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1. DeepCAD: A Deep Generative Network for Computer-Aided Design Models

   https://doi.org/10.1109/ICCV48922.2021.00670  

   Wu, Rundi ; Zheng, Changxi ( January 2021 , The International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV))

   Deep generative models of 3D shapes have received a great deal of research interest. Yet, almost all of them generate discrete shape representations, such as voxels, point clouds, and polygon meshes. We present the first 3D generative model for a drastically different shape representation--describing a shape as a sequence of computer-aided design (CAD) operations. Unlike meshes and point clouds, CAD models encode the user creation process of 3D shapes, widely used in numerous industrial and engineering design tasks. However, the sequential and irregular structure of CAD operations poses significant challenges for existing 3D generative models. Drawing an analogy between CAD operations and natural language, we propose a CAD generative network based on the Transformer. We demonstrate the performance of our model for both shape autoencoding and random shape generation. To train our network, we create a new CAD dataset consisting of 178,238 models and their CAD construction sequences. We have made this dataset publicly available to promote future research on this topic. 

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2. A Predictive and Generative Design Approach for Three-Dimensional Mesh Shapes Using Target-Embedding Variational Autoencoder

   https://doi.org/10.1115/1.4054906  

   Li, Xingang ; Xie, Charles ; Sha, Zhenghui ( November 2022 , Journal of Mechanical Design)

   Abstract In this paper, we present a predictive and generative design approach for supporting the conceptual design of product shapes in 3D meshes. We develop a target-embedding variational autoencoder (TEVAE) neural network architecture, which consists of two modules: (1) a training module with two encoders and one decoder (E2D network) and (2) an application module performing the generative design of new 3D shapes and the prediction of a 3D shape from its silhouette. We demonstrate the utility and effectiveness of the proposed approach in the design of 3D car body and mugs. The results show that our approach can generate a large number of novel 3D shapes and successfully predict a 3D shape based on a single silhouette sketch. The resulting 3D shapes are watertight polygon meshes with high-quality surface details, which have better visualization than voxels and point clouds, and are ready for downstream engineering evaluation (e.g., drag coefficient) and prototyping (e.g., 3D printing). 

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3. LSD-StructureNet: Modeling Levels of Structural Detail in 3D Part Hierarchies

   Roberts, D ; Danielyan, A ; Chu, H ; Golparvar-Fard, M ; Forsyth, D ( October 2021 , Int. Conf. Computer Vision)

   null (Ed.)

   Generative models for 3D shapes represented by hierar- chies of parts can generate realistic and diverse sets of out- puts. However, existing models suffer from the key practi- cal limitation of modelling shapes holistically and thus can- not perform conditional sampling, i.e. they are not able to generate variants on individual parts of generated shapes without modifying the rest of the shape. This is limiting for applications such as 3D CAD design that involve adjust- ing created shapes at multiple levels of detail. To address this, we introduce LSD-StructureNet, an augmentation to the StructureNet architecture that enables re-generation of parts situated at arbitrary positions in the hierarchies of its outputs. We achieve this by learning individual, probabilis- tic conditional decoders for each hierarchy depth. We eval- uate LSD-StructureNet on the PartNet dataset, the largest dataset of 3D shapes represented by hierarchies of parts. Our results show that contrarily to existing methods, LSD- StructureNet can perform conditional sampling without im- pacting inference speed or the realism and diversity of its outputs. 

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4. SurfGen: Adversarial 3D Shape Synthesis with Explicit Surface Discriminators

   Luo, Andrew ; Li, Tianqin ; Zhang, Wen-Hao ; Lee, Tai-Sing ( October 2021 , Proceedings)

   null (Ed.)

   Recent advances in deep generative models have led to immense progress in 3D shape synthesis. While existing models are able to synthesize shapes represented as voxels, point-clouds, or implicit functions, these methods only indirectly enforce the plausibility of the final 3D shape surface. Here we present a 3D shape synthesis framework (SurfGen) that directly applies adversarial training to the object surface. Our approach uses a differentiable spherical projection layer to capture and represent the explicit zero isosurface of an implicit 3D generator as functions defined on the unit sphere. By processing the spherical representation of 3D object surfaces with a spherical CNN in an adversarial setting, our generator can better learn the statistics of natural shape surfaces. We evaluate our model on large-scale shape datasets, and demonstrate that the end-to-end trained model is capable of generating high fidelity 3D shapes with diverse topology. 

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5. DEF: deep estimation of sharp geometric features in 3D shapes

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3528223.3530140  

   Matveev, Albert ; Rakhimov, Ruslan ; Artemov, Alexey ; Bobrovskikh, Gleb ; Egiazarian, Vage ; Bogomolov, Emil ; Panozzo, Daniele ; Zorin, Denis ; Burnaev, Evgeny ( July 2022 , ACM Transactions on Graphics)

   We propose Deep Estimators of Features (DEFs), a learning-based framework for predicting sharp geometric features in sampled 3D shapes. Differently from existing data-driven methods, which reduce this problem to feature classification, we propose to regress a scalar field representing the distance from point samples to the closest feature line on local patches. Our approach is the first that scales to massive point clouds by fusing distance-to-feature estimates obtained on individual patches. We extensively evaluate our approach against related state-of-the-art methods on newly proposed synthetic and real-world 3D CAD model benchmarks. Our approach not only outperforms these (with improvements in Recall and False Positives Rates), but generalizes to real-world scans after training our model on synthetic data and fine-tuning it on a small dataset of scanned data. We demonstrate a downstream application, where we reconstruct an explicit representation of straight and curved sharp feature lines from range scan data. We make code, pre-trained models, and our training and evaluation datasets available at https://github.com/artonson/def. 

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