RotationNet: Joint Object Categorization and Pose Estimation Using Multiviews from Unsupervised Viewpoints

We propose a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)-based model "RotationNet," which takes multi-view images of an object as input and jointly estimates its pose and object category. Unlike previous approaches that use known viewpoint labels for training, our method treats the viewpoint labels as latent variables, which are learned in an unsupervised manner during the training using an unaligned object dataset. RotationNet is designed to use only a partial set of multi-view images for inference, and this property makes it useful in practical scenarios where only partial views are available. Moreover, our pose alignment strategy enables one to obtain view-specific feature representations shared across classes, which is important to maintain high accuracy in both object categorization and pose estimation. Effectiveness of RotationNet is demonstrated by its superior performance to the state-of-the-art methods of 3D object classification on 10- and 40-class ModelNet datasets. We also show that RotationNet, even trained without known poses, achieves the state-of-the-art performance on an object pose estimation dataset. The code is available on https://github.com/kanezaki/rotationnetComment: 24 pages, 23 figures. Accepted to CVPR 201

Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for 3D Keypoint Estimation via View Consistency

In this paper, we introduce a novel unsupervised domain adaptation technique for the task of 3D keypoint prediction from a single depth scan or image. Our key idea is to utilize the fact that predictions from different views of the same or similar objects should be consistent with each other. Such view consistency can provide effective regularization for keypoint prediction on unlabeled instances. In addition, we introduce a geometric alignment term to regularize predictions in the target domain. The resulting loss function can be effectively optimized via alternating minimization. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on real datasets and present experimental results showing that our approach is superior to state-of-the-art general-purpose domain adaptation techniques.Comment: ECCV 201

Learning to Look Around: Intelligently Exploring Unseen Environments for Unknown Tasks

It is common to implicitly assume access to intelligently captured inputs (e.g., photos from a human photographer), yet autonomously capturing good observations is itself a major challenge. We address the problem of learning to look around: if a visual agent has the ability to voluntarily acquire new views to observe its environment, how can it learn efficient exploratory behaviors to acquire informative observations? We propose a reinforcement learning solution, where the agent is rewarded for actions that reduce its uncertainty about the unobserved portions of its environment. Based on this principle, we develop a recurrent neural network-based approach to perform active completion of panoramic natural scenes and 3D object shapes. Crucially, the learned policies are not tied to any recognition task nor to the particular semantic content seen during training. As a result, 1) the learned "look around" behavior is relevant even for new tasks in unseen environments, and 2) training data acquisition involves no manual labeling. Through tests in diverse settings, we demonstrate that our approach learns useful generic policies that transfer to new unseen tasks and environments. Completion episodes are shown at https://goo.gl/BgWX3W

3D-PhysNet: Learning the Intuitive Physics of Non-Rigid Object Deformations

The ability to interact and understand the environment is a fundamental prerequisite for a wide range of applications from robotics to augmented reality. In particular, predicting how deformable objects will react to applied forces in real time is a significant challenge. This is further confounded by the fact that shape information about encountered objects in the real world is often impaired by occlusions, noise and missing regions e.g. a robot manipulating an object will only be able to observe a partial view of the entire solid. In this work we present a framework, 3D-PhysNet, which is able to predict how a three-dimensional solid will deform under an applied force using intuitive physics modelling. In particular, we propose a new method to encode the physical properties of the material and the applied force, enabling generalisation over materials. The key is to combine deep variational autoencoders with adversarial training, conditioned on the applied force and the material properties. We further propose a cascaded architecture that takes a single 2.5D depth view of the object and predicts its deformation. Training data is provided by a physics simulator. The network is fast enough to be used in real-time applications from partial views. Experimental results show the viability and the generalisation properties of the proposed architecture.Comment: in IJCAI 201