Changhe Tu

Zixiong Wang, Yunxiao Zhang, Rui Xu et al.

Neural implicit representation is a promising approach for reconstructing surfaces from point clouds. Existing methods combine various regularization terms, such as the Eikonal and Laplacian energy terms, to enforce the learned neural function to possess the properties of a Signed Distance Function (SDF). However, inferring the actual topology and geometry of the underlying surface from poor-quality unoriented point clouds remains challenging. In accordance with Differential Geometry, the Hessian of the SDF is singular for points within the differential thin-shell space surrounding the surface. Our approach enforces the Hessian of the neural implicit function to have a zero determinant for points near the surface. This technique aligns the gradients for a near-surface point and its on-surface projection point, producing a rough but faithful shape within just a few iterations. By annealing the weight of the singular-Hessian term, our approach ultimately produces a high-fidelity reconstruction result. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our approach effectively suppresses ghost geometry and recovers details from unoriented point clouds with better expressiveness than existing fitting-based methods.

Shuangbing Song, Fan Zhong, Tianju Wang et al.

Guided upsampling is an effective approach for accelerating high-resolution image processing. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective guided upsampling method. Each pixel in the high-resolution image is represented as a linear interpolation of two low-resolution pixels, whose indices and weights are optimized to minimize the upsampling error. The downsampling can be jointly optimized in order to prevent missing small isolated regions. Our method can be derived from the color line model and local color transformations. Compared to previous methods, our method can better preserve detail effects while suppressing artifacts such as bleeding and blurring. It is efficient, easy to implement, and free of sensitive parameters. We evaluate the proposed method with a wide range of image operators, and show its advantages through quantitative and qualitative analysis. We demonstrate the advantages of our method for both interactive image editing and real-time high-resolution video processing. In particular, for interactive editing, the joint optimization can be precomputed, thus allowing for instant feedback without hardware acceleration.

Junjie Gao, Qiujie Dong, Ruian Wang et al.

In the domain of point cloud registration, the coarse-to-fine feature matching paradigm has received substantial attention owing to its impressive performance. This paradigm involves a two-step process: first, the extraction of multi-level features, and subsequently, the propagation of correspondences from coarse to fine levels. Nonetheless, this paradigm exhibits two notable limitations.Firstly, the utilization of the Dual Softmax operation has the potential to promote one-to-one correspondences between superpoints, inadvertently excluding valuable correspondences. This propensity arises from the fact that a source superpoint typically maintains associations with multiple target superpoints. Secondly, it is imperative to closely examine the overlapping areas between point clouds, as only correspondences within these regions decisively determine the actual transformation. Based on these considerations, we propose {\em OAAFormer} to enhance correspondence quality. On one hand, we introduce a soft matching mechanism, facilitating the propagation of potentially valuable correspondences from coarse to fine levels. Additionally, we integrate an overlapping region detection module to minimize mismatches to the greatest extent possible. Furthermore, we introduce a region-wise attention module with linear complexity during the fine-level matching phase, designed to enhance the discriminative capabilities of the extracted features. Tests on the challenging 3DLoMatch benchmark demonstrate that our approach leads to a substantial increase of about 7\% in the inlier ratio, as well as an enhancement of 2-4\% in registration recall. =

Qiujie Dong, Xiaoran Gong, Rui Xu et al.

With the rapid development of geometric deep learning techniques, many mesh-based convolutional operators have been proposed to bridge irregular mesh structures and popular backbone networks. In this paper, we show that while convolutions are helpful, a simple architecture based exclusively on multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs) is competent enough to deal with mesh classification and semantic segmentation. Our new network architecture, named Mesh-MLP, takes mesh vertices equipped with the heat kernel signature (HKS) and dihedral angles as the input, replaces the convolution module of a ResNet with Multi-layer Perceptron (MLP), and utilizes layer normalization (LN) to perform the normalization of the layers. The all-MLP architecture operates in an end-to-end fashion and does not include a pooling module. Extensive experimental results on the mesh classification/segmentation tasks validate the effectiveness of the all-MLP architecture.

Qinghao Guo, Pengfei Wang, Chen Zong et al.

