Learning Semantic Deformation Flows with 3D Convolutional Networks

Shape deformation requires expert user manipulation even when the object under consideration is in a high fidelity format such as a 3D mesh. It becomes even more complicated if the data is represented as a point set or a depth scan with significant self occlusions. We introduce an end-to-end solution to this tedious process using a volumetric Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) that learns deformation flows in 3D. Our network architectures take the voxelized representation of the shape and a semantic deformation intention (e.g., make more sporty) as input and generate a deformation flow at the output. We show that such deformation flows can be trivially applied to the input shape, resulting in a novel deformed version of the input without losing detail information. Our experiments show that the CNN approach achieves comparable results with state of the art methods when applied to CAD models. When applied to single frame depth scans, and partial/noisy CAD models we achieve ∼60% less error compared to the state-of-the-art.