: We develop GRASS, a Generative Recursive Autoencoder for Shape Structures, which enables structural blending between two 3D shapes. Note the discrete blending of translational symmetries (slats on the chair backs) and rotational symmetries (the swivel legs). GRASS encodes and synthesizes box structures (bottom) and part geometries (top) separately. The blending is performed on fixed-length codes learned by the unsupervised autoencoder, without any form of part correspondences, given or computed. We introduce a novel neural network architecture for encoding and synthesis of 3D shapes, particularly their structures. Our key insight is that 3D shapes are effectively characterized by their hierarchical organization of parts, which reflects fundamental intra-shape relationships such as adjacency and symmetry. We develop a recursive neural net (RvNN) based autoencoder to map a flat, unlabeled, arbitrary part layout to a compact code. The code effectively captures hierarchical structures of man-made 3D objects of varying structural complexities despite being fixed-dimensional: an associated decoder maps a code back to a full hierarchy. The learned bidirectional mapping is further tuned using an adversarial setup to yield a generative model of plausible structures, from which novel structures can be sampled. Finally, our structure synthesis framework is augmented by a second trained module that produces fine-grained part geometry, conditioned on global and local structural context, leading to a full generative pipeline for 3D shapes. We demonstrate that without supervision, our network learns meaningful structural hierarchies adhering to perceptual grouping principles, produces compact codes which enable applications such as shape classification and partial matching, and supports shape synthesis and interpolation with significant variations in topology and geometry.
REF proposed a recursive neural network based on an autoencoder to generate the hierarchical structure of shapes.
GRASS: Generative Recursive Autoencoders for Shape Structures
ACM Transactions on Graphics (SIGGRAPH 2017) 36, 4, Article 52
Computer Science