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Abstract Deep learning has been successfully used for tasks in the 2D image domain. Research on 3D computer vision and deep geometry learning has also attracted attention. Considerable achievements have been made regarding feature extraction and discrimination of 3D shapes. Following recent advances in deep generative models such as generative adversarial networks, effective generation of 3D shapes has become an active research topic. Unlike 2D images with a regular grid structure, 3D shapes have various representations, such as voxels, point clouds, meshes, and implicit functions. For deep learning of 3D shapes, shape representation has to be taken into account as there is no unified representation that can cover all tasks well. Factors such as the representativeness of geometry and topology often largely affect the quality of the generated 3D shapes. In this survey, we comprehensively review works on deep-learning-based 3D shape generation by classifying and discussing them in terms of the underlying shape representation and the architecture of the shape generator. The advantages and disadvantages of each class are further analyzed. We also consider the 3D shape datasets commonly used for shape generation. Finally, we present several potential research directions that hopefully can inspire future works on this topic.

Abstract Humans have the ability to perceive kinetic depth effects, i.e., to perceived 3D shapes from 2D projections of rotating 3D objects. This process is based on a variety of visual cues such as lighting and shading effects. However, when such cues are weak or missing, perception can become faulty, as demonstrated by the famous silhouette illusion example of the spinning dancer. Inspired by this, we establish objective and subjective evaluation models of rotated 3D objects by taking their projected 2D images as input. We investigate five different cues: ambient luminance, shading, rotation speed, perspective, and color difference between the objects and background. In the objective evaluation model, we first apply 3D reconstruction algorithms to obtain an objective reconstruction quality metric, and then use quadratic stepwise regression analysis to determine weights of depth cues to represent the reconstruction quality. In the subjective evaluation model, we use a comprehensive user study to reveal correlations with reaction time and accuracy, rotation speed, and perspective. The two evaluation models are generally consistent, and potentially of benefit to inter-disciplinary research into visual perception and 3D reconstruction.

Abstract Modeling the complete geometry of general shapes from a single image is an ill-posed problem. User hints are often incorporated to resolve ambiguities and provide guidance during the modeling process. In this work, we present a novel interactive approach for extracting high-quality freeform shapes from a single image. This is inspired by the popular lofting technique in many CAD systems, and only requires minimal user input. Given an input image, the user only needs to sketch several projected cross sections, provide a “main axis”, and specify some geometric relations. Our algorithm then automatically optimizes the common normal to the sections with respect to these constraints, and interpolates between the sections, resulting in a high-quality 3D model that conforms to both the original image and the user input. The entire modeling session is efficient and intuitive. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach based on qualitative tests on a variety of images, and quantitative comparisons with the ground truth using synthetic images.