Point-to-mesh distance queries are fundamental in computer graphics and geometric modeling. While the state-of-the-art P2M method achieves high-speed queries via Voronoi-based localization, it suffers from prohibitive precomputation costs. Its iterative Voronoi sweep for interference detection leads to redundant predicate evaluations and scales poorly on rotationally symmetric structures (e.g., spheres, cones or cylinders), where candidate counts grow quadratically. We propose P2M++ to address these limitations through three key contributions. First, we adaptively augment the set of mesh vertices with auxiliary sites in regions of high Voronoi vertex density to localize complex interference within minimal spatial regions. Second, we reformulate interference detection as a series of sphere-triangle collision tests centered at Voronoi cell corners, which are efficiently resolved using the base mesh's BVH. Finally, we enhance runtime performance by replacing the standard kd-tree search with a faster recursive dynamic programming implementation. Experimental results demonstrate that P2M++ is 3x-10x faster than the original P2M during preprocessing and 1.5x faster in queries, with even more pronounced gains on rotationally symmetric geometries.

Yang Li, Fan Zhong, Xin Wang et al.

Previous evaluations on 6DoF object pose tracking have presented obvious limitations along with the development of this area. In particular, the evaluation protocols are not unified for different methods, the widely-used YCBV dataset contains significant annotation error, and the error metrics also may be biased. As a result, it is hard to fairly compare the methods, which has became a big obstacle for developing new algorithms. In this paper we contribute a unified benchmark to address the above problems. For more accurate annotation of YCBV, we propose a multi-view multi-object global pose refinement method, which can jointly refine the poses of all objects and view cameras, resulting in sub-pixel sub-millimeter alignment errors. The limitations of previous scoring methods and error metrics are analyzed, based on which we introduce our improved evaluation methods. The unified benchmark takes both YCBV and BCOT as base datasets, which are shown to be complementary in scene categories. In experiments, we validate the precision and reliability of the proposed global pose refinement method with a realistic semi-synthesized dataset particularly for YCBV, and then present the benchmark results unifying learning&non-learning and RGB&RGBD methods, with some finds not discovered in previous studies.

Pengfei Wang, Qinghao Guo, Haisen Zhao et al.

k-nearest neighbor (k-NN) search is a fundamental primitive in geometry processing and computer graphics. While spatial partitioning structures such as kd-trees are standard, they are often manifold-blind, failing to exploit the intrinsic low-dimensional structure of points sampled from 2-manifolds. Recent advances in dynamic programming-based nearest neighbor search (DP-NNS) leverage incrementally constructed Voronoi diagrams to accelerate queries, where each site p maintains a list of successors that progressively refine its Voronoi cell. However, DP-NNS is restricted to single nearest neighbor (k=1) searches, precluding their adoption in applications that require local neighborhood statistics. In this paper, we generalize the DP-NNS framework to support arbitrary k-NN queries for manifold-aligned data. Our approach is founded on the geometric observation that if p_i is the nearest neighbor of a query q in P, then the second nearest neighbor of q must reside either within the prefix set P_{1:i-1} = {p_1, \dots, p_{i-1}} or within p_i's successor list. By recursively extending this principle, we introduce Manifold k-NN, a recursive algorithmic scheme that significantly outperforms conventional kd-trees for manifold-aligned data. Our method achieves a 1\times--10\times speedup in volume-to-surface query scenarios and inherently supports dynamic prefix queries -- enabling k-NN searches within any subset P_{1:m} (m \leq n) with zero overhead. Furthermore, we extend the framework to support point deletion via local Delaunay updates, providing a complete suite of dynamic operations for point set modification. Comprehensive experiments on diverse geometric datasets demonstrate the efficiency and broad applicability of our approach for modern graphics pipelines. Source code is available at https://github.com/sssomeone/manifold-knn.

Xuelu Li, Zhaonan Wang, Xiaogang Wang et al.

Reconstructing articulated objects into high-fidelity digital twins is crucial for applications such as robotic manipulation and interactive simulation. Recent self-supervised methods using differentiable rendering frameworks like 3D Gaussian Splatting remain highly sensitive to the initial part segmentation. Their reliance on heuristic clustering or pre-trained models often causes optimization to converge to local minima, especially for complex multi-part objects. To address these limitations, we propose ArtPro, a novel self-supervised framework that introduces adaptive integration of mobility proposals. Our approach begins with an over-segmentation initialization guided by geometry features and motion priors, generating part proposals with plausible motion hypotheses. During optimization, we dynamically merge these proposals by analyzing motion consistency among spatial neighbors, while a collision-aware motion pruning mechanism prevents erroneous kinematic estimation. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world objects demonstrate that ArtPro achieves robust reconstruction of complex multi-part objects, significantly outperforming existing methods in accuracy and stability.

