LAUSR

Spatially localized deformation components are very useful for shape analysis and synthesis in 3D geometry processing. Several methods have recently been developed, with an aim to extract intuitive and interpretable deformation components. However, these techniques suffer from fundamental limitations especially for meshes with noise or large-scale nonlinear deformations, and may not always be able to identify important deformation components. In this paper we propose a novel mesh-based variational autoencoder architecture that is able to cope with meshes with irregular connectivity and nonlinear deformations. To help localize deformations, we introduce sparse regularization along with spectral graph convolutional operations. Through modifying the regularization formulation and allowing dynamic change of sparsity ranges, we improve the visual quality and reconstruction ability. Our system also provides a nonlinear approach to reconstruction of meshes using the extracted basis, which is more effective than the current linear combination approach. We further develop a neural shape editing method, achieving shape editing and deformation component extraction in a unified framework and ensuring plausibility of the edited shapes. Extensive experiments show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both qualitative and quantitative evaluations. We also demonstrate the effectiveness of our method for neural shape editing.