GenHeld: Generating and Editing Handheld Objects

Grasping is an important human activity that has long been studied in robotics, computer vision, and cognitive science. Most existing works study grasping from the perspective of synthesizing hand poses conditioned on 3D or 2D object representations. We propose GenHeld to address the inverse problem of synthesizing held objects conditioned on 3D hand model or 2D image. Given a 3D model of hand, GenHeld 3D can select a plausible held object from a large dataset using compact object representations called object codes.The selected object is then positioned and oriented to form a plausible grasp without changing hand pose. If only a 2D hand image is available, GenHeld 2D can edit this image to add or replace a held object. GenHeld 2D operates by combining the abilities of GenHeld 3D with diffusion-based image editing. Results and experiments show that we outperform baselines and can generate plausible held objects in both 2D and 3D. Our experiments demonstrate that our method achieves high quality and plausibility of held object synthesis in both 3D and 2D.

TSDF-Sampling: Efficient Sampling for Neural Surface Field using Truncated Signed Distance Field

Multi-view neural surface reconstruction has exhibited impressive results. However, a notable limitation is the prohibitively slow inference time when compared to traditional techniques, primarily attributed to the dense sampling, required to maintain the rendering quality. This paper introduces a novel approach that substantially reduces the number of samplings by incorporating the Truncated Signed Distance Field (TSDF) of the scene. While prior works have proposed importance sampling, their dependence on initial uniform samples over the entire space makes them unable to avoid performance degradation when trying to use less number of samples. In contrast, our method leverages the TSDF volume generated only by the trained views, and it proves to provide a reasonable bound on the sampling from upcoming novel views. As a result, we achieve high rendering quality by fully exploiting the continuous neural SDF estimation within the bounds given by the TSDF volume. Notably, our method is the first approach that can be robustly plug-and-play into a diverse array of neural surface field models, as long as they use the volume rendering technique. Our empirical results show an 11-fold increase in inference speed without compromising performance. The result videos are available at our project page: https://tsdf-sampling.github.io/