It has been a longstanding goal in computer vision to describe the 3D physical space in terms of parameterized volumetric models that would allow autonomous machines to understand and interact with their surroundings. Such models are typically motivated by human visual perception and aim to represents all elements of the physical word ranging from individual objects to complex scenes using a small set of parameters. One of the de facto stadards to approach this problem are superquadrics - volumetric models that define various 3D shape primitives and can be fitted to actual 3D data (either in the form of point clouds or range images). However, existing solutions to superquadric recovery involve costly iterative fitting procedures, which limit the applicability of such techniques in practice. To alleviate this problem, we explore in this paper the possibility to recover superquadrics from range images without time consuming iterative parameter estimation techniques by using contemporary deep-learning models, more specifically, convolutional neural networks (CNNs). We pose the superquadric recovery problem as a regression task and develop a CNN regressor that is able to estimate the parameters of a superquadric model from a given range image. We train the regressor on a large set of synthetic range images, each containing a single (unrotated) superquadric shape and evaluate the learned model in comparaitve experiments with the current state-of-the-art. Additionally, we also present a qualitative analysis involving a dataset of real-world objects. The results of our experiments show that the proposed regressor not only outperforms the existing state-of-the-art, but also ensures a 270x faster execution time.
We introduce a convolutional neural network for inferring a compact disentangled graphical description of objects from 2D images that can be used for volumetric reconstruction. The network comprises an encoder and a twin-tailed decoder. The encoder generates a disentangled graphics code. The first decoder generates a volume, and the second decoder reconstructs the input image using a novel training regime that allows the graphics code to learn a separate representation of the 3D object and a description of its lighting and pose conditions. We demonstrate this method by generating volumes and disentangled graphical descriptions from images and videos of faces and chairs. With the advent of affordable depth sensors, 3D capture becomes more and more ubiquitous and already has made its way into commercial products. Yet, capturing the geometry or complete shapes of everyday objects using scanning devices (e.g. Kinect) still comes with several challenges that result in noise or even incomplete shapes. The need to model visual information with compact representations has existed since the early days of computer vision. We implemented in the past a segmentation and model recovery method for range images which is unfortunately too slow for current size of 3D point clouds and type of applications. Recently, neural networks have become the popular choice for quick and effective processing of visual data. In this article we demonstrate that with a convolutional neural network we could achieve comparable results, that is to determine and model all objects in a given 3D point cloud scene. We started off with a simple architecture that could predict the parameters of a single object in a scene. Then we expanded it with an architecture similar to Faster R-CNN, that could predict the parameters for any number of objects in a scene. The results of the initial neural network were satisfactory. The second network, that performed also segmentation, still gave decent results comparable to the original method, but compared to the initial one, performed somewhat worse. Results, however, are encouraging but further experiments are needed to build CNNs that will be able to replace the state-of-the-art method. 3D shape is a crucial but heavily underutilized cue in today's computer vision systems, mostly due to the lack of a good generic shape representation. With the recent availability of inexpensive 2.5D depth sensors (e.g. Microsoft Kinect), it is becoming increasingly important to have a powerful 3D shape representation in the loop. Apart from category recognition, recovering full 3D shapes from view-based 2.5D depth maps is also a critical part of visual understanding. To this end, we propose to represent a geometric 3D shape as a probability distribution of binary variables on a 3D voxel grid, using a Convolutional Deep Belief Network. Our model, 3D ShapeNets, learns the distribution of complex 3D shapes across different object categories and arbitrary poses from raw CAD data, and discovers hierarchical compositional part representation automatically. It naturally supports joint object recognition and shape completion from 2.5D depth maps, and it enables active object recognition through view planning. To train our 3D deep learning model, we construct ModelNet - a large-scale 3D CAD model dataset. Extensive experiments show that our 3D deep representation enables significant performance improvement over the-state-of-the-arts in a variety of tasks.