Rotation estimation of known rigid objects is important for robotic applications such as dexterous manipulation. Most existing methods for rotation estimation use intermediate representations such as templates, global or local feature descriptors, or object coordinates, which require multiple steps in order to infer the object pose. We propose to directly regress a pose vector from raw point cloud segments using a convolutional neural network. Experimental results show that our method can potentially achieve competitive performance compared to a state-of-the-art method, while also showing more robustness against occlusion. Our method does not require any post processing such as refinement with the iterative closest point algorithm.
Depth information in deep learning systems can be represented with, e.g., voxel grids @cite_30 @cite_18 , truncated signed distance functions (TSDF) @cite_9 , or point clouds @cite_5 . Voxel grids are simple to generate and use. Because of their regular grid structure, voxel grids can be directly used as inputs to 3D CNNs. However, voxel grids are inefficient since they also have to explicitly represent empty space. They also suffer from discretization artifacts. TSDF tries to alleviate these problems by storing the shortest distance to the surface represented in each voxel. This allows a more faithful representation of the 3D information. In comparison to other depth data representations, a point cloud has a simple representation without redundancy, yet contains rich geometric information. Recently, PointNet @cite_5 has allowed to use raw point clouds directly as an input of a CNN.
@cite_30 @cite_9 @cite_18 @cite_5
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Point cloud is an important type of geometric data structure. Due to its irregular format, most researchers transform such data to regular 3D voxel grids or collections of images. This, however, renders data unnecessarily voluminous and causes issues. In this paper, we design a novel type of neural network that directly consumes point clouds, which well respects the permutation invariance of points in the input. Our network, named PointNet, provides a unified architecture for applications ranging from object classification, part segmentation, to scene semantic parsing. Though simple, PointNet is highly efficient and effective. Empirically, it shows strong performance on par or even better than state of the art. Theoretically, we provide analysis towards understanding of what the network has learnt and why the network is robust with respect to input perturbation and corruption. Point cloud is an important type of geometric data structure. Due to its irregular format, most researchers transform such data to regular 3D voxel grids or collections of images. This, however, renders data unnecessarily voluminous and causes issues. In this paper, we design a novel type of neural network that directly consumes point clouds and well respects the permutation invariance of points in the input. Our network, named PointNet, provides a unified architecture for applications ranging from object classification, part segmentation, to scene semantic parsing. Though simple, PointNet is highly efficient and effective. Empirically, it shows strong performance on par or even better than state of the art. Theoretically, we provide analysis towards understanding of what the network has learnt and why the network is robust with respect to input perturbation and corruption. Some existing CNN-based methods for single-view 3D object reconstruction represent a 3D object as either a 3D voxel occupancy grid or multiple depth-mask image pairs. However, these representations are inefficient since empty voxels or background pixels are wasteful. We propose a novel approach that addresses this limitation by replacing masks with “deformation-fields”. Given a single image at an arbitrary viewpoint, a CNN predicts multiple surfaces, each in a canonical location relative to the object. Each surface comprises a depth-map and corresponding deformation-field that ensures every pixel-depth pair in the depth-map lies on the object surface. These surfaces are then fused to form the full 3D shape. During training we use a combination of per-view loss and multi-view losses. The novel multi-view loss encourages the 3D points back-projected from a particular view to be consistent across views. Extensive experiments demonstrate the efficiency and efficacy of our method on single-view 3D object reconstruction. 3D data such as point clouds and meshes are becoming more and more available. The goal of this paper is to obtain 3D object and scene classification and semantic segmentation. Because point clouds have irregular formats, most of the existing methods convert the 3D data into multiple 2D projection images or 3D voxel grids. These representations are suited as input of conventional CNNs but they either ignore the underlying 3D geometrical structure or are constrained by data sparsity and computational complexity. Therefore, recent methods encode the coordinates of each point cloud to certain high dimensional features to cover the 3D space. However, by their design, these models are not able to sufficiently capture the local patterns. In this paper, we propose a method that directly uses point clouds as input and exploits the implicit space partition of k-d tree structure to learn the local contextual information and aggregate features at different scales hierarchically. Extensive experiments on challenging benchmarks show that our proposed model properly captures the local patterns to provide discriminative point set features. For the task of 3D scene semantic segmentation, our method outperforms the state-of-the-art on the challenging Stanford Large-Scale 3D Indoor Spaces Dataset(S3DIS) by a large margin. Recently, Convolutional Neural Networks have shown promising results for 3D geometry prediction. They can make