Neural Face Editing with Intrinsic Image Disentangling

Traditional face editing methods often require a number of sophisticated and task specific algorithms to be applied one after the other --- a process that is tedious, fragile, and computationally intensive. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end generative adversarial network that infers a face-specific disentangled representation of intrinsic face properties, including shape (i.e. normals), albedo, and lighting, and an alpha matte. We show that this network can be trained on "in-the-wild" images by incorporating an in-network physically-based image formation module and appropriate loss functions. Our disentangling latent representation allows for semantically relevant edits, where one aspect of facial appearance can be manipulated while keeping orthogonal properties fixed, and we demonstrate its use for a number of facial editing applications.Comment: CVPR 2017 ora

Soft tissue structure modelling for use in orthopaedic applications and musculoskeletal biomechanics

We present our methodology for the three-dimensional anatomical and geometrical description of soft tissues, relevant for orthopaedic surgical applications and musculoskeletal biomechanics. The technique involves the segmentation and geometrical description of muscles and neurovascular structures from high-resolution computer tomography scanning for the reconstruction of generic anatomical models. These models can be used for quantitative interpretation of anatomical and biomechanical aspects of different soft tissue structures. This approach should allow the use of these data in other application fields, such as musculoskeletal modelling, simulations for radiation therapy, and databases for use in minimally invasive, navigated and robotic surgery

Spectral Volume Method: application to Euler equations and performance appraisal

The compact high-order "Spectral Volume Method" designed for conservation laws on unstructured grids is presented. Its spectral reconstruction is exposed briefly and its applications to the Euler equations are presented through several test cases to assess its accuracy and stability. Comparisons with usual methods such as MUSCL show the superiority of SVM. The SVM method arises as a high-order accurate scheme, geometrically flexible and computationally efficient

A Multi-signal Variant for the GPU-based Parallelization of Growing Self-Organizing Networks

Among the many possible approaches for the parallelization of self-organizing networks, and in particular of growing self-organizing networks, perhaps the most common one is producing an optimized, parallel implementation of the standard sequential algorithms reported in the literature. In this paper we explore an alternative approach, based on a new algorithm variant specifically designed to match the features of the large-scale, fine-grained parallelism of GPUs, in which multiple input signals are processed at once. Comparative tests have been performed, using both parallel and sequential implementations of the new algorithm variant, in particular for a growing self-organizing network that reconstructs surfaces from point clouds. The experimental results show that this approach allows harnessing in a more effective way the intrinsic parallelism that the self-organizing networks algorithms seem intuitively to suggest, obtaining better performances even with networks of smaller size.Comment: 17 page

Epitaxial growth in dislocation-free strained alloy films: Morphological and compositional instabilities

The mechanisms of stability or instability in the strained alloy film growth are of intense current interest to both theorists and experimentalists. We consider dislocation-free, coherent, growing alloy films which could exhibit a morphological instability without nucleation. We investigate such strained films by developing a nonequilibrium, continuum model and by performing a linear stability analysis. The couplings of film-substrate misfit strain, compositional stress, deposition rate, and growth temperature determine the stability of film morphology as well as the surface spinodal decomposition. We consider some realistic factors of epitaxial growth, in particular the composition dependence of elastic moduli and the coupling between top surface and underlying bulk of the film. The interplay of these factors leads to new stability results. In addition to the stability diagrams both above and below the coherent spinodal temperature, we also calculate the kinetic critical thickness for the onset of instability as well as its scaling behavior with respect to misfit strain and deposition rate. We apply our results to some real growth systems and discuss the implications related to some recent experimental observations.Comment: 26 pages, 13 eps figure

Extraction of main levels of a building from a large point cloud

Horizontal levels are references entities, the base of man-made environments. Their creation is the first step for various applications including the BIM (Building Information Modelling). BIM is an emerging methodology, widely used for new constructions, and increasingly applied to existing buildings (scan-to-BIM). The as-built BIM process is still mainly manual or semi-automatic and therefore is highly time-consuming. The automation of the as-built BIM is a challenging topic among the research community. This study is part of an ongoing research into the scan-to-BIM process regarding the extraction of the principal structure of a building. More specifically, here we present a strategy to automatically detect the building levels from a large point cloud obtained with a terrestrial laser scanner survey. The identification of the horizontal planes is the first indispensable step to produce an as-built BIM model. Our algorithm, developed in C++, is based on plane extraction by means of the RANSAC algorithm followed by the minimization of the quadrate sum of points-plane distance. Moreover, this paper will take an in-depth look at the influence of data resolution in the accuracy of plane extraction and at the necessary accuracy for the construction of a BIM model. A laser scanner survey of a three floors building composed by 36 scan stations has produced a point cloud of about 550 million points. The estimated plane parameters at different data resolution are analysed in terms of distance from the full points cloud resolution