Discovering Pattern Structure Using Differentiable Compositing

Patterns, which are collections of elements arranged in regular or near-regular arrangements, are an important graphic art form and widely used due to their elegant simplicity and aesthetic appeal. When a pattern is encoded as a flat image without the underlying structure, manually editing the pattern is tedious and challenging as one has to both preserve the individual element shapes and their original relative arrangements. State-of-the-art deep learning frameworks that operate at the pixel level are unsuitable for manipulating such patterns. Specifically, these methods can easily disturb the shapes of the individual elements or their arrangement, and thus fail to preserve the latent structures of the input patterns. We present a novel differentiable compositing operator using pattern elements and use it to discover structures, in the form of a layered representation of graphical objects, directly from raw pattern images. This operator allows us to adapt current deep learning based image methods to effectively handle patterns. We evaluate our method on a range of patterns and demonstrate superiority in the context of pattern manipulations when compared against state-of-the-art

A Perceptual Measure for Deep Single Image Camera Calibration

Most current single image camera calibration methods rely on specific image features or user input, and cannot be applied to natural images captured in uncontrolled settings. We propose directly inferring camera calibration parameters from a single image using a deep convolutional neural network. This network is trained using automatically generated samples from a large-scale panorama dataset, and considerably outperforms other methods, including recent deep learning-based approaches, in terms of standard L2 error. However, we argue that in many cases it is more important to consider how humans perceive errors in camera estimation. To this end, we conduct a large-scale human perception study where we ask users to judge the realism of 3D objects composited with and without ground truth camera calibration. Based on this study, we develop a new perceptual measure for camera calibration, and demonstrate that our deep calibration network outperforms other methods on this measure. Finally, we demonstrate the use of our calibration network for a number of applications including virtual object insertion, image retrieval and compositing.