Evangelos Kalogerakis

Learning hatching for pen-and-ink illustration of surfaces

This article presents an algorithm for learning hatching styles from line drawings. An artist draws a single hatching illustration of a 3D object. Her strokes are analyzed to extract the following per-pixel properties: hatching level (hatching, cross-hatching, or no strokes), stroke orientation, spacing, intensity, length, and thickness. A mapping is learned from input geometric, contextual, and shading features of the 3D object to these hatching properties, using classification, regression, and clustering techniques. Then, a new illustration can be generated in the artists style, as follows. First, given a new view of a 3D object, the learned mapping is applied to synthesize target stroke properties for each pixel. A new illustration is then generated by synthesizing hatching strokes according to the target properties.

Learning 3D mesh segmentation and labeling

This paper presents a data-driven approach to simultaneous segmentation and labeling of parts in 3D meshes. An objective function is formulated as a Conditional Random Field model, with terms assessing the consistency of faces with labels, and terms between labels of neighboring faces. The objective function is learned from a collection of labeled training meshes. The algorithm uses hundreds of geometric and contextual label features and learns different types of segmentations for different tasks, without requiring manual parameter tuning. Our algorithm achieves a significant improvement in results over the state-of-the-art when evaluated on the Princeton Segmentation Benchmark, often producing segmentations and labelings comparable to those produced by humans.

A probabilistic model for component-based shape synthesis

We present an approach to synthesizing shapes from complex domains, by identifying new plausible combinations of components from existing shapes. Our primary contribution is a new generative model of component-based shape structure. The model represents probabilistic relationships between properties of shape components, and relates them to learned underlying causes of structural variability within the domain. These causes are treated as latent variables, leading to a compact representation that can be effectively learned without supervision from a set of compatibly segmented shapes. We evaluate the model on a number of shape datasets with complex structural variability and demonstrate its application to amplification of shape databases and to interactive shape synthesis.

Probabilistic reasoning for assembly-based 3D modeling

Assembly-based modeling is a promising approach to broadening the accessibility of 3D modeling. In assembly-based modeling, new models are assembled from shape components extracted from a database. A key challenge in assembly-based modeling is the identification of relevant components to be presented to the user. In this paper, we introduce a probabilistic reasoning approach to this problem. Given a repository of shapes, our approach learns a probabilistic graphical model that encodes semantic and geometric relationships among shape components. The probabilistic model is used to present components that are semantically and stylistically compatible with the 3D model that is being assembled. Our experiments indicate that the probabilistic model increases the relevance of presented components.

RisQ: recognizing smoking gestures with inertial sensors on a wristband

Smoking-induced diseases are known to be the leading cause of death in the United States. In this work, we design RisQ, a mobile solution that leverages a wristband containing a 9-axis inertial measurement unit to capture changes in the orientation of a persons arm, and a machine learning pipeline that processes this data to accurately detect smoking gestures and sessions in real-time. Our key innovations are four-fold: a) an arm trajectory-based method that extracts candidate hand-to-mouth gestures, b) a set of trajectory-based features to distinguish smoking gestures from confounding gestures including eating and drinking, c) a probabilistic model that analyzes sequences of hand-to-mouth gestures and infers which gestures are part of individual smoking sessions, and d) a method that leverages multiple IMUs placed on a persons body together with 3D animation of a persons arm to reduce burden of self-reports for labeled data collection. Our experiments show that our gesture recognition algorithm can detect smoking gestures with high accuracy (95.7%), precision (91%) and recall (81%). We also report a user study that demonstrates that we can accurately detect the number of smoking sessions with very few false positives over the period of a day, and that we can reliably extract the beginning and end of smoking session periods.

