arXiv subjects

Yu-Shen Liu

Publications and source records attributed to Yu-Shen Liu.

At least 91 records · Page 5Linked to original sources

arXiv2021

Multi-View Partial (MVP) Point Cloud Challenge 2021 on Completion and Registration: Methods and Results

As real-scanned point clouds are mostly partial due to occlusions and viewpoints, reconstructing complete 3D shapes based on incomplete observations becomes a fundamental problem for computer vision. With a single incomplete point cloud, it becomes the partial point cloud completion problem. Given multiple different observations, 3D reconstruction can be addressed by performing partial-to-partial point cloud registration. Recently, a large-scale Multi-View Partial (MVP) point cloud dataset has been released, which consists of over 100,000 high-quality virtual-scanned partial point clouds. Based on the MVP dataset, this paper reports methods and results in the Multi-View Partial Point Cloud Challenge 2021 on Completion and Registration. In total, 128 participants registered for the competition, and 31 teams made valid submissions. The top-ranked solutions will be analyzed, and then we will discuss future research directions.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

SnowflakeNet: Point Cloud Completion by Snowflake Point Deconvolution with Skip-Transformer

Point cloud completion aims to predict a complete shape in high accuracy from its partial observation. However, previous methods usually suffered from discrete nature of point cloud and unstructured prediction of points in local regions, which makes it hard to reveal fine local geometric details on the complete shape. To resolve this issue, we propose SnowflakeNet with Snowflake Point Deconvolution (SPD) to generate the complete point clouds. The SnowflakeNet models the generation of complete point clouds as the snowflake-like growth of points in 3D space, where the child points are progressively generated by splitting their parent points after each SPD. Our insight of revealing detailed geometry is to introduce skip-transformer in SPD to learn point splitting patterns which can fit local regions the best. Skip-transformer leverages attention mechanism to summarize the splitting patterns used in the previous SPD layer to produce the splitting in the current SPD layer. The locally compact and structured point cloud generated by SPD is able to precisely capture the structure characteristic of 3D shape in local patches, which enables the network to predict highly detailed geometries, such as smooth regions, sharp edges and corners. Our experimental results outperform the state-of-the-art point cloud completion methods under widely used benchmarks. Code will be available at https://github.com/AllenXiangX/SnowflakeNet.

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arXiv2021

Hierarchical View Predictor: Unsupervised 3D Global Feature Learning through Hierarchical Prediction among Unordered Views

Unsupervised learning of global features for 3D shape analysis is an important research challenge because it avoids manual effort for supervised information collection. In this paper, we propose a view-based deep learning model called Hierarchical View Predictor (HVP) to learn 3D shape features from unordered views in an unsupervised manner. To mine highly discriminative information from unordered views, HVP performs a novel hierarchical view prediction over a view pair, and aggregates the knowledge learned from the predictions in all view pairs into a global feature. In a view pair, we pose hierarchical view prediction as the task of hierarchically predicting a set of image patches in a current view from its complementary set of patches, and in addition, completing the current view and its opposite from any one of the two sets of patches. Hierarchical prediction, in patches to patches, patches to view and view to view, facilitates HVP to effectively learn the structure of 3D shapes from the correlation between patches in the same view and the correlation between a pair of complementary views. In addition, the employed implicit aggregation over all view pairs enables HVP to learn global features from unordered views. Our results show that HVP can outperform state-of-the-art methods under large-scale 3D shape benchmarks in shape classification and retrieval.

