Chao Chen

Zhizhong Han, Chao Chen, Yu-Shen Liu et al.

Differentiable renderers have been used successfully for unsupervised 3D structure learning from 2D images because they can bridge the gap between 3D and 2D. To optimize 3D shape parameters, current renderers rely on pixel-wise losses between rendered images of 3D reconstructions and ground truth images from corresponding viewpoints. Hence they require interpolation of the recovered 3D structure at each pixel, visibility handling, and optionally evaluating a shading model. In contrast, here we propose a Differentiable Renderer Without Rendering (DRWR) that omits these steps. DRWR only relies on a simple but effective loss that evaluates how well the projections of reconstructed 3D point clouds cover the ground truth object silhouette. Specifically, DRWR employs a smooth silhouette loss to pull the projection of each individual 3D point inside the object silhouette, and a structure-aware repulsion loss to push each pair of projections that fall inside the silhouette far away from each other. Although we omit surface interpolation, visibility handling, and shading, our results demonstrate that DRWR achieves state-of-the-art accuracies under widely used benchmarks, outperforming previous methods both qualitatively and quantitatively. In addition, our training times are significantly lower due to the simplicity of DRWR.

Zhizhong Han, Chao Chen, Yu-Shen Liu et al.

3D shape captioning is a challenging application in 3D shape understanding. Captions from recent multi-view based methods reveal that they cannot capture part-level characteristics of 3D shapes. This leads to a lack of detailed part-level description in captions, which human tend to focus on. To resolve this issue, we propose ShapeCaptioner, a generative caption network, to perform 3D shape captioning from semantic parts detected in multiple views. Our novelty lies in learning the knowledge of part detection in multiple views from 3D shape segmentations and transferring this knowledge to facilitate learning the mapping from 3D shapes to sentences. Specifically, ShapeCaptioner aggregates the parts detected in multiple colored views using our novel part class specific aggregation to represent a 3D shape, and then, employs a sequence to sequence model to generate the caption. Our outperforming results show that ShapeCaptioner can learn 3D shape features with more detailed part characteristics to facilitate better 3D shape captioning than previous work.