PatchNets: Patch-Based Generalizable Deep Implicit 3D Shape Representations

Edgar Tretschk, Ayush Tewari, Vladislav Golyanik, Michael Zollhöfer, Carsten Stoll, Christian Theobalt ;

Implicit surface representation combined with deep learning has led to impressive models which can represent detailed shapes of objects. Implicit surface representations, such as signed-distance functions, allow to represent shapes of arbitrary topologies. Since a continous function is learned, the reconstructions can also be extracted at any arbitrary resolution. However, large shape datasets such as Shapenet are required to train such models. In this paper, we present a mid-level patch-based surface representation. At the level of patches, objects across different categories share similarities, which leads to more generalizable models. We introduce a novel method to learn these patches in a canonical space, such that they are as object-agnostic as possible. We show that patches trained on one category of objects from ShapeNet can also represent detailed shapes from any other category as well. In addition, our patches can be trained using much fewer shapes, compared to existing approaches. We show several applications of our new representation, including shape interpolation and partial point cloud completion. Due to explicit control over patch extrinsics, our representation is also more controllable compared to object-level representations, which we demonstrate by non-rigidly deforming shapes. "