We tackle the tasks of: 1) predicting a Canonical Surface Mapping (CSM) that
indicates the mapping from 2D pixels to corresponding points on a canonical
template shape, and 2) inferring the articulation and pose of the template
corresponding to the input image. While previous approaches rely on keypoint
supervision for learning, we present an approach that can learn without such
annotations. Our key insight is that these tasks are geometrically related, and
we can obtain supervisory signal via enforcing consistency among the
predictions. We present results across a diverse set of animal object
categories, showing that our method can learn articulation and CSM prediction
from image collections using only foreground mask labels for training. We
empirically show that allowing articulation helps learn more accurate CSM
prediction, and that enforcing the consistency with predicted CSM is similarly
critical for learning meaningful articulation.Comment: To appear at CVPR 2020, project page
https://nileshkulkarni.github.io/acsm