Abstract: A signed distance function (SDF) as the 3D shape description is one of the most effective approaches to represent 3D geometry for rendering and reconstruction. Our work is inspired by the state-of-the-art method DeepSDF [17] that learns and analyzes the 3D shape as the iso-surface of its shell and this method has shown promising results especially in the 3D shape reconstruction and compression domain. In this paper, we consider the degeneration problem of reconstruction coming from the capacity decrease of the DeepSDF model, which approximates the SDF with a neural network and a single latent code. We propose Local Geometry Code Learning (LGCL), a model that improves the original DeepSDF results by learning from a local shape geometry of the full 3D shape. We add an extra graph neural network to split the single transmittable latent code into a set of local latent codes distributed on the 3D shape. Mentioned latent codes are used to approximate the SDF in their local regions, which will alleviate the complexity of the approximation compared to the original DeepSDF. Furthermore, we introduce a new geometric loss function to facilitate the training of these local latent codes. Note that other local shape adjusting methods use the 3D voxel representation, which in turn is a problem highly difficult to solve or even is insolvable. In contrast, our architecture is based on graph processing implicitly and performs the learning regression process directly in the latent code space, thus make the proposed architecture more flexible and also simple for realization. Our experiments on 3D shape reconstruction demonstrate that our LGCL method can keep more details with a significantly smaller size of the SDF decoder and outperforms considerably the original DeepSDF method under the most important quantitative metrics.

Abstract: Color and texture are visual cues of different nature, their integration in an useful visual descriptor is not an easy problem. One way to combine both features is to compute spatial texture descriptors independently on each color channel. Another way is to do the integration at the descriptor level. In this case the problem of normalizing both cues arises. In this paper we solve the latest problem by fusing color and texture through distances in texton spaces. Textons are the attributes of image blobs and they are responsible for texture discrimination as defined in Julesz’s Texton theory. We describe them in two low-dimensional and uniform spaces, namely, shape and color. The dissimilarity between color texture images is computed by combining the distances in these two spaces. Following this approach, we propose our TCD descriptor which outperforms current state of art methods in the two different approaches mentioned above, early combination with LBP and late combination with MPEG-7. This is done on an image retrieval experiment over a highly diverse texture dataset from Corel.

Abstract: The most relevant modules of a pedestrian detector are the candidate generation and the candidate classification. The former aims at presenting image windows to the latter so that they are classified as containing a pedestrian or not. Much attention has being paid to the classification module, while candidate generation has mainly relied on (multiscale) sliding window pyramid. However, candidate generation is critical for achieving real-time. In this paper we assume a context of autonomous driving based on stereo vision. Accordingly, we evaluate the effect of taking into account the 3D information (derived from the stereo) in order to prune the hundred of thousands windows per image generated by classical pyramidal sliding window. For our study we use a multimodal (RGB, disparity) and multi-descriptor (HOG, LBP, HOG+LBP) holistic ensemble based on linear SVM. Evaluation on data from the challenging KITTI benchmark suite shows the effectiveness of using 3D information to dramatically reduce the number of candidate windows, even improving the overall pedestrian detection accuracy.