Showing papers by "Edmond Boyer published in 2020"

Articulated Shape Matching Using Laplacian Eigenfunctions and Unsupervised Point Registration

Abstract: Matching articulated shapes represented by voxel-sets reduces to maximal sub-graph isomorphism when each set is described by a weighted graph. Spectral graph theory can be used to map these graphs onto lower dimensional spaces and match shapes by aligning their embeddings in virtue of their invariance to change of pose. Classical graph isomorphism schemes relying on the ordering of the eigenvalues to align the eigenspaces fail when handling large data-sets or noisy data. We derive a new formulation that finds the best alignment between two congruent $K$-dimensional sets of points by selecting the best subset of eigenfunctions of the Laplacian matrix. The selection is done by matching eigenfunction signatures built with histograms, and the retained set provides a smart initialization for the alignment problem with a considerable impact on the overall performance. Dense shape matching casted into graph matching reduces then, to point registration of embeddings under orthogonal transformations; the registration is solved using the framework of unsupervised clustering and the EM algorithm. Maximal subset matching of non identical shapes is handled by defining an appropriate outlier class. Experimental results on challenging examples show how the algorithm naturally treats changes of topology, shape variations and different sampling densities.

Discrete Point Flow Networks for Efficient Point Cloud Generation

Abstract: Generative models have proven effective at modeling 3D shapes and their statistical variations. In this paper we investigate their application to point clouds, a 3D shape representation widely used in computer vision for which, however, only few generative models have yet been proposed. We introduce a latent variable model that builds on normalizing flows with affine coupling layers to generate 3D point clouds of an arbitrary size given a latent shape representation. To evaluate its benefits for shape modeling we apply this model for generation, autoencoding, and single-view shape reconstruction tasks. We improve over recent GAN-based models in terms of most metrics that assess generation and autoencoding. Compared to recent work based on continuous flows, our model offers a significant speedup in both training and inference times for similar or better performance. For single-view shape reconstruction we also obtain results on par with state-of-the-art voxel, point cloud, and mesh-based methods.

Discrete Point Flow Networks for Efficient Point Cloud Generation

Abstract: Generative models have proven effective at modeling 3D shapes and their statistical variations. In this paper we investigate their application to point clouds, a 3D shape representation widely used in computer vision for which, however, only few generative models have yet been proposed. We introduce a latent variable model that builds on normalizing flows with affine coupling layers to generate 3D point clouds of an arbitrary size given a latent shape representation. To evaluate its benefits for shape modeling we apply this model for generation, autoencoding, and single-view shape reconstruction tasks. We improve over recent GAN-based models in terms of most metrics that assess generation and autoencoding. Compared to recent work based on continuous flows, our model offers a significant speedup in both training and inference times for similar or better performance. For single-view shape reconstruction we also obtain results on par with state-of-the-art voxel, point cloud, and mesh-based methods.

Cross-modal Deep Face Normals with Deactivable Skip Connections

Abstract: We present an approach for estimating surface normals from in-the-wild color images of faces. While data-driven strategies have been proposed for single face images, limited available ground truth data makes this problem difficult. To alleviate this issue, we propose a method that can leverage all available image and normal data, whether paired or not, thanks to a novel cross-modal learning architecture. In particular, we enable additional training with single modality data, either color or normal, by using two encoder-decoder networks with a shared latent space. The proposed architecture also enables face details to be transferred between the image and normal domains, given paired data, through skip connections between the image encoder and normal decoder. Core to our approach is a novel module that we call deactivable skip connections, which allows integrating both the auto-encoded and image-to-normal branches within the same architecture that can be trained end-to-end. This allows learning of a rich latent space that can accurately capture the normal information. We compare against state-of-the-art methods and show that our approach can achieve significant improvements, both quantitative and qualitative, with natural face images.