Zixiong Wang, Pengfei Wang, Pengshuai Wang et al.

Surface reconstruction is very challenging when the input point clouds, particularly real scans, are noisy and lack normals. Observing that the Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) and the implicit moving least-square function (IMLS) provide a dual representation of the underlying surface, we introduce Neural-IMLS, a novel approach that directly learns the noise-resistant signed distance function (SDF) from unoriented raw point clouds in a self-supervised fashion. We use the IMLS to regularize the distance values reported by the MLP while using the MLP to regularize the normals of the data points for running the IMLS. We also prove that at the convergence, our neural network, benefiting from the mutual learning mechanism between the MLP and the IMLS, produces a faithful SDF whose zero-level set approximates the underlying surface. We conducted extensive experiments on various benchmarks, including synthetic scans and real scans. The experimental results show that {\em Neural-IMLS} can reconstruct faithful shapes on various benchmarks with noise and missing parts. The source code can be found at~\url{https://github.com/bearprin/Neural-IMLS}.

Zhiyi Pan, Peng Jiang, Changhe Tu

Scribble-supervised semantic segmentation has gained much attention recently for its promising performance without high-quality annotations. Many approaches have been proposed. Typically, they handle this problem to either introduce a well-labeled dataset from another related task, turn to iterative refinement and post-processing with the graphical model, or manipulate the scribble label. This work aims to achieve semantic segmentation supervised by scribble label directly without auxiliary information and other intermediate manipulation. Specifically, we impose diffusion on neural representation by random walk and consistency on neural eigenspace by self-supervision, which forces the neural network to produce dense and consistent predictions over the whole dataset. The random walk embedded in the network will compute a probabilistic transition matrix, with which the neural representation diffused to be uniform. Moreover, given the probabilistic transition matrix, we apply the self-supervision on its eigenspace for consistency in the image's main parts. In addition to comparing the common scribble dataset, we also conduct experiments on the modified datasets that randomly shrink and even drop the scribbles on image objects. The results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method and are even comparable to some full-label supervised ones. The code and datasets are available at https://github.com/panzhiyi/RW-SS.

Jinming Cao, Yangyan Li, Mingchao Sun et al.

Convolutional layers are the core building blocks of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). In this paper, we propose to augment a convolutional layer with an additional depthwise convolution, where each input channel is convolved with a different 2D kernel. The composition of the two convolutions constitutes an over-parameterization, since it adds learnable parameters, while the resulting linear operation can be expressed by a single convolution layer. We refer to this depthwise over-parameterized convolutional layer as DO-Conv. We show with extensive experiments that the mere replacement of conventional convolutional layers with DO-Conv layers boosts the performance of CNNs on many classical vision tasks, such as image classification, detection, and segmentation. Moreover, in the inference phase, the depthwise convolution is folded into the conventional convolution, reducing the computation to be exactly equivalent to that of a convolutional layer without over-parameterization. As DO-Conv introduces performance gains without incurring any computational complexity increase for inference, we advocate it as an alternative to the conventional convolutional layer. We open-source a reference implementation of DO-Conv in Tensorflow, PyTorch and GluonCV at https://github.com/yangyanli/DO-Conv.

Nenglun Chen, Lingjie Liu, Zhiming Cui et al.

Learning structures of 3D shapes is a fundamental problem in the field of computer graphics and geometry processing. We present a simple yet interpretable unsupervised method for learning a new structural representation in the form of 3D structure points. The 3D structure points produced by our method encode the shape structure intrinsically and exhibit semantic consistency across all the shape instances with similar structures. This is a challenging goal that has not fully been achieved by other methods. Specifically, our method takes a 3D point cloud as input and encodes it as a set of local features. The local features are then passed through a novel point integration module to produce a set of 3D structure points. The chamfer distance is used as reconstruction loss to ensure the structure points lie close to the input point cloud. Extensive experiments have shown that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art on the semantic shape correspondence task and achieves comparable performance with the state-of-the-art on the segmentation label transfer task. Moreover, the PCA based shape embedding built upon consistent structure points demonstrates good performance in preserving the shape structures. Code is available at https://github.com/NolenChen/3DStructurePoints

Pengfei Wang, Shuangmin Chen, Dongming Yan et al.

