PanoNormal: Monocular Indoor 360° Surface Normal Estimation

The presence of spherical distortion on the Equirectangular image is an acknowledged challenge in dense regression computer vision tasks, such as surface normal estimation. Recent advances in convolutional neural networks (CNNs) strive to mitigate spherical distortion but often fall short in capturing holistic structures effectively, primarily due to their fixed receptive field. On the other hand, vision transformers (ViTs) excel in establishing long-range dependencies through a global self-attention mechanism, yet they encounter limitations in preserving local details. We introduce \textit{PanoNormal}, a monocular surface normal estimation architecture designed for 360{\deg} images, which combines the strengths of CNNs and ViTs. Specifically, we employ a multi-level global self-attention scheme with the consideration of the spherical feature distribution, enhancing the comprehensive understanding of the scene. Our experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple popular 360{\deg} monocular datasets. The code and models will be released.

Sphere Face Model:A 3D Morphable Model with Hypersphere Manifold Latent Space

3D Morphable Models (3DMMs) are generative models for face shape and appearance. However, the shape parameters of traditional 3DMMs satisfy the multivariate Gaussian distribution while the identity embeddings satisfy the hypersphere distribution, and this conflict makes it challenging for face reconstruction models to preserve the faithfulness and the shape consistency simultaneously. To address this issue, we propose the Sphere Face Model(SFM), a novel 3DMM for monocular face reconstruction, which can preserve both shape fidelity and identity consistency. The core of our SFM is the basis matrix which can be used to reconstruct 3D face shapes, and the basic matrix is learned by adopting a two-stage training approach where 3D and 2D training data are used in the first and second stages, respectively. To resolve the distribution mismatch, we design a novel loss to make the shape parameters have a hyperspherical latent space. Extensive experiments show that SFM has high representation ability and shape parameter space's clustering performance. Moreover, it produces fidelity face shapes, and the shapes are consistent in challenging conditions in monocular face reconstruction.

Reconstructing Recognizable 3D Face Shapes based on 3D Morphable Models

Many recent works have reconstructed distinctive 3D face shapes by aggregating shape parameters of the same identity and separating those of different people based on parametric models (e.g., 3D morphable models (3DMMs)). However, despite the high accuracy in the face recognition task using these shape parameters, the visual discrimination of face shapes reconstructed from those parameters is unsatisfactory. The following research question has not been answered in previous works: Do discriminative shape parameters guarantee visual discrimination in represented 3D face shapes? This paper analyzes the relationship between shape parameters and reconstructed shape geometry and proposes a novel shape identity-aware regularization(SIR) loss for shape parameters, aiming at increasing discriminability in both the shape parameter and shape geometry domains. Moreover, to cope with the lack of training data containing both landmark and identity annotations, we propose a network structure and an associated training strategy to leverage mixed data containing either identity or landmark labels. We compare our method with existing methods in terms of the reconstruction error, visual distinguishability, and face recognition accuracy of the shape parameters. Experimental results show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.