Meet the winners of the 1st SHARP Challenge for reconstructing 3D scans from partial captures!

Artec 3D is proud to announce the first prize winners of the ECCV 2020 SHARP Challenge, held on August 23^rd in Glasgow, Scotland, as well as online. The contest was focused on finding effective solutions for reconstructing complete 3D scans from partial digital captures.

Gerard Pons-Moll and Julian Chibane together claimed the Artec-sponsored grand prize of €4k when they seized the top award for their contribution titled, “Implicit Feature Networks for Texture Completion of 3D Data.”

Gerard Pons-Moll (left) and Julian Chibane (right)

In their words, “Our key insight is that 3D texture completion benefits from incorporating local and global deep features extracted from both the 3D partial texture and completed geometry. Specifically, given the partial 3D texture and the 3D geometry completed with IF-Nets, our model successfully in-paints the missing texture parts in consistence with the completed geometry.”

Co-winner Gerard Pons-Moll added, “Right before the challenge, we had published a paper at CVPR’20, “Implicit Functions in Feature Space for 3D Shape Reconstruction and Completion” which achieved state of the art on several 3D tasks, so we were lucky with the timing. We did not have the texture completion part, so the challenge pushed us to get it done.”

He continued, “This is what is great about these challenges, they motivate researchers and students, and they allow to compare different methods in a consistent manner. We learned from it. The main idea is that locally 3D objects share similar structures regardless of their category, and hence we designed a network that learns how object and human shapes look locally and globally. This effectively allows to learn with less 3D data, which is always costly to acquire.”

“We are honored and thankful to Artec 3D for sponsoring the event and the generous cash prize. Artec 3D is promoting open-source research, which enables inter-play between industry and academia, and it makes it an attractive place to work in. We hope Artec 3D will sponsor a follow-up challenge – we’d participate for sure!”