The Medial Axis Transform (MAT) is a complete shape descriptor capable of reconstructing the geometry of the original domain. A high-quality MAT should not only facilitate high-fidelity reconstruction but also capture structural features -- for instance, by aligning the MAT boundary with the locus of rolling ball centers within fillet regions. However, computing such an ideal MAT remains a significant challenge, particularly when the input is a discrete triangle mesh. In this paper, we follow the established technical pipeline of initializing the MAT via a 3D Voronoi diagram of surface samples and subsequently simplifying the Voronoi structure through a QEM-like scheme. Our key insight is to explicitly track the correspondence between MAT vertices and surface regions throughout the progressive simplification process, ensuring that the resulting MAT triangles accurately reflect the intrinsic symmetries between surface patches. We translate these geometric requirements into a suite of priority control strategies that govern the sequencing of edge collapses. Through extensive evaluation against state-of-the-art MAT algorithms, we validate the strong performance of our approach regarding runtime efficiency, structural alignment, boundary regularity, triangle quality, and robustness to noise. Our resulting MATs remain highly expressive for both articulated shapes and CAD models, even under extreme simplification -- effectively capturing the global structure of complex geometries with only a few hundred vertices.

Rui Xu, Longdu Liu, Ningna Wang et al.

In mesh simplification, common requirements like accuracy, triangle quality, and feature alignment are often considered as a trade-off. Existing algorithms concentrate on just one or a few specific aspects of these requirements. For example, the well-known Quadric Error Metrics (QEM) approach prioritizes accuracy and can preserve strong feature lines/points as well but falls short in ensuring high triangle quality and may degrade weak features that are not as distinctive as strong ones. In this paper, we propose a smooth functional that simultaneously considers all of these requirements. The functional comprises a normal anisotropy term and a Centroidal Voronoi Tessellation (CVT) energy term, with the variables being a set of movable points lying on the surface. The former inherits the spirit of QEM but operates in a continuous setting, while the latter encourages even point distribution, allowing various surface metrics. We further introduce a decaying weight to automatically balance the two terms. We selected 100 CAD models from the ABC dataset, along with 21 organic models, to compare the existing mesh simplification algorithms with ours. Experimental results reveal an important observation: the introduction of a decaying weight effectively reduces the conflict between the two terms and enables the alignment of weak features. This distinctive feature sets our approach apart from most existing mesh simplification methods and demonstrates significant potential in shape understanding.

Qiujie Dong, Rui Xu, Pengfei Wang et al.

Despite recent advances in reconstructing an organic model with the neural signed distance function (SDF), the high-fidelity reconstruction of a CAD model directly from low-quality unoriented point clouds remains a significant challenge. In this paper, we address this challenge based on the prior observation that the surface of a CAD model is generally composed of piecewise surface patches, each approximately developable even around the feature line. Our approach, named NeurCADRecon, is self-supervised, and its loss includes a developability term to encourage the Gaussian curvature toward 0 while ensuring fidelity to the input points. Noticing that the Gaussian curvature is non-zero at tip points, we introduce a double-trough curve to tolerate the existence of these tip points. Furthermore, we develop a dynamic sampling strategy to deal with situations where the given points are incomplete or too sparse. Since our resulting neural SDFs can clearly manifest sharp feature points/lines, one can easily extract the feature-aligned triangle mesh from the SDF and then decompose it into smooth surface patches, greatly reducing the difficulty of recovering the parametric CAD design. A comprehensive comparison with existing state-of-the-art methods shows the significant advantage of our approach in reconstructing faithful CAD shapes.

Qiujie Dong, Huibiao Wen, Rui Xu et al.