predictions from very little input data such as a single color image. A major limitation of such approaches is that they only predict a coarse resolution voxel grid, which does not capture the surface of the objects well. We propose a general framework, called hierarchical surface prediction (HSP), which facilitates prediction of high resolution voxel grids. The main insight is that it is sufficient to predict high resolution voxels around the predicted surfaces. The exterior and interior of the objects can be represented with coarse resolution voxels. Our approach is not dependent on a specific input type. We show results for geometry prediction from color images, depth images and shape completion from partial voxel grids. Our analysis shows that our high resolution predictions are more accurate than low resolution predictions. We present a novel method to obtain fine-scale detail in 3D reconstructions generated with low-budget RGB-D cameras or other commodity scanning devices. As the depth data of these sensors is noisy, truncated signed distance fields are typically used to regularize out the noise, which unfortunately leads to over-smoothed results. In our approach, we leverage RGB data to refine these reconstructions through shading cues, as color input is typically of much higher resolution than the depth data. As a result, we obtain reconstructions with high geometric detail, far beyond the depth resolution of the camera itself. Our core contribution is shading-based refinement directly on the implicit surface representation, which is generated from globally-aligned RGB-D images. We formulate the inverse shading problem on the volumetric distance field, and present a novel objective function which jointly optimizes for fine-scale surface geometry and spatially-varying surface reflectance. In order to enable the efficient reconstruction of sub-millimeter detail, we store and process our surface using a sparse voxel hashing scheme which we augment by introducing a grid hierarchy. A tailored GPU-based Gauss-Newton solver enables us to refine large shape models to previously unseen resolution within only a few seconds. Many modern 3D reconstruction methods accumulate information volumetrically using truncated signed distance functions. While this usually imposes a regular grid with fixed voxel size, not all parts of a scene necessarily need to be represented at the same level of detail. For example, a flat table needs less detail than a highly structured keyboard on it. We introduce a novel representation for the volumetric 3D data that uses hash functions rather than trees for accessing individual blocks of the scene, but which still provides different resolution levels. We show that our data structure provides efficient access and manipulation functions that can be very well parallelised, and also describe an automatic way of choosing appropriate resolutions for different parts of the scene. We embed the novel representation in a system for simultaneous localization and mapping from RGB-D imagery and also investigate the implications of the irregular grid on interpolation routines. Finally, we evaluate our system in experiments, demonstrating state-of-the-art representation accuracy at typical frame-rates around 100 Hz, along with 40 memory savings. Truncated Signed Distance Fields (TSDFs) have become a popular tool in 3D reconstruction, as they allow building very high-resolution models of the environment in real-time on GPU. However, they have rarely been used for planning on robotic platforms, mostly due to high computational and memory requirements. We propose to reduce these requirements by using large voxel sizes, and extend the standard TSDF representation to be faster and better model the environment at these scales. We also propose a method to build Euclidean Signed Distance Fields (ESDFs), which are a common representation for planning, incrementally out of our TSDF representation. ESDFs provide Euclidean distance to the nearest obstacle at any point in the map, and also provide collision gradient information for use with optimization-based planners. We validate the reconstruction accuracy and real-time performance of our combined system on both new and standard datasets from stereo and RGB-D imagery. The complete system will be made available as an open-source library called voxblox. The ability to quickly acquire 3D models is an essential capability needed in many disciplines including robotics, computer vision, geodesy, and architecture. In this paper we present a novel method for real-time camera tracking and 3D reconstruction of static indoor environments using an RGB-D sensor. We show that by representing the geometry with a signed distance function (SDF), the camera pose can be efficiently estimated by directly minimizing the error of the depth images on the SDF. As the SDF contains the distances to the surface for each voxel, the pose optimization can be carried out extremely fast. By iteratively estimating the camera poses and integrating the RGB-D data in the voxel grid, a detailed reconstruction of an indoor environment can be achieved. We present reconstructions of several rooms using a hand-held sensor and from onboard an autonomous quadrocopter. Our extensive evaluation on publicly available benchmark data shows that our approach is more accurate and robust than the iterated closest point algorithm (ICP) used by KinectFusion, and yields often a comparable accuracy at much higher speed to feature-based bundle adjustment methods such as RGB-D SLAM for up to medium-sized scenes. Dense semantic 3D reconstruction is typically formulated as a discrete or continuous problem over label assignments in a voxel grid, combining semantic and depth likelihoods in a Markov Random Field framework. The depth and semantic information is incorporated as a unary potential, smoothed by a pairwise regularizer. However, modelling likelihoods as a unary