Guided mesh normal filtering

The joint bilateral filter is a variant of the standard bilateral filter, where the range kernel is evaluated using a guidance signal instead of the original signal. It has been successfully applied to various image processing problems, where it provides more flexibility than the standard bilateral filter to achieve high quality results. On the other hand, its success is heavily dependent on the guidance signal, which should ideally provide a robust estimation about the features of the output signal. Such a guidance signal is not always easy to construct. In this paper, we propose a novel mesh normal filtering framework based on the joint bilateral filter, with applications in mesh denoising. Our framework is designed as a two-stage process: first, we apply joint bilateral filtering to the face normals, using a properly constructed normal field as the guidance; afterwards, the vertex positions are updated according to the filtered face normals. We compute the guidance normal on a face using a neighboring patch with the most consistent normal orientations, which provides a reliable estimation of the true normal even with a high-level of noise. The effectiveness of our approach is validated by extensive experimental results

Iso-level tool path planning for free-form surfaces

The aim of tool path planning is to maximize the efficiency against some given precision criteria. In practice, scallop height should be kept constant to avoid unnecessary cutting, while the tool path should be smooth enough to maintain a high feed rate. However, iso-scallop and smoothness often conflict with each other. Existing methods smooth iso-scallop paths one-by-one, which make the final tool path far from being globally optimal. This paper proposes a new framework for tool path optimization. It views a family of iso-level curves of a scalar function defined over the surface as tool path so that desired tool path can be generated by finding the function that minimizes certain energy functional and different objectives can be considered simultaneously. We use the framework to plan globally optimal tool path with respect to iso-scallop and smoothness. The energy functionals for planning iso-scallop, smoothness, and optimal tool path are respectively derived, and the path topology is studied too. Experimental results are given to show effectiveness of the proposed methods

L0L_0-Sampler: An L0L_{0} Model Guided Volume Sampling for NeRF

Since being proposed, Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) have achieved great success in related tasks, mainly adopting the hierarchical volume sampling (HVS) strategy for volume rendering. However, the HVS of NeRF approximates distributions using piecewise constant functions, which provides a relatively rough estimation. Based on the observation that a well-trained weight function $w(t)$ and the $L_0$ distance between points and the surface have very high similarity, we propose $L_0$-Sampler by incorporating the $L_0$ model into $w(t)$ to guide the sampling process. Specifically, we propose to use piecewise exponential functions rather than piecewise constant functions for interpolation, which can not only approximate quasi-$L_0$ weight distributions along rays quite well but also can be easily implemented with few lines of code without additional computational burden. Stable performance improvements can be achieved by applying $L_0$-Sampler to NeRF and its related tasks like 3D reconstruction. Code is available at https://ustc3dv.github.io/L0-Sampler/ .Comment: Project page: https://ustc3dv.github.io/L0-Sampler

CNN-based Real-time Dense Face Reconstruction with Inverse-rendered Photo-realistic Face Images

With the powerfulness of convolution neural networks (CNN), CNN based face reconstruction has recently shown promising performance in reconstructing detailed face shape from 2D face images. The success of CNN-based methods relies on a large number of labeled data. The state-of-the-art synthesizes such data using a coarse morphable face model, which however has difficulty to generate detailed photo-realistic images of faces (with wrinkles). This paper presents a novel face data generation method. Specifically, we render a large number of photo-realistic face images with different attributes based on inverse rendering. Furthermore, we construct a fine-detailed face image dataset by transferring different scales of details from one image to another. We also construct a large number of video-type adjacent frame pairs by simulating the distribution of real video data. With these nicely constructed datasets, we propose a coarse-to-fine learning framework consisting of three convolutional networks. The networks are trained for real-time detailed 3D face reconstruction from monocular video as well as from a single image. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our framework can produce high-quality reconstruction but with much less computation time compared to the state-of-the-art. Moreover, our method is robust to pose, expression and lighting due to the diversity of data.Comment: Accepted by IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 201

Living in a changing Chinese urban landscape: The Dalian case study

Dalian is the second–most important city in the southern part of Liaoning Province in northeast China. The city can trace its history back to the Qingniwa settlement. This settlement was occupied from 1858 until 1950 in succession by the British, Japanese and Russian Empires, with each imposing its own building styles on the city. However, from 1950, when the city was finally returned to China by the Russians, who had captured it from the Japanese during the Second World War, most of the imperial buildings and sites were lost to redevelopment within the city. The most dramatic changes have taken place since 1984, when the city was declared a Special Economic Zone, and particularly during the 1990s, when Bo Xilai became the mayor and introduced parks, extensive motorways and many traffic circles. At present, having lost most of its traditional built environment, Dalian is a modern city marked by dramatic housing developments and dominated by multi-family high-rise buildings to accommodate its population of 5.72 million. In 2011, a survey was conducted among 400 inhabitants of the city to ascertain their perceptions concerning life in Dalian and the Dalian Development Zone, their living conditions and their level of satisfaction with their housing. From the survey, it was clear that the majority of the interviewees were uncertain about the variables concerning the structural quality of their housing units and the nature, quality and accessibility of the services provided. However, most of them indicated that public transport, open spaces, parks and recreational facilities were within easy reach of their housing units