Quadrilateral mesh generation plays a crucial role in numerical simulations within Computer-Aided Design and Engineering (CAD/E). Producing high-quality quadrangulation typically requires satisfying four key criteria. First, the quadrilateral mesh should closely align with principal curvature directions. Second, singular points should be strategically placed and effectively minimized. Third, the mesh should accurately conform to sharp feature edges. Lastly, quadrangulation results should exhibit robustness against noise and minor geometric variations. Existing methods generally involve first computing a regular cross field to represent quad element orientations across the surface, followed by extracting a quadrilateral mesh aligned closely with this cross field. A primary challenge with this approach is balancing the smoothness of the cross field with its alignment to pre-computed principal curvature directions, which are sensitive to small surface perturbations and often ill-defined in spherical or planar regions. To tackle this challenge, we propose NeurCross, a novel framework that simultaneously optimizes a cross field and a neural signed distance function (SDF), whose zero-level set serves as a proxy of the input shape. Our joint optimization is guided by three factors: faithful approximation of the optimized SDF surface to the input surface, alignment between the cross field and the principal curvature field derived from the SDF surface, and smoothness of the cross field. Acting as an intermediary, the neural SDF contributes in two essential ways. First, it provides an alternative, optimizable base surface exhibiting more regular principal curvature directions for guiding the cross field. Second, we leverage the Hessian matrix of the neural SDF to implicitly enforce cross field alignment with principal curvature directions...

Rui Xu, Jiepeng Wang, Hao Pan et al.

In this paper, we study an under-explored but important factor of diffusion generative models, i.e., the combinatorial complexity. Data samples are generally high-dimensional, and for various structured generation tasks, there are additional attributes which are combined to associate with data samples. We show that the space spanned by the combination of dimensions and attributes is insufficiently sampled by existing training scheme of diffusion generative models, causing degraded test time performance. We present a simple fix to this problem by constructing stochastic processes that fully exploit the combinatorial structures, hence the name ComboStoc. Using this simple strategy, we show that network training is significantly accelerated across diverse data modalities, including images and 3D structured shapes. Moreover, ComboStoc enables a new way of test time generation which uses insynchronized time steps for different dimensions and attributes, thus allowing for varying degrees of control over them.

Zhaonan Wang, Manyi Li, ShiQing Xin et al.

Point cloud denoising task aims to recover the clean point cloud from the scanned data coupled with different levels or patterns of noise. The recent state-of-the-art methods often train deep neural networks to update the point locations towards the clean point cloud, and empirically repeat the denoising process several times in order to obtain the denoised results. It is not clear how to efficiently arrange the iterative denoising processes to deal with different levels or patterns of noise. In this paper, we propose an adaptive and iterative point cloud denoising method based on the score-based diffusion model. For a given noisy point cloud, we first estimate the noise variation and determine an adaptive denoising schedule with appropriate step sizes, then invoke the trained network iteratively to update point clouds following the adaptive schedule. To facilitate this adaptive and iterative denoising process, we design the network architecture and a two-stage sampling strategy for the network training to enable feature fusion and gradient fusion for iterative denoising. Compared to the state-of-the-art point cloud denoising methods, our approach obtains clean and smooth denoised point clouds, while preserving the shape boundary and details better. Our results not only outperform the other methods both qualitatively and quantitatively, but also are preferable on the synthetic dataset with different patterns of noises, as well as the real-scanned dataset.

Zhaonan Wang, Manyi Li, Changhe Tu

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has witnessed exponential adoption across diverse applications, driving a critical need for semantic-aware 3D Gaussian representations to enable scene understanding and editing tasks. Existing approaches typically attach semantic features to a collection of free Gaussians and distill the features via differentiable rendering, leading to noisy segmentation and a messy selection of Gaussians. In this paper, we introduce AG$^2$aussian, a novel framework that leverages an anchor-graph structure to organize semantic features and regulate Gaussian primitives. Our anchor-graph structure not only promotes compact and instance-aware Gaussian distributions, but also facilitates graph-based propagation, achieving a clean and accurate instance-level Gaussian selection. Extensive validation across four applications, i.e. interactive click-based query, open-vocabulary text-driven query, object removal editing, and physics simulation, demonstrates the advantages of our approach and its benefits to various applications. The experiments and ablation studies further evaluate the effectiveness of the key designs of our approach.

Hongxu Liu, Xinyu Chen, Haoyang Zheng et al.

