No Arabic abstract
Geometric model fitting is a fundamental task in computer graphics and computer vision. However, most geometric model fitting methods are unable to fit an arbitrary geometric model (e.g. a surface with holes) to incomplete data, due to that the similarity metrics used in these methods are unable to measure the rigid partial similarity between arbitrary models. This paper hence proposes a novel rigid geometric similarity metric, which is able to measure both the full similarity and the partial similarity between arbitrary geometric models. The proposed metric enables us to perform partial procedural geometric model fitting (PPGMF). The task of PPGMF is to search a procedural geometric model space for the model rigidly similar to a query of non-complete point set. Models in the procedural model space are generated according to a set of parametric modeling rules. A typical query is a point cloud. PPGMF is very useful as it can be used to fit arbitrary geometric models to non-complete (incomplete, over-complete or hybrid-complete) point cloud data. For example, most laser scanning data is non-complete due to occlusion. Our PPGMF method uses Markov chain Monte Carlo technique to optimize the proposed similarity metric over the model space. To accelerate the optimization process, the method also employs a novel coarse-to-fine model dividing strategy to reject dissimilar models in advance. Our method has been demonstrated on a variety of geometric models and non-complete data. Experimental results show that the PPGMF method based on the proposed metric is able to fit non-complete data, while the method based on other metrics is unable. It is also shown that our method can be accelerated by several times via early rejection.
Establishing a consistent normal orientation for point clouds is a notoriously difficult problem in geometry processing, requiring attention to both local and global shape characteristics. The normal direction of a point is a function of the local surface neighborhood; yet, point clouds do not disclose the full underlying surface structure. Even assuming known geodesic proximity, calculating a consistent normal orientation requires the global context. In this work, we introduce a novel approach for establishing a globally consistent normal orientation for point clouds. Our solution separates the local and global components into two different sub-problems. In the local phase, we train a neural network to learn a coherent normal direction per patch (i.e., consistently oriented normals within a single patch). In the global phase, we propagate the orientation across all coherent patches using a dipole propagation. Our dipole propagation decides to orient each patch using the electric field defined by all previously orientated patches. This gives rise to a global propagation that is stable, as well as being robust to nearby surfaces, holes, sharp features and noise.
We present a technique for rendering point clouds using a neural network. Existing point rendering techniques either use splatting, or first reconstruct a surface mesh that can then be rendered. Both of these techniques require solving for global point normal orientation, which is a challenging problem on its own. Furthermore, splatting techniques result in holes and overlaps, whereas mesh reconstruction is particularly challenging, especially in the cases of thin surfaces and sheets. We cast the rendering problem as a conditional image-to-image translation problem. In our formulation, Z2P, i.e., depth-augmented point features as viewed from target camera view, are directly translated by a neural network to rendered images, conditioned on control variables (e.g., color, light). We avoid inevitable issues with splatting (i.e., holes and overlaps), and bypass solving the notoriously challenging surface reconstruction problem or estimating oriented normals. Yet, our approach results in a rendered image as if a surface mesh was reconstructed. We demonstrate that our framework produces a plausible image, and can effectively handle noise, non-uniform sampling, thin surfaces / sheets, and is fast.
We propose a method to learn object representations from 3D point clouds using bundles of geometrically interpretable hidden units, which we call geometric capsules. Each geometric capsule represents a visual entity, such as an object or a part, and consists of two components: a pose and a feature. The pose encodes where the entity is, while the feature encodes what it is. We use these capsules to construct a Geometric Capsule Autoencoder that learns to group 3D points into parts (small local surfaces), and these parts into the whole object, in an unsupervised manner. Our novel Multi-View Agreement voting mechanism is used to discover an objects canonical pose and its pose-invariant feature vector. Using the ShapeNet and ModelNet40 datasets, we analyze the properties of the learned representations and show the benefits of having multiple votes agree. We perform alignment and retrieval of arbitrarily rotated objects -- tasks that evaluate our models object identification and canonical pose recovery capabilities -- and obtained insightful results.
In this paper, we propose a stochastic geometric iterative method to approximate the high-resolution 3D models by finite Loop subdivision surfaces. Given an input mesh as the fitting target, the initial control mesh is generated using the mesh simplification algorithm. Then, our method adjusts the control mesh iteratively to make its finite Loop subdivision surface approximates the input mesh. In each geometric iteration, we randomly select part of points on the subdivision surface to calculate the difference vectors and distribute the vectors to the control points. Finally, the control points are updated by adding the weighted average of these difference vectors. We prove the convergence of our method and verify it by demonstrating error curves in the experiment. In addition, compared with an existing geometric iterative method, our method has a faster fitting speed and higher fitting precision.
Existing bidirectional reflectance distribution function (BRDF) models are capable of capturing the distinctive highlights produced by the fibrous nature of wood. However, capturing parameter textures for even a single specimen remains a laborious process requiring specialized equipment. In this paper we take a procedural approach to generating parameters for the wood BSDF. We characterize the elements of trees that are important for the appearance of wood, discuss techniques appropriate for representing those features, and present a complete procedural wood shader capable of reproducing the growth patterns responsible for the distinctive appearance of highly prized ``figured wood. Our procedural wood shader is random-access, 3D, modular, and is fast enough to generate a preview for design.