Group-Free 3D Object Detection via Transformers

Recently, directly detecting 3D objects from 3D point clouds has received increasing attention. To extract object representation from an irregular point cloud, existing methods usually take a point grouping step to assign the points to an object candidate so that a PointNet-like network could be used to derive object features from the grouped points. However, the inaccurate point assignments caused by the hand-crafted grouping scheme decrease the performance of 3D object detection. In this paper, we present a simple yet effective method for directly detecting 3D objects from the 3D point cloud. Instead of grouping local points to each object candidate, our method computes the feature of an object from all the points in the point cloud with the help of an attention mechanism in the Transformers \cite{vaswani2017attention}, where the contribution of each point is automatically learned in the network training. With an improved attention stacking scheme, our method fuses object features in different stages and generates more accurate object detection results. With few bells and whistles, the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art 3D object detection performance on two widely used benchmarks, ScanNet V2 and SUN RGB-D. The code and models are publicly available at \url{https://github.com/zeliu98/Group-Free-3D}

Deep Implicit Moving Least-Squares Functions for 3D Reconstruction

Point set is a flexible and lightweight representation widely used for 3D deep learning. However, their discrete nature prevents them from representing continuous and fine geometry, posing a major issue for learning-based shape generation. In this work, we turn the discrete point sets into smooth surfaces by introducing the well-known implicit moving least-squares (IMLS) surface formulation, which naturally defines locally implicit functions on point sets. We incorporate IMLS surface generation into deep neural networks for inheriting both the flexibility of point sets and the high quality of implicit surfaces. Our IMLSNet predicts an octree structure as a scaffold for generating MLS points where needed and characterizes shape geometry with learned local priors. Furthermore, our implicit function evaluation is independent of the neural network once the MLS points are predicted, thus enabling fast runtime evaluation. Our experiments on 3D object reconstruction demonstrate that IMLSNets outperform state-of-the-art learning-based methods in terms of reconstruction quality and computational efficiency. Extensive ablation tests also validate our network design and loss functions.

Bridging Cost-sensitive and Neyman-Pearson Paradigms for Asymmetric Binary Classification

Asymmetric binary classification problems, in which the type I and II errors have unequal severity, are ubiquitous in real-world applications. To handle such asymmetry, researchers have developed the cost-sensitive and Neyman-Pearson paradigms for training classifiers to control the more severe type of classification error, say the type I error. The cost-sensitive paradigm is widely used and has straightforward implementations that do not require sample splitting; however, it demands an explicit specification of the costs of the type I and II errors, and an open question is what specification can guarantee a high-probability control on the population type I error. In contrast, the Neyman-Pearson paradigm can train classifiers to achieve a high-probability control of the population type I error, but it relies on sample splitting that reduces the effective training sample size. Since the two paradigms have complementary strengths, it is reasonable to combine their strengths for classifier construction. In this work, we for the first time study the methodological connections between the two paradigms, and we develop the TUBE-CS algorithm to bridge the two paradigms from the perspective of controlling the population type I error.

Deformed Implicit Field: Modeling 3D Shapes with Learned Dense Correspondence

We propose a novel Deformed Implicit Field (DIF) representation for modeling 3D shapes of a category and generating dense correspondences among shapes. With DIF, a 3D shape is represented by a template implicit field shared across the category, together with a 3D deformation field and a correction field dedicated for each shape instance. Shape correspondences can be easily established using their deformation fields. Our neural network, dubbed DIF-Net, jointly learns a shape latent space and these fields for 3D objects belonging to a category without using any correspondence or part label. The learned DIF-Net can also provides reliable correspondence uncertainty measurement reflecting shape structure discrepancy. Experiments show that DIF-Net not only produces high-fidelity 3D shapes but also builds high-quality dense correspondences across different shapes. We also demonstrate several applications such as texture transfer and shape editing, where our method achieves compelling results that cannot be achieved by previous methods.

SkeletonNet: A Topology-Preserving Solution for Learning Mesh Reconstruction of Object Surfaces from RGB Images

This paper focuses on the challenging task of learning 3D object surface reconstructions from RGB images. Existingmethods achieve varying degrees of success by using different surface representations. However, they all have their own drawbacks,and cannot properly reconstruct the surface shapes of complex topologies, arguably due to a lack of constraints on the topologicalstructures in their learning frameworks. To this end, we propose to learn and use the topology-preserved, skeletal shape representationto assist the downstream task of object surface reconstruction from RGB images. Technically, we propose the novelSkeletonNetdesign that learns a volumetric representation of a skeleton via a bridged learning of a skeletal point set, where we use paralleldecoders each responsible for the learning of points on 1D skeletal curves and 2D skeletal sheets, as well as an efficient module ofglobally guided subvolume synthesis for a refined, high-resolution skeletal volume; we present a differentiablePoint2Voxellayer tomake SkeletonNet end-to-end and trainable. With the learned skeletal volumes, we propose two models, the Skeleton-Based GraphConvolutional Neural Network (SkeGCNN) and the Skeleton-Regularized Deep Implicit Surface Network (SkeDISN), which respectivelybuild upon and improve over the existing frameworks of explicit mesh deformation and implicit field learning for the downstream surfacereconstruction task. We conduct thorough experiments that verify the efficacy of our proposed SkeletonNet. SkeGCNN and SkeDISNoutperform existing methods as well, and they have their own merits when measured by different metrics. Additional results ingeneralized task settings further demonstrate the usefulness of our proposed methods. We have made both our implementation codeand the ShapeNet-Skeleton dataset publicly available at ble at https://github.com/tangjiapeng/SkeletonNet.

