Modeling 3D Surface Manifolds with a Locally Conditioned Atlas
This work addresses mesh quality issues in 3D reconstruction for applications like computer graphics and robotics, but it is incremental as it builds on prior atlas-based methods.
The paper tackled the problem of discontinuities in 3D object reconstruction from point clouds by introducing a locally consistent atlas framework, resulting in structurally coherent meshes with quality comparable to existing methods.
Recently proposed 3D object reconstruction methods represent a mesh with an atlas - a set of planar patches approximating the surface. However, their application in a real-world scenario is limited since the surfaces of reconstructed objects contain discontinuities, which degrades the quality of the final mesh. This is mainly caused by independent processing of individual patches, and in this work, we postulate to mitigate this limitation by preserving local consistency around patch vertices. To that end, we introduce a Locally Conditioned Atlas (LoCondA), a framework for representing a 3D object hierarchically in a generative model. Firstly, the model maps a point cloud of an object into a sphere. Secondly, by leveraging a spherical prior, we enforce the mapping to be locally consistent on the sphere and on the target object. This way, we can sample a mesh quad on that sphere and project it back onto the object's manifold. With LoCondA, we can produce topologically diverse objects while maintaining quads to be stitched together. We show that the proposed approach provides structurally coherent reconstructions while producing meshes of quality comparable to the competitors.