Learning Embedding of 3D models with Quadric Loss

Sharp features such as edges and corners play an important role in the perception of 3D models. In order to capture them better, we propose quadric loss, a point-surface loss function, which minimizes the quadric error between the reconstructed points and the input surface. Computation of Quadric loss is easy, efficient since the quadric matrices can be computed apriori, and is fully differentiable, making quadric loss suitable for training point and mesh based architectures. Through extensive experiments we show the merits and demerits of quadric loss. When combined with Chamfer loss, quadric loss achieves better reconstruction results as compared to any one of them or other point-surface loss functions.Comment: Accepted to BMVC 2019 for Oral Presentatio

Neural Puppet: Generative Layered Cartoon Characters

We propose a learning based method for generating new animations of a cartoon character given a few example images. Our method is designed to learn from a traditionally animated sequence, where each frame is drawn by an artist, and thus the input images lack any common structure, correspondences, or labels. We express pose changes as a deformation of a layered 2.5D template mesh, and devise a novel architecture that learns to predict mesh deformations matching the template to a target image. This enables us to extract a common low-dimensional structure from a diverse set of character poses. We combine recent advances in differentiable rendering as well as mesh-aware models to successfully align common template even if only a few character images are available during training. In addition to coarse poses, character appearance also varies due to shading, out-of-plane motions, and artistic effects. We capture these subtle changes by applying an image translation network to refine the mesh rendering, providing an end-to-end model to generate new animations of a character with high visual quality. We demonstrate that our generative model can be used to synthesize in-between frames and to create data-driven deformation. Our template fitting procedure outperforms state-of-the-art generic techniques for detecting image correspondences