Bridging Formal Shape Models and Deep Learning: A Novel Fusion for Understanding 3D Objects

This article describes a novel fusion of a generative formal model for three-dimensional (3D) shapes with deep learning (DL) methods to understand the geometric structure of 3D objects and the relationships between their components, given a collection of unorganized point cloud measurements. Formal 3D shape models are implemented as shape grammar programs written in Procedural Shape Modeling Language (PSML). Users write PSML programs to describe complex objects, and DL networks estimate the configured free parameters of the program to generate 3D shapes. Users write PSML programs to enforce fundamental rules that define an object class and encode object attributes, including shapes, components, size, position, etc., into a parametric representation of objects. This fusion of the generative model with DL offers artificial intelligence (AI) models an opportunity to better understand the geometric organization of objects in terms of their components and their relationships to other objects. This approach allows human-in-the-loop control over DL estimates by specifying lists of candidate objects, the shape variations that each object can exhibit, and the level of detail or, equivalently, dimension of the latent representation of the shape. The results demonstrate the advantages of the proposed method over competing approaches.