Object-based Illumination Estimation with Rendering-aware Neural Networks

We present a scheme for fast environment light estimation from the RGBD appearance of individual objects and their local image areas. Conventional inverse rendering is too computationally demanding for real-time applications, and the performance of purely learning-based techniques may be limited by the meager input data available from individual objects. To address these issues, we propose an approach that takes advantage of physical principles from inverse rendering to constrain the solution, while also utilizing neural networks to expedite the more computationally expensive portions of its processing, to increase robustness to noisy input data as well as to improve temporal and spatial stability. This results in a rendering-aware system that estimates the local illumination distribution at an object with high accuracy and in real time. With the estimated lighting, virtual objects can be rendered in AR scenarios with shading that is consistent to the real scene, leading to improved realism.

Unsupervised 3D Learning for Shape Analysis via Multiresolution Instance Discrimination

Although unsupervised feature learning has demonstrated its advantages to reducing the workload of data labeling and network design in many fields, existing unsupervised 3D learning methods still cannot offer a generic network for various shape analysis tasks with competitive performance to supervised methods. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised method for learning a generic and efficient shape encoding network for different shape analysis tasks. The key idea of our method is to jointly encode and learn shape and point features from unlabeled 3D point clouds. For this purpose, we adapt HR-Net to octree-based convolutional neural networks for jointly encoding shape and point features with fused multiresolution subnetworks and design a simple-yet-efficient \emph{Multiresolution Instance Discrimination} (MID) loss for jointly learning the shape and point features. Our network takes a 3D point cloud as input and output both shape and point features. After training, the network is concatenated with simple task-specific back-end layers and fine-tuned for different shape analysis tasks. We evaluate the efficacy and generality of our method and validate our network and loss design with a set of shape analysis tasks, including shape classification, semantic shape segmentation, as well as shape registration tasks. With simple back-ends, our network demonstrates the best performance among all unsupervised methods and achieves competitive performance to supervised methods, especially in tasks with a small labeled dataset. For fine-grained shape segmentation, our method even surpasses existing supervised methods by a large margin.

A Closer Look at Local Aggregation Operators in Point Cloud Analysis

Recent advances of network architecture for point cloud processing are mainly driven by new designs of local aggregation operators. However, the impact of these operators to network performance is not carefully investigated due to different overall network architecture and implementation details in each solution. Meanwhile, most of operators are only applied in shallow architectures. In this paper, we revisit the representative local aggregation operators and study their performance using the same deep residual architecture. Our investigation reveals that despite the different designs of these operators, all of these operators make surprisingly similar contributions to the network performance under the same network input and feature numbers and result in the state-of-the-art accuracy on standard benchmarks. This finding stimulate us to rethink the necessity of sophisticated design of local aggregation operator for point cloud processing. To this end, we propose a simple local aggregation operator without learnable weights, named Position Pooling (PosPool), which performs similarly or slightly better than existing sophisticated operators. In particular, a simple deep residual network with PosPool layers achieves outstanding performance on all benchmarks, which outperforms the previous state-of-the methods on the challenging PartNet datasets by a large margin (7.4 mIoU). The code is publicly available at https://github.com/zeliu98/CloserLook3D

Deep Octree-based CNNs with Output-Guided Skip Connections for 3D Shape and Scene Completion

Acquiring complete and clean 3D shape and scene data is challenging due to geometric occlusion and insufficient views during 3D capturing. We present a simple yet effective deep learning approach for completing the input noisy and incomplete shapes or scenes. Our network is built upon the octree-based CNNs (O-CNN) with U-Net like structures, which enjoys high computational and memory efficiency and supports to construct a very deep network structure for 3D CNNs. A novel output-guided skip-connection is introduced to the network structure for better preserving the input geometry and learning geometry prior from data effectively. We show that with these simple adaptions -- output-guided skip-connection and deeper O-CNN (up to 70 layers), our network achieves state-of-the-art results in 3D shape completion and semantic scene computation.

Disentangled and Controllable Face Image Generation via 3D Imitative-Contrastive Learning

We propose an approach for face image generation of virtual people with disentangled, precisely-controllable latent representations for identity of non-existing people, expression, pose, and illumination. We embed 3D priors into adversarial learning and train the network to imitate the image formation of an analytic 3D face deformation and rendering process. To deal with the generation freedom induced by the domain gap between real and rendered faces, we further introduce contrastive learning to promote disentanglement by comparing pairs of generated images. Experiments show that through our imitative-contrastive learning, the factor variations are very well disentangled and the properties of a generated face can be precisely controlled. We also analyze the learned latent space and present several meaningful properties supporting factor disentanglement. Our method can also be used to embed real images into the disentangled latent space. We hope our method could provide new understandings of the relationship between physical properties and deep image synthesis.