We present Neural Shape Deformation Priors, a novel method for shape manipulation that predicts mesh deformations of non-rigid objects from user-provided handle movements. State-of-the-art methods cast this problem as an optimization task, where the input source mesh is iteratively deformed to minimize an objective function according to hand-crafted regularizers such as ARAP. In this work, we learn the deformation behavior based on the underlying geometric properties of a shape, while leveraging a large-scale dataset containing a diverse set of non-rigid deformations. Specifically, given a source mesh and desired target locations of handles that describe the partial surface deformation, we predict a continuous deformation field that is defined in 3D space to describe the space deformation. To this end, we introduce transformer-based deformation networks that represent a shape deformation as a composition of local surface deformations. It learns a set of local latent codes anchored in 3D space, from which we can learn a set of continuous deformation functions for local surfaces. Our method can be applied to challenging deformations and generalizes well to unseen deformations. We validate our approach in experiments using the DeformingThing4D dataset, and compare to both classic optimization-based and recent neural network-based methods.

Tactile perception is essential for human interaction with the environment and is becoming increasingly crucial in robotics. Tactile sensors like the BioTac mimic human fingertips and provide detailed interaction data. Despite its utility in applications like slip detection and object identification, this sensor is now deprecated, making many existing datasets obsolete. This article introduces a novel method for translating data between tactile sensors by exploiting sensor deformation information rather than output signals. We demonstrate the approach by translating BioTac signals into the DIGIT sensor. Our framework consists of three steps: first, converting signal data into corresponding 3D deformation meshes; second, translating these 3D deformation meshes from one sensor to another; and third, generating output images using the converted meshes. Our approach enables the continued use of valuable datasets.

We present Neural Shape Deformation Priors, a novel method for shape manipulation that predicts mesh deformations of non-rigid objects from user-provided handle movements. State-of-the-art methods cast this problem as an optimization task, where the input source mesh is iteratively deformed to minimize an objective function according to hand-crafted regularizers such as ARAP. In this work, we learn the deformation behavior based on the underlying geometric properties of a shape, while leveraging a large-scale dataset containing a diverse set of non-rigid deformations. Specifically, given a source mesh and desired target locations of handles that describe the partial surface deformation, we predict a continuous deformation field that is defined in 3D space to describe the space deformation. To this end, we introduce transformer-based deformation networks that represent a shape deformation as a composition of local surface deformations. It learns a set of local latent codes anchored in 3D space, from which we can learn a set of continuous deformation functions for local surfaces.