Second-order priors on the smoothness of 3D surfaces are a better model of typical scenes than first-order priors. However, stereo reconstruction using global inference algorithms, such as graph-cuts, has not been able to incorporate second-order priors because the triple cliques needed to express them yield intractable (non-submodular) optimization problems.This paper shows that inference with triple cliques can be effectively optimized. Our optimization strategy is a development of recent extensions to α-expansion, based on the "QPBO" algorithm [5,14,26]. The strategy is to repeatedly merge proposal depth maps using a novel extension of QPBO. Proposal depth maps can come from any source, for example fronto-parallel planes as in α-expansion, or indeed any existing stereo algorithm, with arbitrary parameter settings.Experimental results demonstrate the usefulness of the second-order prior and the efficacy of our optimization framework. An implementation of our stereo framework is available online [34].

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Second-order priors on the smoothness of 3D surfaces are a better model of typical scenes than first-order priors. However, stereo reconstruction using global inference algorithms, such as graph-cuts, has not been able to incorporate second-order priors because the triple cliques needed to express them yield intractable (non-submodular) optimization problems.This paper shows that inference with triple cliques can be effectively optimized. Our optimization strategy is a development of recent extensions to α-expansion, based on the "QPBO" algorithm [5,14,26]. The strategy is to repeatedly merge proposal depth maps using a novel extension of QPBO. Proposal depth maps can come from any source, for example fronto-parallel planes as in α-expansion, or indeed any existing stereo algorithm, with arbitrary parameter settings.Experimental results demonstrate the usefulness of the second-order prior and the efficacy of our optimization framework. An implementation of our stereo framework is available online [34].

We propose a novel approach to performing fine-grained 3D manipulation of image content via a convolutional neural network, which we call the Transformable Bottleneck Network (TBN). It applies given spatial transformations directly to a volumetric bottleneck within our encoderbottleneck-decoder architecture. Multi-view supervision encourages the network to learn to spatially disentangle the feature space within the bottleneck. The resulting spatial structure can be manipulated with arbitrary spatial transformations. We demonstrate the efficacy of TBNs for novel view synthesis, achieving state-of-the-art results on a challenging benchmark. We demonstrate that the bottlenecks produced by networks trained for this task contain meaningful spatial structure that allows us to intuitively perform a variety of image manipulations in 3D, well beyond the rigid transformations seen during training. These manipulations include non-uniform scaling, non-rigid warping, and combining content from different images. Finally, we extract explicit 3D structure from the bottleneck, performing impressive 3D reconstruction from a single input image. 1

This paper presents a method for vote-based 3D shape recognition and registration, in particular using mean shift on 3D pose votes in the space of direct similarity transforms for the first time. We introduce a new distance between poses in this space-the SRT distance. It is left-invariant, unlike Euclidean distance, and has a unique, closed-form mean, in contrast to Riemannian distance, so is fast to compute. We demonstrate improved performance over the state of the art in both recognition and registration on a real and challenging dataset, by comparing our distance with others in a mean shift framework, as well as with the commonly used Hough voting approach.