arXiv subjects

Evangelos Kalogerakis

Publications and source records attributed to Evangelos Kalogerakis.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2022

Morig: Motion-aware rigging of character meshes from point clouds

We present MoRig, a method that automatically rigs character meshes driven by single-view point cloud streams capturing the motion of performing characters. Our method is also able to animate the 3D meshes according to the captured point cloud motion. MoRig's neural network encodes motion cues from the point clouds into features that are informative about the articulated parts of the performing character. These motion-aware features guide the inference of an appropriate skeletal rig for the input mesh, which is then animated based on the point cloud motion. Our method can rig and animate diverse characters, including humanoids, quadrupeds, and toys with varying articulation. It accounts for occluded regions in the point clouds and mismatches in the part proportions between the input mesh and captured character. Compared to other rigging approaches that ignore motion cues, MoRig produces more accurate rigs, well-suited for re-targeting motion from captured characters.

cs.GR↗

arXiv2022

MvDeCor: Multi-view Dense Correspondence Learning for Fine-grained 3D Segmentation

We propose to utilize self-supervised techniques in the 2D domain for fine-grained 3D shape segmentation tasks. This is inspired by the observation that view-based surface representations are more effective at modeling high-resolution surface details and texture than their 3D counterparts based on point clouds or voxel occupancy. Specifically, given a 3D shape, we render it from multiple views, and set up a dense correspondence learning task within the contrastive learning framework. As a result, the learned 2D representations are view-invariant and geometrically consistent, leading to better generalization when trained on a limited number of labeled shapes compared to alternatives that utilize self-supervision in 2D or 3D alone. Experiments on textured (RenderPeople) and untextured (PartNet) 3D datasets show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art alternatives in fine-grained part segmentation. The improvements over baselines are greater when only a sparse set of views is available for training or when shapes are textured, indicating that MvDeCor benefits from both 2D processing and 3D geometric reasoning.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

Audio-driven Neural Gesture Reenactment with Video Motion Graphs

Human speech is often accompanied by body gestures including arm and hand gestures. We present a method that reenacts a high-quality video with gestures matching a target speech audio. The key idea of our method is to split and re-assemble clips from a reference video through a novel video motion graph encoding valid transitions between clips. To seamlessly connect different clips in the reenactment, we propose a pose-aware video blending network which synthesizes video frames around the stitched frames between two clips. Moreover, we developed an audio-based gesture searching algorithm to find the optimal order of the reenacted frames. Our system generates reenactments that are consistent with both the audio rhythms and the speech content. We evaluate our synthesized video quality quantitatively, qualitatively, and with user studies, demonstrating that our method produces videos of much higher quality and consistency with the target audio compared to previous work and baselines.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

PriFit: Learning to Fit Primitives Improves Few Shot Point Cloud Segmentation

We present PriFit, a semi-supervised approach for label-efficient learning of 3D point cloud segmentation networks. PriFit combines geometric primitive fitting with point-based representation learning. Its key idea is to learn point representations whose clustering reveals shape regions that can be approximated well by basic geometric primitives, such as cuboids and ellipsoids. The learned point representations can then be re-used in existing network architectures for 3D point cloud segmentation, and improves their performance in the few-shot setting. According to our experiments on the widely used ShapeNet and PartNet benchmarks, PriFit outperforms several state-of-the-art methods in this setting, suggesting that decomposability into primitives is a useful prior for learning representations predictive of semantic parts. We present a number of ablative experiments varying the choice of geometric primitives and downstream tasks to demonstrate the effectiveness of the method.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

APES: Articulated Part Extraction from Sprite Sheets

Rigged puppets are one of the most prevalent representations to create 2D character animations. Creating these puppets requires partitioning characters into independently moving parts. In this work, we present a method to automatically identify such articulated parts from a small set of character poses shown in a sprite sheet, which is an illustration of the character that artists often draw before puppet creation. Our method is trained to infer articulated parts, e.g. head, torso and limbs, that can be re-assembled to best reconstruct the given poses. Our results demonstrate significantly better performance than alternatives qualitatively and quantitatively.Our project page https://zhan-xu.github.io/parts/ includes our code and data.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

ASSET: Autoregressive Semantic Scene Editing with Transformers at High Resolutions

We present ASSET, a neural architecture for automatically modifying an input high-resolution image according to a user's edits on its semantic segmentation map. Our architecture is based on a transformer with a novel attention mechanism. Our key idea is to sparsify the transformer's attention matrix at high resolutions, guided by dense attention extracted at lower image resolutions. While previous attention mechanisms are computationally too expensive for handling high-resolution images or are overly constrained within specific image regions hampering long-range interactions, our novel attention mechanism is both computationally efficient and effective. Our sparsified attention mechanism is able to capture long-range interactions and context, leading to synthesizing interesting phenomena in scenes, such as reflections of landscapes onto water or flora consistent with the rest of the landscape, that were not possible to generate reliably with previous convnets and transformer approaches. We present qualitative and quantitative results, along with user studies, demonstrating the effectiveness of our method.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