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arXiv2021

Unsupervised Learning of Fine Structure Generation for 3D Point Clouds by 2D Projection Matching

Learning to generate 3D point clouds without 3D supervision is an important but challenging problem. Current solutions leverage various differentiable renderers to project the generated 3D point clouds onto a 2D image plane, and train deep neural networks using the per-pixel difference with 2D ground truth images. However, these solutions are still struggling to fully recover fine structures of 3D shapes, such as thin tubes or planes. To resolve this issue, we propose an unsupervised approach for 3D point cloud generation with fine structures. Specifically, we cast 3D point cloud learning as a 2D projection matching problem. Rather than using entire 2D silhouette images as a regular pixel supervision, we introduce structure adaptive sampling to randomly sample 2D points within the silhouettes as an irregular point supervision, which alleviates the consistency issue of sampling from different view angles. Our method pushes the neural network to generate a 3D point cloud whose 2D projections match the irregular point supervision from different view angles. Our 2D projection matching approach enables the neural network to learn more accurate structure information than using the per-pixel difference, especially for fine and thin 3D structures. Our method can recover fine 3D structures from 2D silhouette images at different resolutions, and is robust to different sampling methods and point number in irregular point supervision. Our method outperforms others under widely used benchmarks. Our code, data and models are available at https://github.com/chenchao15/2D\_projection\_matching.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

PMP-Net: Point Cloud Completion by Learning Multi-step Point Moving Paths

The task of point cloud completion aims to predict the missing part for an incomplete 3D shape. A widely used strategy is to generate a complete point cloud from the incomplete one. However, the unordered nature of point clouds will degrade the generation of high-quality 3D shapes, as the detailed topology and structure of discrete points are hard to be captured by the generative process only using a latent code. In this paper, we address the above problem by reconsidering the completion task from a new perspective, where we formulate the prediction as a point cloud deformation process. Specifically, we design a novel neural network, named PMP-Net, to mimic the behavior of an earth mover. It moves each point of the incomplete input to complete the point cloud, where the total distance of point moving paths (PMP) should be shortest. Therefore, PMP-Net predicts a unique point moving path for each point according to the constraint of total point moving distances. As a result, the network learns a strict and unique correspondence on point-level, which can capture the detailed topology and structure relationships between the incomplete shape and the complete target, and thus improves the quality of the predicted complete shape. We conduct comprehensive experiments on Completion3D and PCN datasets, which demonstrate our advantages over the state-of-the-art point cloud completion methods.

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arXiv2021

Cycle4Completion: Unpaired Point Cloud Completion using Cycle Transformation with Missing Region Coding

In this paper, we present a novel unpaired point cloud completion network, named Cycle4Completion, to infer the complete geometries from a partial 3D object. Previous unpaired completion methods merely focus on the learning of geometric correspondence from incomplete shapes to complete shapes, and ignore the learning in the reverse direction, which makes them suffer from low completion accuracy due to the limited 3D shape understanding ability. To address this problem, we propose two simultaneous cycle transformations between the latent spaces of complete shapes and incomplete ones. The insight of cycle transformation is to promote networks to understand 3D shapes by learning to generate complete or incomplete shapes from their complementary ones. Specifically, the first cycle transforms shapes from incomplete domain to complete domain, and then projects them back to the incomplete domain. This process learns the geometric characteristic of complete shapes, and maintains the shape consistency between the complete prediction and the incomplete input. Similarly, the inverse cycle transformation starts from complete domain to incomplete domain, and goes back to complete domain to learn the characteristic of incomplete shapes. We provide a comprehensive evaluation in experiments, which shows that our model with the learned bidirectional geometry correspondence outperforms state-of-the-art unpaired completion methods.

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arXiv2021

Neural-Pull: Learning Signed Distance Functions from Point Clouds by Learning to Pull Space onto Surfaces

Reconstructing continuous surfaces from 3D point clouds is a fundamental operation in 3D geometry processing. Several recent state-of-the-art methods address this problem using neural networks to learn signed distance functions (SDFs). In this paper, we introduce \textit{Neural-Pull}, a new approach that is simple and leads to high quality SDFs. Specifically, we train a neural network to pull query 3D locations to their closest points on the surface using the predicted signed distance values and the gradient at the query locations, both of which are computed by the network itself. The pulling operation moves each query location with a stride given by the distance predicted by the network. Based on the sign of the distance, this may move the query location along or against the direction of the gradient of the SDF. This is a differentiable operation that allows us to update the signed distance value and the gradient simultaneously during training. Our outperforming results under widely used benchmarks demonstrate that we can learn SDFs more accurately and flexibly for surface reconstruction and single image reconstruction than the state-of-the-art methods.