potential does not model the problem correctly leading to various undesirable visibility artifacts. We propose to formulate an optimization problem that directly optimizes the reprojection error of the 3D model with respect to the image estimates, which corresponds to the optimization over rays, where the cost function depends on the semantic class and depth of the first occupied voxel along the ray. The 2-label formulation is made feasible by transforming it into a graph-representable form under QPBO relaxation, solvable using graph cut. The multi-label problem is solved by applying α-expansion using the same relaxation in each expansion move. Our method was indeed shown to be feasible in practice, running comparably fast to the competing methods, while not suffering from ray potential approximation artifacts. Recent deep networks that directly handle points in a point set, e.g., PointNet, have been state-of-the-art for supervised semantic learning tasks on point clouds such as classification and segmentation. In this work, a novel end-to-end deep auto-encoder is proposed to address unsupervised learning challenges on point clouds. On the encoder side, a graph-based enhancement is enforced to promote local structures on top of PointNet. Then, a novel folding-based approach is proposed in the decoder, which folds a 2D grid onto the underlying 3D object surface of a point cloud. The proposed decoder only uses about 7 parameters of a decoder with fully-connected neural networks, yet leads to a more discriminative representation that achieves higher linear SVM classification accuracy than the benchmark. In addition, the proposed decoder structure is shown, in theory, to be a generic architecture that is able to reconstruct an arbitrary point cloud from a 2D grid. Finally, this folding-based decoder is interpretable since the reconstruction could be viewed as a fine granular warping from the 2D grid to the point cloud surface. Most of the existing deep learning-based methods for 3D hand and human pose estimation from a single depth map are based on a common framework that takes a 2D depth map and directly regresses the 3D coordinates of keypoints, such as hand or human body joints, via 2D convolutional neural networks (CNNs). The first weakness of this approach is the presence of perspective distortion in the 2D depth map. While the depth map is intrinsically 3D data, many previous methods treat depth maps as 2D images that can distort the shape of the actual object through projection from 3D to 2D space. This compels the network to perform perspective distortion-invariant estimation. The second weakness of the conventional approach is that directly regressing 3D coordinates from a 2D image is a highly nonlinear mapping, which causes difficulty in the learning procedure. To overcome these weaknesses, we firstly cast the 3D hand and human pose estimation problem from a single depth map into a voxel-to-voxel prediction that uses a 3D voxelized grid and estimates the per-voxel likelihood for each keypoint. We design our model as a 3D CNN that provides accurate estimates while running in real-time. Our system outperforms previous methods in almost all publicly available 3D hand and human pose estimation datasets and placed first in the HANDS 2017 frame-based 3D hand pose estimation challenge. The code is available in1. We introduce a method for learning to generate the surface of 3D shapes. Our approach represents a 3D shape as a collection of parametric surface elements and, in contrast to methods generating voxel grids or point clouds, naturally infers a surface representation of the shape. Beyond its novelty, our new shape generation framework, AtlasNet, comes with significant advantages, such as improved precision and generalization capabilities, and the possibility to generate a shape of arbitrary resolution without memory issues. We demonstrate these benefits and compare to strong baselines on the ShapeNet benchmark for two applications: (i) auto-encoding shapes, and (ii) single-view reconstruction from a still image. We also provide results showing its potential for other applications, such as morphing, parametrization, super-resolution, matching, and co-segmentation. We present a novel global representation of 3D shapes, suitable for the application of 2D CNNs. We represent 3D shapes as multi-layered height-maps (MLH) where at each grid location, we store multiple instances of height maps, thereby representing 3D shape detail that is hidden behind several layers of occlusion. We provide a novel view merging method for combining view dependent information (Eg. MLH descriptors) from multiple views. Because of the ability of using 2D CNNs, our method is highly memory efficient in terms of input resolution compared to the voxel based input. Together with MLH descriptors and our multi view merging, we achieve the state-of-the-art result in classification on ModelNet dataset. Computer graphics, 3D computer vision and robotics communities have produced multiple approaches to representing 3D geometry for rendering and reconstruction. These provide trade-offs across fidelity, efficiency and compression capabilities. In this work, we introduce DeepSDF, a learned continuous Signed Distance Function (SDF) representation of a class of shapes that enables high quality shape representation, interpolation and completion from partial and noisy 3D input data. DeepSDF, like its classical counterpart, represents a shape's surface by a continuous volumetric field: the magnitude of a point in the field represents the distance to the surface boundary and the sign indicates whether the region is inside (-) or outside (+) of the shape, hence our representation implicitly encodes a shape's boundary as the zero-level-set of the learned function while explicitly representing the classification of space as being part of the shapes interior or not. While classical SDF's both in analytical