Unsupervised Pose-Aware Part Decomposition for Man-Made Articulated Objects

Yuki Kawana, Yusuke Mukuta, Tatsuya Harada ;

"Man-made articulated objects exist widely in the real world. However, previous methods for unsupervised part decomposition are unsuitable for such objects because they assume a spatially fixed part location, resulting in inconsistent part parsing. In this paper, we propose PPD (unsupervised Pose-aware Part Decomposition) to address a novel setting that explicitly targets man-made articulated objects with mechanical joints, considering the part poses in part parsing. As an analysis-by-synthesis approach, We show that category-common prior learning for both part shapes and poses facilitates the unsupervised learning of (1) part parsing with abstracted part shapes, and (2) part poses as joint parameters under single-frame shape supervision. We evaluate our method on synthetic and real datasets, and we show that it outperforms previous works in consistent part parsing of the articulated objects based on comparable part pose estimation performance to the supervised baseline."