Recovering a continuous colormap from a single 2D scalar field visualization can be quite challenging, especially in the absence of a corresponding color legend. In this paper, we propose a novel colormap recovery approach that extracts the colormap from a color-encoded 2D scalar field visualization by simultaneously predicting the colormap and underlying data using a decoupling-and-reconstruction strategy. Our approach first separates the input visualization into colormap and data using a decoupling module, then reconstructs the visualization with a differentiable color-mapping module. To guide this process, we design a reconstruction loss between the input and reconstructed visualizations, which serves both as a constraint to ensure strong correlation between colormap and data during training, and as a self-supervised optimizer for fine-tuning the predicted colormap of unseen visualizations during inferencing. To ensure smoothness and correct color ordering in the extracted colormap, we introduce a compact colormap representation using cubic B-spline curves and an associated color order loss. We evaluate our method quantitatively and qualitatively on a synthetic dataset and a collection of real-world visualizations from the VIS30K dataset. Additionally, we demonstrate its utility in two prototype applications -- colormap adjustment and colormap transfer -- and explore its generalization to visualizations with color legends and ones encoded using discrete color palettes.

Pengfei Wang, Qiujie Dong, Fangtian Liang et al.

Neural implicit shape representation has drawn significant attention in recent years due to its smoothness, differentiability, and topological flexibility. However, directly modeling the shape of a neural implicit surface, especially as the zero-level set of a neural signed distance function (SDF), with sparse geometric control is still a challenging task. Sparse input shape control typically includes 3D curve networks or, more generally, 3D curve sketches, which are unstructured and cannot be connected to form a curve network, and therefore more difficult to deal with. While 3D curve networks or curve sketches provide intuitive shape control, their sparsity and varied topology pose challenges in generating high-quality surfaces to meet such curve constraints. In this paper, we propose NeuVAS, a variational approach to shape modeling using neural implicit surfaces constrained under sparse input shape control, including unstructured 3D curve sketches as well as connected 3D curve networks. Specifically, we introduce a smoothness term based on a functional of surface curvatures to minimize shape variation of the zero-level set surface of a neural SDF. We also develop a new technique to faithfully model G0 sharp feature curves as specified in the input curve sketches. Comprehensive comparisons with the state-of-the-art methods demonstrate the significant advantages of our method.

Junhao Chen, Manyi Li, Zherong Pan et al.

Deep generative models learn the data distribution, which is concentrated on a low-dimensional manifold. The geometric analysis of distribution transformation provides a better understanding of data structure and enables a variety of applications. In this paper, we study the geometric properties of the diffusion model, whose forward diffusion process and reverse generation process construct a series of distributions on manifolds which vary over time. Our key contribution is the introduction of generation rate, which corresponds to the local deformation of manifold over time around an image component. We show that the generation rate is highly correlated with intuitive visual properties, such as visual saliency, of the image component. Further, we propose an efficient and differentiable scheme to estimate the generation rate for a given image component over time, giving rise to a generation curve. The differentiable nature of our scheme allows us to control the shape of the generation curve via optimization. Using different loss functions, our generation curve matching algorithm provides a unified framework for a range of image manipulation tasks, including semantic transfer, object removal, saliency manipulation, image blending, etc. We conduct comprehensive analytical evaluations to support our findings and evaluate our framework on various manipulation tasks. The results show that our method consistently leads to better manipulation results, compared to recent baselines.

Qiujie Dong, Zixiong Wang, Manyi Li et al.

Geometric deep learning has sparked a rising interest in computer graphics to perform shape understanding tasks, such as shape classification and semantic segmentation. When the input is a polygonal surface, one has to suffer from the irregular mesh structure. Motivated by the geometric spectral theory, we introduce Laplacian2Mesh, a novel and flexible convolutional neural network (CNN) framework for coping with irregular triangle meshes (vertices may have any valence). By mapping the input mesh surface to the multi-dimensional Laplacian-Beltrami space, Laplacian2Mesh enables one to perform shape analysis tasks directly using the mature CNNs, without the need to deal with the irregular connectivity of the mesh structure. We further define a mesh pooling operation such that the receptive field of the network can be expanded while retaining the original vertex set as well as the connections between them. Besides, we introduce a channel-wise self-attention block to learn the individual importance of feature ingredients. Laplacian2Mesh not only decouples the geometry from the irregular connectivity of the mesh structure but also better captures the global features that are central to shape classification and segmentation. Extensive tests on various datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of Laplacian2Mesh, particularly in terms of the capability of being vulnerable to noise to fulfill various learning tasks.

