No Arabic abstract
Sketches are the most abstract 2D representations of real-world objects. Although a sketch usually has geometrical distortion and lacks visual cues, humans can effortlessly envision a 3D object from it. This indicates that sketches encode the appropriate information to recover 3D shapes. Although great progress has been achieved in 3D reconstruction from distortion-free line drawings, such as CAD and edge maps, little effort has been made to reconstruct 3D shapes from free-hand sketches. We pioneer to study this task and aim to enhance the power of sketches in 3D-related applications such as interactive design and VR/AR games. Further, we propose an end-to-end sketch-based 3D reconstruction framework. Instead of well-used edge maps, synthesized sketches are adopted as training data. Additionally, we propose a sketch standardization module to handle different sketch styles and distortions. With extensive experiments, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our model and its strong generalizability to various free-hand sketches.
When a toddler is presented a new toy, their instinctual behaviour is to pick it upand inspect it with their hand and eyes in tandem, clearly searching over its surface to properly understand what they are playing with. At any instance here, touch provides high fidelity localized information while vision provides complementary global context. However, in 3D shape reconstruction, the complementary fusion of visual and haptic modalities remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we study this problem and present an effective chart-based approach to multi-modal shape understanding which encourages a similar fusion vision and touch information.To do so, we introduce a dataset of simulated touch and vision signals from the interaction between a robotic hand and a large array of 3D objects. Our results show that (1) leveraging both vision and touch signals consistently improves single-modality baselines; (2) our approach outperforms alternative modality fusion methods and strongly benefits from the proposed chart-based structure; (3) there construction quality increases with the number of grasps provided; and (4) the touch information not only enhances the reconstruction at the touch site but also extrapolates to its local neighborhood.
Humans build 3D understandings of the world through active object exploration, using jointly their senses of vision and touch. However, in 3D shape reconstruction, most recent progress has relied on static datasets of limited sensory data such as RGB images, depth maps or haptic readings, leaving the active exploration of the shape largely unexplored. In active touch sensing for 3D reconstruction, the goal is to actively select the tactile readings that maximize the improvement in shape reconstruction accuracy. However, the development of deep learning-based active touch models is largely limited by the lack of frameworks for shape exploration. In this paper, we focus on this problem and introduce a system composed of: 1) a haptic simulator leveraging high spatial resolution vision-based tactile sensors for active touching of 3D objects; 2) a mesh-based 3D shape reconstruction model that relies on tactile or visuotactile signals; and 3) a set of data-driven solutions with either tactile or visuotactile priors to guide the shape exploration. Our framework enables the development of the first fully data-driven solutions to active touch on top of learned models for object understanding. Our experiments show the benefits of such solutions in the task of 3D shape understanding where our models consistently outperform natural baselines. We provide our framework as a tool to foster future research in this direction.
This paper tackles the problem of estimating 3D body shape of clothed humans from single polarized 2D images, i.e. polarization images. Polarization images are known to be able to capture polarized reflected lights that preserve rich geometric cues of an object, which has motivated its recent applications in reconstructing surface normal of the objects of interest. Inspired by the recent advances in human shape estimation from single color images, in this paper, we attempt at estimating human body shapes by leveraging the geometric cues from single polarization images. A dedicated two-stage deep learning approach, SfP, is proposed: given a polarization image, stage one aims at inferring the fined-detailed body surface normal; stage two gears to reconstruct the 3D body shape of clothing details. Empirical evaluations on a synthetic dataset (SURREAL) as well as a real-world dataset (PHSPD) demonstrate the qualitative and quantitative performance of our approach in estimating human poses and shapes. This indicates polarization camera is a promising alternative to the more conventional color or depth imaging for human shape estimation. Further, normal maps inferred from polarization imaging play a significant role in accurately recovering the body shapes of clothed people.
3D hand pose estimation from monocular videos is a long-standing and challenging problem, which is now seeing a strong upturn. In this work, we address it for the first time using a single event camera, i.e., an asynchronous vision sensor reacting on brightness changes. Our EventHands approach has characteristics previously not demonstrated with a single RGB or depth camera such as high temporal resolution at low data throughputs and real-time performance at 1000 Hz. Due to the different data modality of event cameras compared to classical cameras, existing methods cannot be directly applied to and re-trained for event streams. We thus design a new neural approach which accepts a new event stream representation suitable for learning, which is trained on newly-generated synthetic event streams and can generalise to real data. Experiments show that EventHands outperforms recent monocular methods using a colour (or depth) camera in terms of accuracy and its ability to capture hand motions of unprecedented speed. Our method, the event stream simulator and the dataset will be made publicly available.
The reconstruction of an objects shape or surface from a set of 3D points plays an important role in medical image analysis, e.g. in anatomy reconstruction from tomographic measurements or in the process of aligning intra-operative navigation and preoperative planning data. In such scenarios, one usually has to deal with sparse data, which significantly aggravates the problem of reconstruction. However, medical applications often provide contextual information about the 3D point data that allow to incorporate prior knowledge about the shape that is to be reconstructed. To this end, we propose the use of a statistical shape model (SSM) as a prior for surface reconstruction. The SSM is represented by a point distribution model (PDM), which is associated with a surface mesh. Using the shape distribution that is modelled by the PDM, we formulate the problem of surface reconstruction from a probabilistic perspective based on a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM). In order to do so, the given points are interpreted as samples of the GMM. By using mixture components with anisotropic covariances that are oriented according to the surface normals at the PDM points, a surface-based fitting is accomplished. Estimating the parameters of the GMM in a maximum a posteriori manner yields the reconstruction of the surface from the given data points. We compare our method to the extensively used Iterative Closest Points method on several different anatomical datasets/SSMs (brain, femur, tibia, hip, liver) and demonstrate superior accuracy and robustness on sparse data.