SAOR: Single-View Articulated Object Reconstruction
Authors: Mehmet Aygun, Oisin Mac Aodha

We introduce SAOR a novel approach for estimating the 3D shape texture and viewpoint of an articulated object from a single image captured in the wild. Unlike prior approaches that rely on pre-defined category-specific 3D templates or tailored 3D skeletons SAOR learns to articulate shapes from single-view image collections with a skeleton-free part-based model without requiring any 3D object shape priors. To prevent ill-posed solutions we propose a cross-instance consistency loss that exploits disentangled object shape deformation and articulation. This is helped by a new silhouette-based sampling mechanism to enhance viewpoint diversity during training. Our method only requires estimated object silhouettes and relative depth maps from off-the-shelf pre-trained networks during training. At inference time given a single-view image it efficiently outputs an explicit mesh representation. We obtain improved qualitative and quantitative results on challenging quadruped animals compared to relevant existing work.