Jinming Cao, Hanchao Leng, Dani Lischinski et al.

RGB-D semantic segmentation has attracted increasing attention over the past few years. Existing methods mostly employ homogeneous convolution operators to consume the RGB and depth features, ignoring their intrinsic differences. In fact, the RGB values capture the photometric appearance properties in the projected image space, while the depth feature encodes both the shape of a local geometry as well as the base (whereabout) of it in a larger context. Compared with the base, the shape probably is more inherent and has a stronger connection to the semantics, and thus is more critical for segmentation accuracy. Inspired by this observation, we introduce a Shape-aware Convolutional layer (ShapeConv) for processing the depth feature, where the depth feature is firstly decomposed into a shape-component and a base-component, next two learnable weights are introduced to cooperate with them independently, and finally a convolution is applied on the re-weighted combination of these two components. ShapeConv is model-agnostic and can be easily integrated into most CNNs to replace vanilla convolutional layers for semantic segmentation. Extensive experiments on three challenging indoor RGB-D semantic segmentation benchmarks, i.e., NYU-Dv2(-13,-40), SUN RGB-D, and SID, demonstrate the effectiveness of our ShapeConv when employing it over five popular architectures. Moreover, the performance of CNNs with ShapeConv is boosted without introducing any computation and memory increase in the inference phase. The reason is that the learnt weights for balancing the importance between the shape and base components in ShapeConv become constants in the inference phase, and thus can be fused into the following convolution, resulting in a network that is identical to one with vanilla convolutional layers.

Zherong Pan, Duo Zhang, Changhe Tu et al.

We propose an optimization-based approach to plan power grasps. Central to our method is a reformulation of grasp planning as an infinite program under complementary constraints (IPCC), which allows contacts to happen between arbitrary pairs of points on the object and the robot gripper. We show that IPCC can be reduced to a conventional finite-dimensional nonlinear program (NLP) using a kernel-integral relaxation. Moreover, the values and Jacobian matrices of the kernel-integral can be evaluated efficiently using a modified Fast Multipole Method (FMM). We further guarantee that the planned grasps are collision-free using primal barrier penalties. We demonstrate the effectiveness, robustness, and efficiency of our grasp planner on a row of challenging 3D objects and high-DOF grippers, such as Barrett Hand and Shadow Hand, where our method achieves superior grasp qualities over competitors.

Zhiyi Pan, Peng Jiang, Yunhai Wang et al.

Scribble-supervised semantic segmentation has gained much attention recently for its promising performance without high-quality annotations. Due to the lack of supervision, confident and consistent predictions are usually hard to obtain. Typically, people handle these problems to either adopt an auxiliary task with the well-labeled dataset or incorporate the graphical model with additional requirements on scribble annotations. Instead, this work aims to achieve semantic segmentation by scribble annotations directly without extra information and other limitations. Specifically, we propose holistic operations, including minimizing entropy and a network embedded random walk on neural representation to reduce uncertainty. Given the probabilistic transition matrix of a random walk, we further train the network with self-supervision on its neural eigenspace to impose consistency on predictions between related images. Comprehensive experiments and ablation studies verify the proposed approach, which demonstrates superiority over others; it is even comparable to some full-label supervised ones and works well when scribbles are randomly shrunk or dropped.

Guangnan Wu, Zhiyi Pan, Peng Jiang et al.

Instance segmentation in point clouds is one of the most fine-grained ways to understand the 3D scene. Due to its close relationship to semantic segmentation, many works approach these two tasks simultaneously and leverage the benefits of multi-task learning. However, most of them only considered simple strategies such as element-wise feature fusion, which may not lead to mutual promotion. In this work, we build a Bi-Directional Attention module on backbone neural networks for 3D point cloud perception, which uses similarity matrix measured from features for one task to help aggregate non-local information for the other task, avoiding the potential feature exclusion and task conflict. From comprehensive experiments and ablation studies on the S3DIS dataset and the PartNet dataset, the superiority of our method is verified. Moreover, the mechanism of how bi-directional attention module helps joint instance and semantic segmentation is also analyzed.

Jian Liu, Shiqing Xin, Zengfu Gao et al.