or discretized voxel form typically represent the surface of a single shape, DeepSDF can represent an entire class of shapes. Furthermore, we show state-of-the-art performance for learned 3D shape representation and completion while reducing the model size by an order of magnitude compared with previous work. We propose a novel approach to 3D human pose estimation from a single depth map. Recently, convolutional neural network (CNN) has become a powerful paradigm in computer vision. Many of computer vision tasks have benefited from CNNs, however, the conventional approach to directly regress 3D body joint locations from an image does not yield a noticeably improved performance. In contrast, we formulate the problem as estimating per-voxel likelihood of key body joints from a 3D occupancy grid. We argue that learning a mapping from volumetric input to volumetric output with 3D convolution consistently improves the accuracy when compared to learning a regression from depth map to 3D joint coordinates. We propose a two-stage approach to reduce the computational overhead caused by volumetric representation and 3D convolution: Holistic 2D prediction and Local 3D prediction. In the first stage, Planimetric Network (P-Net) estimates per-pixel likelihood for each body joint in the holistic 2D space. In the second stage, Volumetric Network (V-Net) estimates the per-voxel likelihood of each body joints in the local 3D space around the 2D estimations of the first stage, effectively reducing the computational cost. Our model outperforms existing methods by a large margin in publicly available datasets. In this paper, we propose a novel 3D-RecGAN approach, which reconstructs the complete 3D structure of a given object from a single arbitrary depth view using generative adversarial networks. Unlike the existing work which typically requires multiple views of the same object or class labels to recover the full 3D geometry, the proposed 3D-RecGAN only takes the voxel grid representation of a depth view of the object as input, and is able to generate the complete 3D occupancy grid by filling in the occluded missing regions. The key idea is to combine the generative capabilities of autoencoders and the conditional Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) framework, to infer accurate and fine-grained 3D structures of objects in high-dimensional voxel space. Extensive experiments on large synthetic datasets show that the proposed 3D-RecGAN significantly outperforms the state of the art in single view 3D object reconstruction, and is able to reconstruct unseen types of objects. Our code and data are available at: this https URL Robots that are operating for extended periods of time need to be able to deal with changes in their environment and represent them adequately in their maps. In this paper, we present a novel 3D reconstruction algorithm based on an extended Truncated Signed Distance Function (TSDF) that enables to continuously refine the static map while simultaneously obtaining 3D reconstructions of dynamic objects in the scene. This is a challenging problem because map updates happen incrementally and are often incomplete. Previous work typically performs change detection on point clouds, surfels or maps, which are not able to distinguish between unexplored and empty space. In contrast, our TSDF-based representation naturally contains this information and thus allows us to more robustly solve the scene differencing problem. We demonstrate the algorithms performance as part of a system for unsupervised object discovery and class recognition. We evaluated our algorithm on challenging datasets that we recorded over several days with RGB-D enabled tablets. To stimulate further research in this area, all of our datasets are publicly available3. In this paper, we propose a novel 3D-RecGAN approach, which reconstructs the complete 3D structure of a given object from a single arbitrary depth view using generative adversarial networks. Unlike the existing work which typically requires multiple views of the same object or class labels to recover the full 3D geometry, the proposed 3D-RecGAN only takes the voxel grid representation of a depth view of the object as input, and is able to generate the complete 3D occupancy grid by filling in the occluded missing regions. The key idea is to combine the generative capabilities of autoencoders and the conditional Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) framework, to infer accurate and fine-grained 3D structures of objects in high-dimensional voxel space. Extensive experiments on large synthetic datasets show that the proposed 3D-RecGAN significantly outperforms the state of the art in single view 3D object reconstruction, and is able to reconstruct unseen types of objects. Our code and data are available at: https: github.com Yang7879 3D-RecGAN. Recent deep networks that directly handle points in a point set, e.g., PointNet, have been state-of-the-art for supervised learning tasks on point clouds such as classification and segmentation. In this work, a novel end-to-end deep auto-encoder is proposed to address unsupervised learning challenges on point clouds. On the encoder side, a graph-based enhancement is enforced to promote local structures on top of PointNet. Then, a novel folding-based decoder deforms a canonical 2D grid onto the underlying 3D object surface of a point cloud, achieving low reconstruction errors even for objects with delicate structures. The proposed decoder only uses about 7 parameters of a decoder with fully-connected neural networks, yet leads to a more discriminative representation that achieves higher linear SVM classification accuracy than the benchmark. In addition, the proposed decoder structure is shown, in theory, to be a generic architecture that is able to reconstruct an arbitrary point cloud from a 2D grid. Our code is available at http: www.merl.com research license#FoldingNet