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arXiv2020

Fine-Grained 3D Shape Classification with Hierarchical Part-View Attentions

Fine-grained 3D shape classification is important for shape understanding and analysis, which poses a challenging research problem. However, the studies on the fine-grained 3D shape classification have rarely been explored, due to the lack of fine-grained 3D shape benchmarks. To address this issue, we first introduce a new 3D shape dataset (named FG3D dataset) with fine-grained class labels, which consists of three categories including airplane, car and chair. Each category consists of several subcategories at a fine-grained level. According to our experiments under this fine-grained dataset, we find that state-of-the-art methods are significantly limited by the small variance among subcategories in the same category. To resolve this problem, we further propose a novel fine-grained 3D shape classification method named FG3D-Net to capture the fine-grained local details of 3D shapes from multiple rendered views. Specifically, we first train a Region Proposal Network (RPN) to detect the generally semantic parts inside multiple views under the benchmark of generally semantic part detection. Then, we design a hierarchical part-view attention aggregation module to learn a global shape representation by aggregating generally semantic part features, which preserves the local details of 3D shapes. The part-view attention module hierarchically leverages part-level and view-level attention to increase the discriminability of our features. The part-level attention highlights the important parts in each view while the view-level attention highlights the discriminative views among all the views of the same object. In addition, we integrate a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) to capture the spatial relationships among sequential views from different viewpoints. Our results under the fine-grained 3D shape dataset show that our method outperforms other state-of-the-art methods.

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arXiv2020

DRWR: A Differentiable Renderer without Rendering for Unsupervised 3D Structure Learning from Silhouette Images

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.

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arXiv2020

Point Cloud Completion by Skip-attention Network with Hierarchical Folding

Point cloud completion aims to infer the complete geometries for missing regions of 3D objects from incomplete ones. Previous methods usually predict the complete point cloud based on the global shape representation extracted from the incomplete input. However, the global representation often suffers from the information loss of structure details on local regions of incomplete point cloud. To address this problem, we propose Skip-Attention Network (SA-Net) for 3D point cloud completion. Our main contributions lie in the following two-folds. First, we propose a skip-attention mechanism to effectively exploit the local structure details of incomplete point clouds during the inference of missing parts. The skip-attention mechanism selectively conveys geometric information from the local regions of incomplete point clouds for the generation of complete ones at different resolutions, where the skip-attention reveals the completion process in an interpretable way. Second, in order to fully utilize the selected geometric information encoded by skip-attention mechanism at different resolutions, we propose a novel structure-preserving decoder with hierarchical folding for complete shape generation. The hierarchical folding preserves the structure of complete point cloud generated in upper layer by progressively detailing the local regions, using the skip-attentioned geometry at the same resolution. We conduct comprehensive experiments on ShapeNet and KITTI datasets, which demonstrate that the proposed SA-Net outperforms the state-of-the-art point cloud completion methods.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2020

LRC-Net: Learning Discriminative Features on Point Clouds by Encoding Local Region Contexts

Learning discriminative feature directly on point clouds is still challenging in the understanding of 3D shapes. Recent methods usually partition point clouds into local region sets, and then extract the local region features with fixed-size CNN or MLP, and finally aggregate all individual local features into a global feature using simple max pooling. However, due to the irregularity and sparsity in sampled point clouds, it is hard to encode the fine-grained geometry of local regions and their spatial relationships when only using the fixed-size filters and individual local feature integration, which limit the ability to learn discriminative features. To address this issue, we present a novel Local-Region-Context Network (LRC-Net), to learn discriminative features on point clouds by encoding the fine-grained contexts inside and among local regions simultaneously. LRC-Net consists of two main modules. The first module, named intra-region context encoding, is designed for capturing the geometric correlation inside each local region by novel variable-size convolution filter. The second module, named inter-region context encoding, is proposed for integrating the spatial relationships among local regions based on spatial similarity measures. Experimental results show that LRC-Net is competitive with state-of-the-art methods in shape classification and shape segmentation applications.

