34 research outputs found
Learning Shape Priors for Single-View 3D Completion and Reconstruction
The problem of single-view 3D shape completion or reconstruction is
challenging, because among the many possible shapes that explain an
observation, most are implausible and do not correspond to natural objects.
Recent research in the field has tackled this problem by exploiting the
expressiveness of deep convolutional networks. In fact, there is another level
of ambiguity that is often overlooked: among plausible shapes, there are still
multiple shapes that fit the 2D image equally well; i.e., the ground truth
shape is non-deterministic given a single-view input. Existing fully supervised
approaches fail to address this issue, and often produce blurry mean shapes
with smooth surfaces but no fine details.
In this paper, we propose ShapeHD, pushing the limit of single-view shape
completion and reconstruction by integrating deep generative models with
adversarially learned shape priors. The learned priors serve as a regularizer,
penalizing the model only if its output is unrealistic, not if it deviates from
the ground truth. Our design thus overcomes both levels of ambiguity
aforementioned. Experiments demonstrate that ShapeHD outperforms state of the
art by a large margin in both shape completion and shape reconstruction on
multiple real datasets.Comment: ECCV 2018. The first two authors contributed equally to this work.
Project page: http://shapehd.csail.mit.edu
Qur'an and archeology in a creationist documentary
The ambition of “scientific creationism” is to prove that science actually confirms religion. This is especially true in the case of Muslim creationism, which adopts a reasoning of a syllogistic type: divine revelation is truth; good science confirms truth; divine revelation is henceforth scientifically proven. Harun Yahya is a prominent Muslim “creationist” whose website hosts many texts and documentary films, among which “Evidence of the true faith in historical sources”. This is a small audiovisual production which, starting from some archeological files, seeks to demonstrate that Qur’an truth precedes science but is equally proven by it. In this paper, we examine the organization of the scientific and religious argumentative repertoires and, in particular, what in each of them is taken as evidence and gets access to an authoritative status. It leads us to show how much this type of Muslim creationism constitutes a kind of scientism