Shape Recovery to Communicate Rough 3D Shape by its Monocular Hand-Written Figure

Abstract

A monocular 2D hand-written figure is often used as a simple and useful medium to communicate a rough 3D shape in mind among humans in our daily life. In this article, we discuss 3D shape recovery to realize such communication between a human and a computer. In the previous work on shape recovery for object recognition, what to be recovered from an image is a detailed quantitative 3D shape that is completely consistent, in the geometric sense, to the image. On the other hand, when we assume shape recovery for man-machine communication, what to be recovered is the information about the 3D shape that is originally implied by a human. Considering this issue, we propose to recover the 3D shape from its hand-written figure interactively based on some qualitative features that would be important to describe 3D shapes in the mind of humans when they choose a monocular hand-written figure as the medium for communication. We also propose to infer the 3D shape that is not drawn in the figure from the shape recovered from the drawn part. Procedures for these two processes are also presented.