Seminar by Michael Wand on October 1 (Wednesday) at 10am in room Byron Beige
Title: Building Blocks for Shape Analysis and Synthesis
Abstract: In this talk, I would like to talk about some recent work in which we decompose geometry into elementary building blocks and subsequently reassemble these to create shape variations.
The first step is to look at partial correspondences within shapes, where parts of an object are mapped back to itself under a fixed group of transformations. From this matching information, we can compute canonical building blocks that characterize the redundancy in the shape. Further, we can infer tiling grammars that place a constraint on how the pieces found can be assembled to new compound objects if we demand certain similarity between the example geometry and newly created shapes.
From this basic framework, a number of applications can be derived, such as building context-free shape grammars for characterizing families of shapes, and interactive resizing and sculpting of composite shapes. I will discuss a common conceptual framework for these different applications and motivate how they can be derived from a few basic core principles.
Finally, I would also like to talk about some recent work in progress that aims at applying these ideas to imperfect data with ambiguous correspondences. The challenge here is to find meaningful building blocks and reassemble them into plausible shapes although correspondence information is unreliable and the extracted pieces to not match up reliably either. Our idea is to use the hypothesis of a latent simple and exact structure as a prior to regularize analysis and synthesis.
As usual, the talk will conclude with a discussion of future direction and the many open challenges.