We propose to synthesize feasible caging grasps for a target object through computing Caging Loops, a closed curve defined in the shape embedding space of the object. Different from the traditional methods, our approach decouples caging loops from the surface geometry of target objects through working in the embedding space. This enables us to synthesize caging loops encompassing multiple topological holes, instead of always tied with one specific handle which could be too small to be graspable by the robot gripper. Our method extracts caging loops through a topological analysis of the distance field defined for the target surface in the embedding space, based on a rigorous theoretical study on the relation between caging loops and the field topology. Due to the decoupling, our method can tolerate incomplete and noisy surface geometry of an unknown target object captured on-the-fly. We implemented our method with a robotic gripper and demonstrate through extensive experiments that our method can synthesize reliable grasps for objects with complex surface geometry and topology and in various scales.

Jinming Cao, Oren Katzir, Peng Jiang et al.

Unsupervised domain adaptation aims at learning a shared model for two related, but not identical, domains by leveraging supervision from a source domain to an unsupervised target domain. A number of effective domain adaptation approaches rely on the ability to extract discriminative, yet domain-invariant, latent factors which are common to both domains. Extracting latent commonality is also useful for disentanglement analysis, enabling separation between the common and the domain-specific features of both domains. In this paper, we present a method for boosting domain adaptation performance by leveraging disentanglement analysis. The key idea is that by learning to separately extract both the common and the domain-specific features, one can synthesize more target domain data with supervision, thereby boosting the domain adaptation performance. Better common feature extraction, in turn, helps further improve the disentanglement analysis and disentangled synthesis. We show that iterating between domain adaptation and disentanglement analysis can consistently improve each other on several unsupervised domain adaptation tasks, for various domain adaptation backbone models.

Peng Jiang, Fanglin Gu, Yunhai Wang et al.

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have recently shown state of the art performance on semantic segmentation tasks, however, they still suffer from problems of poor boundary localization and spatial fragmented predictions. The difficulties lie in the requirement of making dense predictions from a long path model all at once since details are hard to keep when data goes through deeper layers. Instead, in this work, we decompose this difficult task into two relative simple sub-tasks: seed detection which is required to predict initial predictions without the need of wholeness and preciseness, and similarity estimation which measures the possibility of any two nodes belong to the same class without the need of knowing which class they are. We use one branch network for one sub-task each, and apply a cascade of random walks base on hierarchical semantics to approximate a complex diffusion process which propagates seed information to the whole image according to the estimated similarities. The proposed DifNet consistently produces improvements over the baseline models with the same depth and with the equivalent number of parameters, and also achieves promising performance on Pascal VOC and Pascal Context dataset. OurDifNet is trained end-to-end without complex loss functions.

Zhenhua Wang, Fanglin Gu, Dani Lischinski et al.

Contextual information provides important cues for disambiguating visually similar pixels in scene segmentation. In this paper, we introduce a neuron-level Selective Context Aggregation (SCA) module for scene segmentation, comprised of a contextual dependency predictor and a context aggregation operator. The dependency predictor is implicitly trained to infer contextual dependencies between different image regions. The context aggregation operator augments local representations with global context, which is aggregated selectively at each neuron according to its on-the-fly predicted dependencies. The proposed mechanism enables data-driven inference of contextual dependencies, and facilitates context-aware feature learning. The proposed method improves strong baselines built upon VGG16 on challenging scene segmentation datasets, which demonstrates its effectiveness in modeling context information.

Wenzheng Chen, Huan Wang, Yangyan Li et al.

Human 3D pose estimation from a single image is a challenging task with numerous applications. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have recently achieved superior performance on the task of 2D pose estimation from a single image, by training on images with 2D annotations collected by crowd sourcing. This suggests that similar success could be achieved for direct estimation of 3D poses. However, 3D poses are much harder to annotate, and the lack of suitable annotated training images hinders attempts towards end-to-end solutions. To address this issue, we opt to automatically synthesize training images with ground truth pose annotations. Our work is a systematic study along this road. We find that pose space coverage and texture diversity are the key ingredients for the effectiveness of synthetic training data. We present a fully automatic, scalable approach that samples the human pose space for guiding the synthesis procedure and extracts clothing textures from real images. Furthermore, we explore domain adaptation for bridging the gap between our synthetic training images and real testing photos. We demonstrate that CNNs trained with our synthetic images out-perform those trained with real photos on 3D pose estimation tasks.