Coupling Ontologies with Graphics Content for Knowledge Driven Visualization

A great challenge in information visualization today is to provide models and software that effectively integrate the graphics content of scenes with domain-specific knowledge so that the users can effectively query, interpret, personalize and manipulate the visualized information [1]. Moreover, it is important that the intelligent visualization applications are interoperable in the semantic web environment and thus, require that the models and software supporting them integrate state-of-the-art international standards for knowledge representation, graphics and multimedia. In this paper, we present a model, a methodology and a software framework for the semantic web (Intelligent 3D Visualization Platform - I3DVP) for the development of interoperable intelligent visualization applications that support the coupling of graphics and virtual reality scenes with domain knowledge of different domains. The graphics content and the semantics of the scenes are married into a consistent and cohesive ontological model while at the same time knowledge- based techniques for the querying, manipulation, and semantic personalization of the scenes are introduced. We also provide methods for knowledge driven information visualization and visualization- aided decision making based on inference by reasoning.

Folding meshes: hierarchical mesh segmentation based on planar symmetry

Meshes representing real world objects, both artist-created and scanned, contain a high level of redundancy due to (possibly approximate) planar reflection symmetries, either global or localized to different subregions. An algorithm is presented for detecting such symmetries and segmenting the mesh into the symmetric and remaining regions. The method, inspired by techniques in Computer Vision, has foundations in robust statistics and is resilient to structured outliers which are present in the form of the non symmetric regions of the data. Also introduced is an application of the method: the folding tree data structure. The structure encodes the non redundant regions of the original mesh as well as the reflection planes and is created by the recursive application of the detection method. This structure can then be unfolded to recover the original shape. Applications include mesh compression, repair, skeletal extraction of objects of known symmetry as well as mesh processing acceleration by limiting computation to non redundant regions and propagation of results.

Robust statistical estimation of curvature on discretized surfaces

A robust statistics approach to curvature estimation on discretely sampled surfaces, namely polygon meshes and point clouds, is presented. The method exhibits accuracy, stability and consistency even for noisy, non-uniformly sampled surfaces with irregular configurations. Within an M-estimation framework, the algorithm is able to reject noise and structured outliers by sampling normal variations in an adaptively reweighted neighborhood around each point. The algorithm can be used to reliably derive higher order differential attributes and even correct noisy surface normals while preserving the fine features of the normal and curvature field. The approach is compared with state-of-the-art curvature estimation methods and shown to improve accuracy by up to an order of magnitude across ground truth test surfaces under varying tessellation densities and types as well as increasing degrees of noise. Finally, the benefits of a robust statistical estimation of curvature are illustrated by applying it to the popular applications of mesh segmentation and suggestive contour rendering.

Extracting lines of curvature from noisy point clouds

We present a robust framework for extracting lines of curvature from point clouds. First, we show a novel approach to denoising the input point cloud using robust statistical estimates of surface normal and curvature which automatically rejects outliers and corrects points by energy minimization. Then the lines of curvature are constructed on the point cloud with controllable density. Our approach is applicable to surfaces of arbitrary genus, with or without boundaries, and is statistically robust to noise and outliers while preserving sharp surface features. We show our approach to be effective over a range of synthetic and real-world input datasets with varying amounts of noise and outliers. The extraction of curvature information can benefit many applications in CAD, computer vision and graphics for point cloud shape analysis, recognition and segmentation. Here, we show the possibility of using the lines of curvature for feature-preserving mesh construction directly from noisy point clouds.

Multi-objective shape segmentation and labeling

Shape segmentations designed for different applications show significant variation in the composition of their parts. In this paper, we introduce the segmentation and labeling of shape based on the simultaneous optimization of multiple heterogenous objectives that capture application‐specific segmentation criteria. We present a number of efficient objective functions that capture useful shape adjectives (compact, flat, narrow, perpendicular, etc.) Segmentation descriptions within our framework combine multiple such objective functions with optional labels to define each part. The optimization problem is simplified by proposing weighted Voronoi partitioning as a compact and continuous parametrization of spatially embedded shape segmentations. Separation of spatially close but geodesically distant parts is made possible using multi‐dimensional scaling prior to Voronoi partitioning. Optimization begins with an initial segmentation found using the centroids of a k‐means clustering of surface elements. This partition is automatically labeled to optimize heterogeneous part objectives and the Voronoi centers and their weights optimized using Generalized Pattern Search. We illustrate our framework using several diverse segmentation applications: consistent segmentations with semantic labels, bounding volume hierarchies for path tracing, and automatic rig and clothing transfer between animation characters.