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arXiv2020

SeqXY2SeqZ: Structure Learning for 3D Shapes by Sequentially Predicting 1D Occupancy Segments From 2D Coordinates

Structure learning for 3D shapes is vital for 3D computer vision. State-of-the-art methods show promising results by representing shapes using implicit functions in 3D that are learned using discriminative neural networks. However, learning implicit functions requires dense and irregular sampling in 3D space, which also makes the sampling methods affect the accuracy of shape reconstruction during test. To avoid dense and irregular sampling in 3D, we propose to represent shapes using 2D functions, where the output of the function at each 2D location is a sequence of line segments inside the shape. Our approach leverages the power of functional representations, but without the disadvantage of 3D sampling. Specifically, we use a voxel tubelization to represent a voxel grid as a set of tubes along any one of the X, Y, or Z axes. Each tube can be indexed by its 2D coordinates on the plane spanned by the other two axes. We further simplify each tube into a sequence of occupancy segments. Each occupancy segment consists of successive voxels occupied by the shape, which leads to a simple representation of its 1D start and end location. Given the 2D coordinates of the tube and a shape feature as condition, this representation enables us to learn 3D shape structures by sequentially predicting the start and end locations of each occupancy segment in the tube. We implement this approach using a Seq2Seq model with attention, called SeqXY2SeqZ, which learns the mapping from a sequence of 2D coordinates along two arbitrary axes to a sequence of 1D locations along the third axis. SeqXY2SeqZ not only benefits from the regularity of voxel grids in training and testing, but also achieves high memory efficiency. Our experiments show that SeqXY2SeqZ outperforms the state-ofthe-art methods under widely used benchmarks.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2019

Fast Low-rank Metric Learning for Large-scale and High-dimensional Data

Low-rank metric learning aims to learn better discrimination of data subject to low-rank constraints. It keeps the intrinsic low-rank structure of datasets and reduces the time cost and memory usage in metric learning. However, it is still a challenge for current methods to handle datasets with both high dimensions and large numbers of samples. To address this issue, we present a novel fast low-rank metric learning (FLRML) method.FLRML casts the low-rank metric learning problem into an unconstrained optimization on the Stiefel manifold, which can be efficiently solved by searching along the descent curves of the manifold.FLRML significantly reduces the complexity and memory usage in optimization, which makes the method scalable to both high dimensions and large numbers of samples.Furthermore, we introduce a mini-batch version of FLRML to make the method scalable to larger datasets which are hard to be loaded and decomposed in limited memory. The outperforming experimental results show that our method is with high accuracy and much faster than the state-of-the-art methods under several benchmarks with large numbers of high-dimensional data. Code has been made available at https://github.com/highan911/FLRML

cs.LG↗

arXiv2019

Point2SpatialCapsule: Aggregating Features and Spatial Relationships of Local Regions on Point Clouds using Spatial-aware Capsules

Learning discriminative shape representation directly on point clouds is still challenging in 3D shape analysis and understanding. Recent studies usually involve three steps: first splitting a point cloud into some local regions, then extracting corresponding feature of each local region, and finally aggregating all individual local region features into a global feature as shape representation using simple max pooling. However, such pooling-based feature aggregation methods do not adequately take the spatial relationships between local regions into account, which greatly limits the ability to learn discriminative shape representation. To address this issue, we propose a novel deep learning network, named Point2SpatialCapsule, for aggregating features and spatial relationships of local regions on point clouds, which aims to learn more discriminative shape representation. Compared with traditional max-pooling based feature aggregation networks, Point2SpatialCapsule can explicitly learn not only geometric features of local regions but also spatial relationships among them. It consists of two modules. To resolve the disorder problem of local regions, the first module, named geometric feature aggregation, is designed to aggregate the local region features into the learnable cluster centers, which explicitly encodes the spatial locations from the original 3D space. The second module, named spatial relationship aggregation, is proposed for further aggregating clustered features and the spatial relationships among them in the feature space using the spatial-aware capsules developed in this paper. Compared to the previous capsule network based methods, the feature routing on the spatial-aware capsules can learn more discriminative spatial relationships among local regions for point clouds, which establishes a direct mapping between log priors and the spatial locations through feature clusters.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2019