Projective Urban Texturing

This paper proposes a method for automatic generation of textures for 3D city meshes in immersive urban environments. Many recent pipelines capture or synthesize large quantities of city geometry using scanners or procedural modeling pipelines. Such geometry is intricate and realistic, however the generation of photo-realistic textures for such large scenes remains a problem. We propose to generate textures for input target 3D meshes driven by the textural style present in readily available datasets of panoramic photos capturing urban environments. Re-targeting such 2D datasets to 3D geometry is challenging because the underlying shape, size, and layout of the urban structures in the photos do not correspond to the ones in the target meshes. Photos also often have objects (e.g., trees, vehicles) that may not even be present in the target geometry. To address these issues we present a method, called Projective Urban Texturing (PUT), which re-targets textural style from real-world panoramic images to unseen urban meshes. PUT relies on contrastive and adversarial training of a neural architecture designed for unpaired image-to-texture translation. The generated textures are stored in a texture atlas applied to the target 3D mesh geometry. To promote texture consistency, PUT employs an iterative procedure in which texture synthesis is conditioned on previously generated, adjacent textures. We demonstrate both quantitative and qualitative evaluation of the generated textures.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

BuildingNet: Learning to Label 3D Buildings

We introduce BuildingNet: (a) a large-scale dataset of 3D building models whose exteriors are consistently labeled, (b) a graph neural network that labels building meshes by analyzing spatial and structural relations of their geometric primitives. To create our dataset, we used crowdsourcing combined with expert guidance, resulting in 513K annotated mesh primitives, grouped into 292K semantic part components across 2K building models. The dataset covers several building categories, such as houses, churches, skyscrapers, town halls, libraries, and castles. We include a benchmark for evaluating mesh and point cloud labeling. Buildings have more challenging structural complexity compared to objects in existing benchmarks (e.g., ShapeNet, PartNet), thus, we hope that our dataset can nurture the development of algorithms that are able to cope with such large-scale geometric data for both vision and graphics tasks e.g., 3D semantic segmentation, part-based generative models, correspondences, texturing, and analysis of point cloud data acquired from real-world buildings. Finally, we show that our mesh-based graph neural network significantly improves performance over several baselines for labeling 3D meshes.

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arXiv2021

Neural Strokes: Stylized Line Drawing of 3D Shapes

This paper introduces a model for producing stylized line drawings from 3D shapes. The model takes a 3D shape and a viewpoint as input, and outputs a drawing with textured strokes, with variations in stroke thickness, deformation, and color learned from an artist's style. The model is fully differentiable. We train its parameters from a single training drawing of another 3D shape. We show that, in contrast to previous image-based methods, the use of a geometric representation of 3D shape and 2D strokes allows the model to transfer important aspects of shape and texture style while preserving contours. Our method outputs the resulting drawing in a vector representation, enabling richer downstream analysis or editing in interactive applications.

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arXiv2021

MakeItTalk: Speaker-Aware Talking-Head Animation

We present a method that generates expressive talking heads from a single facial image with audio as the only input. In contrast to previous approaches that attempt to learn direct mappings from audio to raw pixels or points for creating talking faces, our method first disentangles the content and speaker information in the input audio signal. The audio content robustly controls the motion of lips and nearby facial regions, while the speaker information determines the specifics of facial expressions and the rest of the talking head dynamics. Another key component of our method is the prediction of facial landmarks reflecting speaker-aware dynamics. Based on this intermediate representation, our method is able to synthesize photorealistic videos of entire talking heads with full range of motion and also animate artistic paintings, sketches, 2D cartoon characters, Japanese mangas, stylized caricatures in a single unified framework. We present extensive quantitative and qualitative evaluation of our method, in addition to user studies, demonstrating generated talking heads of significantly higher quality compared to prior state-of-the-art.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2020

ParSeNet: A Parametric Surface Fitting Network for 3D Point Clouds

We propose a novel, end-to-end trainable, deep network called ParSeNet that decomposes a 3D point cloud into parametric surface patches, including B-spline patches as well as basic geometric primitives. ParSeNet is trained on a large-scale dataset of man-made 3D shapes and captures high-level semantic priors for shape decomposition. It handles a much richer class of primitives than prior work, and allows us to represent surfaces with higher fidelity. It also produces repeatable and robust parametrizations of a surface compared to purely geometric approaches. We present extensive experiments to validate our approach against analytical and learning-based alternatives. Our source code is publicly available at: https://hippogriff.github.io/parsenet.

