arXiv subjects

David Novotny

Publications and source records attributed to David Novotny.

44 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

arXiv2020

3D Multi-bodies: Fitting Sets of Plausible 3D Human Models to Ambiguous Image Data

We consider the problem of obtaining dense 3D reconstructions of humans from single and partially occluded views. In such cases, the visual evidence is usually insufficient to identify a 3D reconstruction uniquely, so we aim at recovering several plausible reconstructions compatible with the input data. We suggest that ambiguities can be modelled more effectively by parametrizing the possible body shapes and poses via a suitable 3D model, such as SMPL for humans. We propose to learn a multi-hypothesis neural network regressor using a best-of-M loss, where each of the M hypotheses is constrained to lie on a manifold of plausible human poses by means of a generative model. We show that our method outperforms alternative approaches in ambiguous pose recovery on standard benchmarks for 3D humans, and in heavily occluded versions of these benchmarks.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2020

Accelerating 3D Deep Learning with PyTorch3D

Deep learning has significantly improved 2D image recognition. Extending into 3D may advance many new applications including autonomous vehicles, virtual and augmented reality, authoring 3D content, and even improving 2D recognition. However despite growing interest, 3D deep learning remains relatively underexplored. We believe that some of this disparity is due to the engineering challenges involved in 3D deep learning, such as efficiently processing heterogeneous data and reframing graphics operations to be differentiable. We address these challenges by introducing PyTorch3D, a library of modular, efficient, and differentiable operators for 3D deep learning. It includes a fast, modular differentiable renderer for meshes and point clouds, enabling analysis-by-synthesis approaches. Compared with other differentiable renderers, PyTorch3D is more modular and efficient, allowing users to more easily extend it while also gracefully scaling to large meshes and images. We compare the PyTorch3D operators and renderer with other implementations and demonstrate significant speed and memory improvements. We also use PyTorch3D to improve the state-of-the-art for unsupervised 3D mesh and point cloud prediction from 2D images on ShapeNet. PyTorch3D is open-source and we hope it will help accelerate research in 3D deep learning.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2019

C3DPO: Canonical 3D Pose Networks for Non-Rigid Structure From Motion

We propose C3DPO, a method for extracting 3D models of deformable objects from 2D keypoint annotations in unconstrained images. We do so by learning a deep network that reconstructs a 3D object from a single view at a time, accounting for partial occlusions, and explicitly factoring the effects of viewpoint changes and object deformations. In order to achieve this factorization, we introduce a novel regularization technique. We first show that the factorization is successful if, and only if, there exists a certain canonicalization function of the reconstructed shapes. Then, we learn the canonicalization function together with the reconstruction one, which constrains the result to be consistent. We demonstrate state-of-the-art reconstruction results for methods that do not use ground-truth 3D supervision for a number of benchmarks, including Up3D and PASCAL3D+. Source code has been made available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/c3dpo_nrsfm.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2019

Detecting and Receiving Phase Modulated Signals with a Rydberg Atom-Based Mixer

Recently, we introduced a Rydberg-atom based mixer capable of detecting and measuring the phase of a radio-frequency field through the electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) and Autler-Townes (AT) effect. The ability to measure phase with this mixer allows for an atom-based receiver to detect digital modulated communication signals. In this paper, we demonstrate detection and reception of digital modulated signals based on various phase-shift keying approaches. We demonstrate Rydberg atom-based digital reception of binary phase-shift keying (BPSK), quadrature phase-shift keying (QPSK), and quadrature amplitude (QAM) modulated signals over a 19.626~GHz carrier to transmit and receive a bit stream in cesium vapor. We present measured values of Error Vector Magnitude (EVM, a common communication metric used to assess how accurate a symbol or bit stream is received) as a function of symbol rate for BPSK, QPSK, 16QAM, 32QAM, and 64QAM modulation schemes. These results allow us to discuss the bandwidth of a Rydberg-atom based receiver system.

physics.atom-ph↗

arXiv2018

Semi-convolutional Operators for Instance Segmentation

Object detection and instance segmentation are dominated by region-based methods such as Mask RCNN. However, there is a growing interest in reducing these problems to pixel labeling tasks, as the latter could be more efficient, could be integrated seamlessly in image-to-image network architectures as used in many other tasks, and could be more accurate for objects that are not well approximated by bounding boxes. In this paper we show theoretically and empirically that constructing dense pixel embeddings that can separate object instances cannot be easily achieved using convolutional operators. At the same time, we show that simple modifications, which we call semi-convolutional, have a much better chance of succeeding at this task. We use the latter to show a connection to Hough voting as well as to a variant of the bilateral kernel that is spatially steered by a convolutional network. We demonstrate that these operators can also be used to improve approaches such as Mask RCNN, demonstrating better segmentation of complex biological shapes and PASCAL VOC categories than achievable by Mask RCNN alone.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2018

Self-supervised Learning of Geometrically Stable Features Through Probabilistic Introspection

Self-supervision can dramatically cut back the amount of manually-labelled data required to train deep neural networks. While self-supervision has usually been considered for tasks such as image classification, in this paper we aim at extending it to geometry-oriented tasks such as semantic matching and part detection. We do so by building on several recent ideas in unsupervised landmark detection. Our approach learns dense distinctive visual descriptors from an unlabelled dataset of images using synthetic image transformations. It does so by means of a robust probabilistic formulation that can introspectively determine which image regions are likely to result in stable image matching. We show empirically that a network pre-trained in this manner requires significantly less supervision to learn semantic object parts compared to numerous pre-training alternatives. We also show that the pre-trained representation is excellent for semantic object matching.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2017

AnchorNet: A Weakly Supervised Network to Learn Geometry-sensitive Features For Semantic Matching

Despite significant progress of deep learning in recent years, state-of-the-art semantic matching methods still rely on legacy features such as SIFT or HoG. We argue that the strong invariance properties that are key to the success of recent deep architectures on the classification task make them unfit for dense correspondence tasks, unless a large amount of supervision is used. In this work, we propose a deep network, termed AnchorNet, that produces image representations that are well-suited for semantic matching. It relies on a set of filters whose response is geometrically consistent across different object instances, even in the presence of strong intra-class, scale, or viewpoint variations. Trained only with weak image-level labels, the final representation successfully captures information about the object structure and improves results of state-of-the-art semantic matching methods such as the deformable spatial pyramid or the proposal flow methods. We show positive results on the cross-instance matching task where different instances of the same object category are matched as well as on a new cross-category semantic matching task aligning pairs of instances each from a different object class.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2015

Cascaded Sparse Spatial Bins for Efficient and Effective Generic Object Detection

A novel efficient method for extraction of object proposals is introduced. Its "objectness" function exploits deep spatial pyramid features, a novel fast-to-compute HoG-based edge statistic and the EdgeBoxes score. The efficiency is achieved by the use of spatial bins in a novel combination with sparsity-inducing group normalized SVM. State-of-the-art recall performance is achieved on Pascal VOC07, significantly outperforming methods with comparable speed. Interestingly, when only 100 proposals per image are considered the method attains 78% recall on VOC07. The method improves mAP of the RCNN state-of-the-art class-specific detector, increasing it by 10 points when only 50 proposals are used in each image. The system trained on twenty classes performs well on the two hundred class ILSVRC2013 set confirming generalization capability.

cs.CV↗