Non-Rigid Puzzles

Shape correspondence is a fundamental problem in computer graphics and vision, with applications in various problems including animation, texture mapping, robotic vision, medical imaging, archaeology and many more. In settings where the shapes are allowed to undergo non-rigid deformations and only partial views are available, the problem becomes very challenging. To this end, we present a non-rigid multi-part shape matching algorithm. We assume to be given a reference shape and its multiple parts undergoing a non-rigid deformation. Each of these query parts can be additionally contaminated by clutter, may overlap with other parts, and there might be missing parts or redundant ones. Our method simultaneously solves for the segmentation of the reference model, and for a dense correspondence to (subsets of) the parts. Experimental results on synthetic as well as real scans demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in dealing with this challenging matching scenario

Towards precise completion of deformable shapes

According to Aristotle, “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts”. This statement was adopted to explain human perception by the Gestalt psychology school of thought in the twentieth century. Here, we claim that when observing a part of an object which was previously acquired as a whole, one could deal with both partial correspondence and shape completion in a holistic manner. More specifically, given the geometry of a full, articulated object in a given pose, as well as a partial scan of the same object in a different pose, we address the new problem of matching the part to the whole while simultaneously reconstructing the new pose from its partial observation. Our approach is data-driven and takes the form of a Siamese autoencoder without the requirement of a consistent vertex labeling at inference time; as such, it can be used on unorganized point clouds as well as on triangle meshes. We demonstrate the practical effectiveness of our model in the applications of single-view deformable shape completion and dense shape correspondence, both on synthetic and real-world geometric data, where we outperform prior work by a large margin

Unsupervised learning of dense shape correspondence

We introduce the first completely unsupervised correspondence learning approach for deformable 3D shapes. Key to our model is the understanding that natural deformations (such as changes in pose) approximately preserve the metric structure of the surface, yielding a natural criterion to drive the learning process toward distortion-minimizing predictions. On this basis, we overcome the need for annotated data and replace it by a purely geometric criterion. The resulting learning model is class-agnostic, and is able to leverage any type of deformable geometric data for the training phase. In contrast to existing supervised approaches which specialize on the class seen at training time, we demonstrate stronger generalization as well as applicability to a variety of challenging settings. We showcase our method on a wide selection of correspondence benchmarks, where we outperform other methods in terms of accuracy, generalization, and efficiency

Fully spectral partial shape matching

We propose an efficient procedure for calculating partial dense intrinsic correspondence between deformable shapes performed entirely in the spectral domain. Our technique relies on the recently introduced partial functional maps formalism and on the joint approximate diagonalization (JAD) of the Laplace-Beltrami operators previously introduced for matching non-isometric shapes. We show that a variant of the JAD problem with an appropriately modified coupling term (surprisingly) allows to construct quasi-harmonic bases localized on the latent corresponding parts. This circumvents the need to explicitly compute the unknown parts by means of the cumbersome alternating minimization used in the previous approaches, and allows performing all the calculations in the spectral domain with constant complexity independent of the number of shape vertices. We provide an extensive evaluation of the proposed technique on standard non-rigid correspondence benchmarks and show state-of-the-art performance in various settings, including partiality and the presence of topological noise

Learning Spectral Unions of Partial Deformable 3D Shapes

Spectral geometric methods have brought revolutionary changes to the field of geometry processing. Of particular interest is the study of the Laplacian spectrum as a compact, isometry and permutation-invariant representation of a shape. Some recent works show how the intrinsic geometry of a full shape can be recovered from its spectrum, but there are approaches that consider the more challenging problem of recovering the geometry from the spectral information of partial shapes. In this paper, we propose a possible way to fill this gap. We introduce a learning-based method to estimate the Laplacian spectrum of the union of partial non-rigid 3D shapes, without actually computing the 3D geometry of the union or any correspondence between those partial shapes. We do so by operating purely in the spectral domain and by defining the union operation between short sequences of eigenvalues. We show that the approximated union spectrum can be used as-is to reconstruct the complete geometry [MRC*19], perform region localization on a template [RTO*19] and retrieve shapes from a database, generalizing ShapeDNA [RWP06] to work with partialities. Working with eigenvalues allows us to deal with unknown correspondence, different sampling, and different discretizations (point clouds and meshes alike), making this operation especially robust and general. Our approach is data-driven and can generalize to isometric and non-isometric deformations of the surface, as long as these stay within the same semantic class (e.g., human bodies or horses), as well as to partiality artifacts not seen at training time

Structured Regularization of Functional Map Computations

International audienceWe consider the problem of non-rigid shape matching using the functional map framework. Specifically, we analyze a commonly used approach for regularizing functional maps, which consists in penalizing the failure of the unknown map to commute with the Laplace-Beltrami operators on the source and target shapes. We show that this approach has certain undesirable fundamental theoretical limitations, and can be undefined even for trivial maps in the smooth setting. Instead we propose a novel, theoretically well-justified approach for regularizing functional maps, by using the notion of the resolvent of the Laplacian operator. In addition, we provide a natural one-parameter family of regularizers, that can be easily tuned depending on the expected approximate isometry of the input shape pair. We show on a wide range of shape correspondence scenarios that our novel regularization leads to an improvement in the quality of the estimated functional, and ultimately pointwise correspondences before and after commonly-used refinement techniques

Shape Correspondence with Isometric and Non-Isometric Deformations

The registration of surfaces with non-rigid deformation, especially non-isometric deformations, is a challenging problem. When applying such techniques to real scans, the problem is compounded by topological and geometric inconsistencies between shapes. In this paper, we capture a benchmark dataset of scanned 3D shapes undergoing various controlled deformations (articulating, bending, stretching and topologically changing), along with ground truth correspondences. With the aid of this tiered benchmark of increasingly challenging real scans, we explore this problem and investigate how robust current state-of- the-art methods perform in different challenging registration and correspondence scenarios. We discover that changes in topology is a challenging problem for some methods and that machine learning-based approaches prove to be more capable of handling non-isometric deformations on shapes that are moderately similar to the training set

Orthogonalized Fourier Polynomials for Signal Approximation and Transfer

We propose a novel approach for the approximation and transfer of signals across 3D shapes. The proposed solution is based on taking pointwise polynomials of the Fourier-like Laplacian eigenbasis, which provides a compact and expressive representation for general signals defined on the surface. Key to our approach is the construction of a new orthonormal basis upon the set of these linearly dependent polynomials. We analyze the properties of this representation, and further provide a complete analysis of the involved parameters. Our technique results in accurate approximation and transfer of various families of signals between near-isometric and non-isometric shapes, even under poor initialization. Our experiments, showcased on a selection of downstream tasks such as filtering and detail transfer, show that our method is more robust to discretization artifacts, deformation and noise as compared to alternative approaches

SHREC\u201917: Deformable Shape Retrieval with Missing Parts

Partial similarity problems arise in numerous applications that involve real data acquisition by 3D sensors, inevitably leading to missing parts due to occlusions and partial views. In this setting, the shapes to be retrieved may undergo a variety of transformations simultaneously, such as non-rigid deformations (changes in pose), topological noise, and missing parts - a combination of nuisance factors that renders the retrieval process extremely challenging. With this benchmark, we aim to evaluate the state of the art in deformable shape retrieval under such kind of transformations. The benchmark is organized in two sub-challenges exemplifying different data modalities (3D vs. 2.5D). A total of 15 retrieval algorithms were evaluated in the contest; this paper presents the details of the dataset, and shows thorough comparisons among all competing methods