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arXiv2020

Label-Efficient Learning on Point Clouds using Approximate Convex Decompositions

The problems of shape classification and part segmentation from 3D point clouds have garnered increasing attention in the last few years. Both of these problems, however, suffer from relatively small training sets, creating the need for statistically efficient methods to learn 3D shape representations. In this paper, we investigate the use of Approximate Convex Decompositions (ACD) as a self-supervisory signal for label-efficient learning of point cloud representations. We show that using ACD to approximate ground truth segmentation provides excellent self-supervision for learning 3D point cloud representations that are highly effective on downstream tasks. We report improvements over the state-of-the-art for unsupervised representation learning on the ModelNet40 shape classification dataset and significant gains in few-shot part segmentation on the ShapeNetPart dataset.Code available at https://github.com/matheusgadelha/PointCloudLearningACD

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arXiv2020

Learning Part Boundaries from 3D Point Clouds

We present a method that detects boundaries of parts in 3D shapes represented as point clouds. Our method is based on a graph convolutional network architecture that outputs a probability for a point to lie in an area that separates two or more parts in a 3D shape. Our boundary detector is quite generic: it can be trained to localize boundaries of semantic parts or geometric primitives commonly used in 3D modeling. Our experiments demonstrate that our method can extract more accurate boundaries that are closer to ground-truth ones compared to alternatives. We also demonstrate an application of our network to fine-grained semantic shape segmentation, where we also show improvements in terms of part labeling performance.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2020

RigNet: Neural Rigging for Articulated Characters

We present RigNet, an end-to-end automated method for producing animation rigs from input character models. Given an input 3D model representing an articulated character, RigNet predicts a skeleton that matches the animator expectations in joint placement and topology. It also estimates surface skin weights based on the predicted skeleton. Our method is based on a deep architecture that directly operates on the mesh representation without making assumptions on shape class and structure. The architecture is trained on a large and diverse collection of rigged models, including their mesh, skeletons and corresponding skin weights. Our evaluation is three-fold: we show better results than prior art when quantitatively compared to animator rigs; qualitatively we show that our rigs can be expressively posed and animated at multiple levels of detail; and finally, we evaluate the impact of various algorithm choices on our output rigs.

cs.GR↗

arXiv2020

Neural Contours: Learning to Draw Lines from 3D Shapes

This paper introduces a method for learning to generate line drawings from 3D models. Our architecture incorporates a differentiable module operating on geometric features of the 3D model, and an image-based module operating on view-based shape representations. At test time, geometric and view-based reasoning are combined with the help of a neural module to create a line drawing. The model is trained on a large number of crowdsourced comparisons of line drawings. Experiments demonstrate that our method achieves significant improvements in line drawing over the state-of-the-art when evaluated on standard benchmarks, resulting in drawings that are comparable to those produced by experienced human artists.

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arXiv2019

Neural Shape Parsers for Constructive Solid Geometry

Constructive Solid Geometry (CSG) is a geometric modeling technique that defines complex shapes by recursively applying boolean operations on primitives such as spheres and cylinders. We present CSGNe, a deep network architecture that takes as input a 2D or 3D shape and outputs a CSG program that models it. Parsing shapes into CSG programs is desirable as it yields a compact and interpretable generative model. However, the task is challenging since the space of primitives and their combinations can be prohibitively large. CSGNe uses a convolutional encoder and recurrent decoder based on deep networks to map shapes to modeling instructions in a feed-forward manner and is significantly faster than bottom-up approaches. We investigate two architectures for this task --- a vanilla encoder (CNN) - decoder (RNN) and another architecture that augments the encoder with an explicit memory module based on the program execution stack. The stack augmentation improves the reconstruction quality of the generated shape and learning efficiency. Our approach is also more effective as a shape primitive detector compared to a state-of-the-art object detector. Finally, we demonstrate CSGNet can be trained on novel datasets without program annotations through policy gradient techniques.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2019

Learning Point Embeddings from Shape Repositories for Few-Shot Segmentation

User generated 3D shapes in online repositories contain rich information about surfaces, primitives, and their geometric relations, often arranged in a hierarchy. We present a framework for learning representations of 3D shapes that reflect the information present in this meta data and show that it leads to improved generalization for semantic segmentation tasks. Our approach is a point embedding network that generates a vectorial representation of the 3D points such that it reflects the grouping hierarchy and tag data. The main challenge is that the data is noisy and highly variable. To this end, we present a tree-aware metric-learning approach and demonstrate that such learned embeddings offer excellent transfer to semantic segmentation tasks, especially when training data is limited. Our approach reduces the relative error by $10.2\%$ with $8$ training examples, by $11.72\%$ with $120$ training examples on the ShapeNet semantic segmentation benchmark, in comparison to the network trained from scratch. By utilizing tag data the relative error is reduced by $12.8\%$ with $8$ training examples, in comparison to the network trained from scratch. These improvements come at no additional labeling cost as the meta data is freely available.

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arXiv2019

Predicting Animation Skeletons for 3D Articulated Models via Volumetric Nets

We present a learning method for predicting animation skeletons for input 3D models of articulated characters. In contrast to previous approaches that fit pre-defined skeleton templates or predict fixed sets of joints, our method produces an animation skeleton tailored for the structure and geometry of the input 3D model. Our architecture is based on a stack of hourglass modules trained on a large dataset of 3D rigged characters mined from the web. It operates on the volumetric representation of the input 3D shapes augmented with geometric shape features that provide additional cues for joint and bone locations. Our method also enables intuitive user control of the level-of-detail for the output skeleton. Our evaluation demonstrates that our approach predicts animation skeletons that are much more similar to the ones created by humans compared to several alternatives and baselines.

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