L2G Auto-encoder: Understanding Point Clouds by Local-to-Global Reconstruction with Hierarchical Self-Attention

Auto-encoder is an important architecture to understand point clouds in an encoding and decoding procedure of self reconstruction. Current auto-encoder mainly focuses on the learning of global structure by global shape reconstruction, while ignoring the learning of local structures. To resolve this issue, we propose Local-to-Global auto-encoder (L2G-AE) to simultaneously learn the local and global structure of point clouds by local to global reconstruction. Specifically, L2G-AE employs an encoder to encode the geometry information of multiple scales in a local region at the same time. In addition, we introduce a novel hierarchical self-attention mechanism to highlight the important points, scales and regions at different levels in the information aggregation of the encoder. Simultaneously, L2G-AE employs a recurrent neural network (RNN) as decoder to reconstruct a sequence of scales in a local region, based on which the global point cloud is incrementally reconstructed. Our outperforming results in shape classification, retrieval and upsampling show that L2G-AE can understand point clouds better than state-of-the-art methods.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2019

ShapeCaptioner: Generative Caption Network for 3D Shapes by Learning a Mapping from Parts Detected in Multiple Views to Sentences

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.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2019

Multi-Angle Point Cloud-VAE: Unsupervised Feature Learning for 3D Point Clouds from Multiple Angles by Joint Self-Reconstruction and Half-to-Half Prediction

Unsupervised feature learning for point clouds has been vital for large-scale point cloud understanding. Recent deep learning based methods depend on learning global geometry from self-reconstruction. However, these methods are still suffering from ineffective learning of local geometry, which significantly limits the discriminability of learned features. To resolve this issue, we propose MAP-VAE to enable the learning of global and local geometry by jointly leveraging global and local self-supervision. To enable effective local self-supervision, we introduce multi-angle analysis for point clouds. In a multi-angle scenario, we first split a point cloud into a front half and a back half from each angle, and then, train MAP-VAE to learn to predict a back half sequence from the corresponding front half sequence. MAP-VAE performs this half-to-half prediction using RNN to simultaneously learn each local geometry and the spatial relationship among them. In addition, MAP-VAE also learns global geometry via self-reconstruction, where we employ a variational constraint to facilitate novel shape generation. The outperforming results in four shape analysis tasks show that MAP-VAE can learn more discriminative global or local features than the state-of-the-art methods.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2019

Parts4Feature: Learning 3D Global Features from Generally Semantic Parts in Multiple Views

Deep learning has achieved remarkable results in 3D shape analysis by learning global shape features from the pixel-level over multiple views. Previous methods, however, compute low-level features for entire views without considering part-level information. In contrast, we propose a deep neural network, called Parts4Feature, to learn 3D global features from part-level information in multiple views. We introduce a novel definition of generally semantic parts, which Parts4Feature learns to detect in multiple views from different 3D shape segmentation benchmarks. A key idea of our architecture is that it transfers the ability to detect semantically meaningful parts in multiple views to learn 3D global features. Parts4Feature achieves this by combining a local part detection branch and a global feature learning branch with a shared region proposal module. The global feature learning branch aggregates the detected parts in terms of learned part patterns with a novel multi-attention mechanism, while the region proposal module enables locally and globally discriminative information to be promoted by each other. We demonstrate that Parts4Feature outperforms the state-of-the-art under three large-scale 3D shape benchmarks.

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