NASM: Neural Anisotropic Surface Meshing

This paper introduces a new learning-based method, NASM, for anisotropic surface meshing. Our key idea is to propose a graph neural network to embed an input mesh into a high-dimensional (high-d) Euclidean embedding space to preserve curvature-based anisotropic metric by using a dot product loss between high-d edge vectors. This can dramatically reduce the computational time and increase the scalability. Then, we propose a novel feature-sensitive remeshing on the generated high-d embedding to automatically capture sharp geometric features. We define a high-d normal metric, and then derive an automatic differentiation on a high-d centroidal Voronoi tessellation (CVT) optimization with the normal metric to simultaneously preserve geometric features and curvature anisotropy that exhibit in the original 3D shapes. To our knowledge, this is the first time that a deep learning framework and a large dataset are proposed to construct a high-d Euclidean embedding space for 3D anisotropic surface meshing. Experimental results are evaluated and compared with the state-of-the-art in anisotropic surface meshing on a large number of surface models from Thingi10K dataset as well as tested on extensive unseen 3D shapes from Multi-Garment Network dataset and FAUST human dataset.

Monge-Ampere Regularization for Learning Arbitrary Shapes from Point Clouds

As commonly used implicit geometry representations, the signed distance function (SDF) is limited to modeling watertight shapes, while the unsigned distance function (UDF) is capable of representing various surfaces. However, its inherent theoretical shortcoming, i.e., the non-differentiability at the zero level set, would result in sub-optimal reconstruction quality. In this paper, we propose the scaled-squared distance function (S$^{2}$DF), a novel implicit surface representation for modeling arbitrary surface types. S$^{2}$DF does not distinguish between inside and outside regions while effectively addressing the non-differentiability issue of UDF at the zero level set. We demonstrate that S$^{2}$DF satisfies a second-order partial differential equation of Monge-Ampere-type, allowing us to develop a learning pipeline that leverages a novel Monge-Ampere regularization to directly learn S$^{2}$DF from raw unoriented point clouds without supervision from ground-truth S$^{2}$DF values. Extensive experiments across multiple datasets show that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art supervised approaches that require ground-truth surface information as supervision for training. The code will be publicly available at https://github.com/chuanxiang-yang/S2DF.

VistaDream: Sampling multiview consistent images for single-view scene reconstruction

In this paper, we propose VistaDream a novel framework to reconstruct a 3D scene from a single-view image. Recent diffusion models enable generating high-quality novel-view images from a single-view input image. Most existing methods only concentrate on building the consistency between the input image and the generated images while losing the consistency between the generated images. VistaDream addresses this problem by a two-stage pipeline. In the first stage, VistaDream begins with building a global coarse 3D scaffold by zooming out a little step with inpainted boundaries and an estimated depth map. Then, on this global scaffold, we use iterative diffusion-based RGB-D inpainting to generate novel-view images to inpaint the holes of the scaffold. In the second stage, we further enhance the consistency between the generated novel-view images by a novel training-free Multiview Consistency Sampling (MCS) that introduces multi-view consistency constraints in the reverse sampling process of diffusion models. Experimental results demonstrate that without training or fine-tuning existing diffusion models, VistaDream achieves consistent and high-quality novel view synthesis using just single-view images and outperforms baseline methods by a large margin. The code, videos, and interactive demos are available at https://vistadream-project-page.github.io/.

Parameterize Structure with Differentiable Template for 3D Shape Generation

Structural representation is crucial for reconstructing and generating editable 3D shapes with part semantics. Recent 3D shape generation works employ complicated networks and structure definitions relying on hierarchical annotations and pay less attention to the details inside parts. In this paper, we propose the method that parameterizes the shared structure in the same category using a differentiable template and corresponding fixed-length parameters. Specific parameters are fed into the template to calculate cuboids that indicate a concrete shape. We utilize the boundaries of three-view drawings of each cuboid to further describe the inside details. Shapes are represented with the parameters and three-view details inside cuboids, from which the SDF can be calculated to recover the object. Benefiting from our fixed-length parameters and three-view details, our networks for reconstruction and generation are simple and effective to learn the latent space. Our method can reconstruct or generate diverse shapes with complicated details, and interpolate them smoothly. Extensive evaluations demonstrate the superiority of our method on reconstruction from point cloud, generation, and interpolation.

Analysis and Benchmarking of Extending Blind Face Image Restoration to Videos

Recent progress in blind face restoration has resulted in producing high-quality restored results for static images. However, efforts to extend these advancements to video scenarios have been minimal, partly because of the absence of benchmarks that allow for a comprehensive and fair comparison. In this work, we first present a fair evaluation benchmark, in which we first introduce a Real-world Low-Quality Face Video benchmark (RFV-LQ), evaluate several leading image-based face restoration algorithms, and conduct a thorough systematical analysis of the benefits and challenges associated with extending blind face image restoration algorithms to degraded face videos. Our analysis identifies several key issues, primarily categorized into two aspects: significant jitters in facial components and noise-shape flickering between frames. To address these issues, we propose a Temporal Consistency Network (TCN) cooperated with alignment smoothing to reduce jitters and flickers in restored videos. TCN is a flexible component that can be seamlessly plugged into the most advanced face image restoration algorithms, ensuring the quality of image-based restoration is maintained as closely as possible. Extensive experiments have been conducted to evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed TCN and alignment smoothing operation. Project page: https://wzhouxiff.github.io/projects/FIR2FVR/FIR2FVR.