Cross-Modal Deep Face Normals With Deactivable Skip Connections

Abstract: We present an approach for estimating surface normals from in-the-wild color images of faces. While data-driven strategies have been proposed for single face images, limited available ground truth data makes this problem difficult. To alleviate this issue, we propose a method that can leverage all available image and normal data, whether paired or not, thanks to a novel cross-modal learning architecture. In particular, we enable additional training with single modality data, either color or normal, by using two encoder-decoder networks with a shared latent space. The proposed architecture also enables face details to be transferred between the image and normal domains, given paired data, through skip connections between the image encoder and normal decoder. Core to our approach is a novel module that we call deactivable skip connections, which allows integrating both the auto-encoded and image-to-normal branches within the same architecture that can be trained end-to-end. This allows learning of a rich latent space that can accurately capture the normal information. We compare against state-of-the-art methods and show that our approach can achieve significant improvements, both quantitative and qualitative, with natural face images.

Mesh Denoising with Facet Graph Convolutions.

Abstract: We examine the problem of mesh denoising, which consists of removing noise from corrupted 3D meshes while preserving existing geometric features. Most mesh denoising methods require a lot of mesh-specific parameter fine-tuning, to account for specific features and noise types. In recent years, data-driven methods have demonstrated their robustness and effectiveness with respect to noise and feature properties on a wide variety of geometry and image problems. Most existing mesh denoising methods still use hand-crafted features, and locally denoise facets rather than examine the mesh globally. In this work, we propose the use of a fully end-to-end learning strategy based on graph convolutions, where meaningful features are learned directly by our network. It operates on a graph of facets, directly on the existing topology of the mesh, without resampling, and follows a multi-scale design to extract geometric features at different resolution levels. Similar to most recent pipelines, given a noisy mesh, we first denoise face normals with our novel approach, then update vertex positions accordingly. Our method performs significantly better than the current state-of-the-art learning-based methods. Additionally, we show that it can be trained on noisy data, without explicit correspondence between noisy and ground-truth facets. We also propose a multi-scale denoising strategy, better suited to correct noise with a low spatial frequency.

Learning a Statistical Full Spine Model from Partial Observations

Abstract: The study of the morphology of the human spine has attracted research attention for its many potential applications, such as image segmentation, bio-mechanics or pathology detection. However, as of today there is no publicly available statistical model of the 3D surface of the full spine. This is mainly due to the lack of openly available 3D data where the full spine is imaged and segmented. In this paper we propose to learn a statistical surface model of the full-spine (7 cervical, 12 thoracic and 5 lumbar vertebrae) from partial and incomplete views of the spine. In order to deal with the partial observations we use probabilistic principal component analysis (PPCA) to learn a surface shape model of the full spine. Quantitative evaluation demonstrates that the obtained model faithfully captures the shape of the population in a low dimensional space and generalizes to left out data. Furthermore, we show that the model faithfully captures the global correlations among the vertebrae shape. Given a partial observation of the spine, i.e. a few vertebrae, the model can predict the shape of unseen vertebrae with a mean error under 3 mm. The full-spine statistical model is trained on the VerSe 2019 public dataset and is publicly made available to the community for non-commercial purposes. (https://gitlab.inria.fr/spine/spine_model)

Reconstructing Human Body Mesh from Point Clouds by Adversarial GP Network

Abstract: We study the problem of reconstructing the template-aligned mesh for human body estimation from unstructured point cloud data. Recently proposed approaches for shape matching that rely on Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) achieve state-of-the-art results with generic point-wise architectures; but in doing so, they exploit much weaker human body shape and surface priors with respect to methods that explicitly model the body surface with 3D templates. We investigate the impact of adding back such stronger shape priors by proposing a novel dedicated human template matching process, which relies on a point-based, deep autoencoder architecture. We encode surface smoothness and shape coherence with a specialized Gaussian Process layer. Furthermore, we enforce global consistency and improve the generalization capabilities of the model by introducing an adversarial training phase. The choice of these elements is grounded on an extensive analysis of DNNs failure modes in widely used datasets like SURREAL and FAUST. We validate and evaluate the impact of our novel components on these datasets, showing a quantitative improvement over state-of-the-art DNN-based methods, and qualitatively better results.