real data, to validate the efficacy of our approach and demonstrate its state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance. Users are also more satisfied with results generated by our approach according to our user study. We believe our approach has the potential to revolutionize the process of 3D modeling by offering an intuitive and easy-to-use solution for novice users.Comment: Accepted at IEEE SMC 202

Digital Library Services for Three-Dimensional Models

With the growth in computing, storage and networking infrastructure, it is becoming increasingly feasible for multimedia professionals—such as graphic designers in commercial, manufacturing, scientific and entertainment areas—to work with 3D digital models of the objects with which they deal in their domain. Unfortunately most of these models exist in individual repositories, and are not accessible to geographically distributed professionals who are in need of them. Building an efficient digital library system presents a number of challenges. In particular, the following issues need to be addressed: (1) What is the best way of representing 3D models in a digital library, so that the searches can be done faster? (2) How to compress and deliver the 3D models to reduce the storage and bandwidth requirements? (3) How can we represent the user\u27s view on similarity between two objects? (4) What search types can be used to enhance the usability of the digital library and how can we implement these searches, what are the trade-offs? In this research, we have developed a digital library architecture for 3D models that addresses the above issues as well as other technical issues. We have developed a prototype for our 3D digital library (3DLIB) that supports compressed storage, along with retrieval of 3D models. The prototype also supports search and discovery services that are targeted for 3-D models. The key to 3DLIB is a representation of a 3D model that is based on “surface signatures”. This representation captures the shape information of any free-form surface and encodes it into a set of 2D images. We have developed a shape similarity search technique that uses the signature images to compare 3D models. One advantage of the proposed technique is that it works in the compressed domain, thus it eliminates the need for uncompressing in content-based search. Moreover, we have developed an efficient discovery service consisting of a multi-level hierarchical browsing service that enables users to navigate large sets of 3D models. To implement this targeted browsing (find an object that is similar to a given object in a large collection through browsing) we abstract a large set of 3D models to a small set of representative models (key models). The abstraction is based on shape similarity and uses specially tailored clustering techniques. The browsing service applies clustering recursively to limit the number of key models that a user views at any time. We have evaluated the performance of our digital library services using the Princeton Shape Benchmark (PSB) and it shows significantly better precision and recall, as compared to other approaches