PVP-Recon: Progressive View Planning via Warping Consistency for Sparse-View Surface Reconstruction

Neural implicit representations have revolutionized dense multi-view surface reconstruction, yet their performance significantly diminishes with sparse input views. A few pioneering works have sought to tackle the challenge of sparse-view reconstruction by leveraging additional geometric priors or multi-scene generalizability. However, they are still hindered by the imperfect choice of input views, using images under empirically determined viewpoints to provide considerable overlap. We propose PVP-Recon, a novel and effective sparse-view surface reconstruction method that progressively plans the next best views to form an optimal set of sparse viewpoints for image capturing. PVP-Recon starts initial surface reconstruction with as few as 3 views and progressively adds new views which are determined based on a novel warping score that reflects the information gain of each newly added view. This progressive view planning progress is interleaved with a neural SDF-based reconstruction module that utilizes multi-resolution hash features, enhanced by a progressive training scheme and a directional Hessian loss. Quantitative and qualitative experiments on three benchmark datasets show that our framework achieves high-quality reconstruction with a constrained input budget and outperforms existing baselines.

NESI: Shape Representation via Neural Explicit Surface Intersection

Compressed representations of 3D shapes that are compact, accurate, and can be processed efficiently directly in compressed form, are extremely useful for digital media applications. Recent approaches in this space focus on learned implicit or parametric representations. While implicits are well suited for tasks such as in-out queries, they lack natural 2D parameterization, complicating tasks such as texture or normal mapping. Conversely, parametric representations support the latter tasks but are ill-suited for occupancy queries. We propose a novel learned alternative to these approaches, based on intersections of localized explicit, or height-field, surfaces. Since explicits can be trivially expressed both implicitly and parametrically, NESI directly supports a wider range of processing operations than implicit alternatives, including occupancy queries and parametric access. We represent input shapes using a collection of differently oriented height-field bounded half-spaces combined using volumetric Boolean intersections. We first tightly bound each input using a pair of oppositely oriented height-fields, forming a Double Height-Field (DHF) Hull. We refine this hull by intersecting it with additional localized height-fields (HFs) that capture surface regions in its interior. We minimize the number of HFs necessary to accurately capture each input and compactly encode both the DHF hull and the local HFs as neural functions defined over subdomains of R^2. This reduced dimensionality encoding delivers high-quality compact approximations. Given similar parameter count, or storage capacity, NESI significantly reduces approximation error compared to the state of the art, especially at lower parameter counts.

Language-Augmented Symbolic Planner for Open-World Task Planning

Enabling robotic agents to perform complex long-horizon tasks has been a long-standing goal in robotics and artificial intelligence (AI). Despite the potential shown by large language models (LLMs), their planning capabilities remain limited to short-horizon tasks and they are unable to replace the symbolic planning approach. Symbolic planners, on the other hand, may encounter execution errors due to their common assumption of complete domain knowledge which is hard to manually prepare for an open-world setting. In this paper, we introduce a Language-Augmented Symbolic Planner (LASP) that integrates pre-trained LLMs to enable conventional symbolic planners to operate in an open-world environment where only incomplete knowledge of action preconditions, objects, and properties is initially available. In case of execution errors, LASP can utilize the LLM to diagnose the cause of the error based on the observation and interact with the environment to incrementally build up its knowledge base necessary for accomplishing the given tasks. Experiments demonstrate that LASP is proficient in solving planning problems in the open-world setting, performing well even in situations where there are multiple gaps in the knowledge.

DICE: End-to-end Deformation Capture of Hand-Face Interactions from a Single Image

Reconstructing 3D hand-face interactions with deformations from a single image is a challenging yet crucial task with broad applications in AR, VR, and gaming. The challenges stem from self-occlusions during single-view hand-face interactions, diverse spatial relationships between hands and face, complex deformations, and the ambiguity of the single-view setting. The first and only method for hand-face interaction recovery, Decaf, introduces a global fitting optimization guided by contact and deformation estimation networks trained on studio-collected data with 3D annotations. However, Decaf suffers from a time-consuming optimization process and limited generalization capability due to its reliance on 3D annotations of hand-face interaction data. To address these issues, we present DICE, the first end-to-end method for Deformation-aware hand-face Interaction reCovEry from a single image. DICE estimates the poses of hands and faces, contacts, and deformations simultaneously using a Transformer-based architecture. It features disentangling the regression of local deformation fields and global mesh vertex locations into two network branches, enhancing deformation and contact estimation for precise and robust hand-face mesh recovery. To improve generalizability, we propose a weakly-supervised training approach that augments the training set using in-the-wild images without 3D ground-truth annotations, employing the depths of 2D keypoints estimated by off-the-shelf models and adversarial priors of poses for supervision. Our experiments demonstrate that DICE achieves state-of-the-art performance on a standard benchmark and in-the-wild data in terms of accuracy and physical plausibility. Additionally, our method operates at an interactive rate (20 fps) on an Nvidia 4090 GPU, whereas Decaf requires more than 15 seconds for a single image. Our code will be publicly available upon publication.

MoDGS: Dynamic Gaussian Splatting from Causually-captured Monocular Videos

In this paper, we propose MoDGS, a new pipeline to render novel-view images in dynamic scenes using only casually captured monocular videos. Previous monocular dynamic NeRF or Gaussian Splatting methods strongly rely on the rapid movement of input cameras to construct multiview consistency but fail to reconstruct dynamic scenes on casually captured input videos whose cameras are static or move slowly. To address this challenging task, MoDGS adopts recent single-view depth estimation methods to guide the learning of the dynamic scene. Then, a novel 3D-aware initialization method is proposed to learn a reasonable deformation field and a new robust depth loss is proposed to guide the learning of dynamic scene geometry. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that MoDGS is able to render high-quality novel view images of dynamic scenes from just a casually captured monocular video, which outperforms baseline methods by a significant margin.