In this paper, we consider a different data format for images: vector graphics. In contrast to raster graphics which are widely used in image recognition, vector graphics can be scaled up or down into any resolution without aliasing or information loss, due to the analytic representation of the primitives in the document. Furthermore, vector graphics are able to give extra structural information on how low-level elements group together to form high level shapes or structures. These merits of graphic vectors have not been fully leveraged in existing methods. To explore this data format, we target on the fundamental recognition tasks: object localization and classification. We propose an efficient CNN-free pipeline that does not render the graphic into pixels (i.e. rasterization), and takes textual document of the vector graphics as input, called YOLaT (You Only Look at Text). YOLaT builds multi-graphs to model the structural and spatial information in vector graphics, and a dual-stream graph neural network is proposed to detect objects from the graph. Our experiments show that by directly operating on vector graphics, YOLaT out-performs raster-graphic based object detection baselines in terms of both average precision and efficiency.
Manga is a fashionable Japanese-style comic form that is composed of black-and-white strokes and is generally displayed as raster images on digital devices. Typical mangas have simple textures, wide lines, and few color gradients, which are vectorizable natures to enjoy the merits of vector graphics, e.g., adaptive resolutions and small file sizes. In this paper, we propose MARVEL (MAnga's Raster to VEctor Learning), a primitive-wise approach for vectorizing raster mangas by Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL). Unlike previous learning-based methods which predict vector parameters for an entire image, MARVEL introduces a new perspective that regards an entire manga as a collection of basic primitives\textemdash stroke lines, and designs a DRL model to decompose the target image into a primitive sequence for achieving accurate vectorization. To improve vectorization accuracies and decrease file sizes, we further propose a stroke accuracy reward to predict accurate stroke lines, and a pruning mechanism to avoid generating erroneous and repeated strokes. Extensive subjective and objective experiments show that our MARVEL can generate impressive results and reaches the state-of-the-art level. Our code is open-source at: https://github.com/SwordHolderSH/Mang2Vec.
Anticipating motions of vehicles in a scene is an essential problem for safe autonomous driving systems. To this end, the comprehension of the scene's infrastructure is often the main clue for predicting future trajectories. Most of the proposed approaches represent the scene with a rasterized format and some of the more recent approaches leverage custom vectorized formats. In contrast, we propose representing the scene's information by employing Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG). SVG is a well-established format that matches the problem of trajectory prediction better than rasterized formats while being more general than arbitrary vectorized formats. SVG has the potential to provide the convenience and generality of raster-based solutions if coupled with a powerful tool such as CNNs, for which we introduce SVG-Net. SVG-Net is a Transformer-based Neural Network that can effectively capture the scene's information from SVG inputs. Thanks to the self-attention mechanism in its Transformers, SVG-Net can also adequately apprehend relations amongst the scene and the agents. We demonstrate SVG-Net's effectiveness by evaluating its performance on the publicly available Argoverse forecasting dataset. Finally, we illustrate how, by using SVG, one can benefit from datasets and advancements in other research fronts that also utilize the same input format. Our code is available at https://vita-epfl.github.io/SVGNet/.
Vector graphics are widely used to represent fonts, logos, digital artworks, and graphic designs. But, while a vast body of work has focused on generative algorithms for raster images, only a handful of options exists for vector graphics. One can always rasterize the input graphic and resort to image-based generative approaches, but this negates the advantages of the vector representation. The current alternative is to use specialized models that require explicit supervision on the vector graphics representation at training time. This is not ideal because large-scale high quality vector-graphics datasets are difficult to obtain. Furthermore, the vector representation for a given design is not unique, so models that supervise on the vector representation are unnecessarily constrained. Instead, we propose a new neural network that can generate complex vector graphics with varying topologies, and only requires indirect supervision from readily-available raster training images (i.e., with no vector counterparts). To enable this, we use a differentiable rasterization pipeline that renders the generated vector shapes and composites them together onto a raster canvas. We demonstrate our method on a range of datasets, and provide comparison with state-of-the-art SVG-VAE and DeepSVG, both of which require explicit vector graphics supervision. Finally, we also demonstrate our approach on the MNIST dataset, for which no groundtruth vector representation is available. Source code, datasets, and more results are available at geometry.cs.ucl.ac.uk/projects/2021/Im2Vec/
Biogeographical regions (bioregions) reveal how different sets of species are spatially grouped and therefore are important units for conservation, historical biogeography, ecology and evolution. Several methods have been developed to identify bioregions based on species distribution data rather than expert opinion. One approach successfully applies network theory to simplify and highlight the underlying structure in species distributions. However, this method lacks tools for simple and efficient analysis. Here we present Infomap Bioregions, an interactive web application that inputs species distribution data and generates bioregion maps. Species distributions may be provided as georeferenced point occurrences or range maps, and can be of local, regional or global scale. The application uses a novel adaptive resolution method to make best use of often incomplete species distribution data. The results can be downloaded as vector graphics, shapefiles or in table format. We validate the tool by processing large datasets of publicly available species distribution data of the world's amphibians using species ranges, and mammals using point occurrences. We then calculate the fit between the inferred bioregions and WWF ecoregions. As examples of applications, researchers can reconstruct ancestral ranges in historical biogeography or identify indicator species for targeted conservation.
Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) are ubiquitous in modern 2D interfaces due to their ability to scale to different resolutions. However, despite the success of deep learning-based models applied to rasterized images, the problem of vector graphics representation learning and generation remains largely unexplored. In this work, we propose a novel hierarchical generative network, called DeepSVG, for complex SVG icons generation and interpolation. Our architecture effectively disentangles high-level shapes from the low-level commands that encode the shape itself. The network directly predicts a set of shapes in a non-autoregressive fashion. We introduce the task of complex SVG icons generation by releasing a new large-scale dataset along with an open-source library for SVG manipulation. We demonstrate that our network learns to accurately reconstruct diverse vector graphics, and can serve as a powerful animation tool by performing interpolations and other latent space operations. Our code is available at https://github.com/alexandre01/deepsvg.
We introduce UV-Net, a novel neural network architecture and representation designed to operate directly on Boundary representation (B-rep) data from 3D CAD models. The B-rep format is widely used in the design, simulation and manufacturing industries to enable sophisticated and precise CAD modeling operations. However, B-rep data presents some unique challenges when used with modern machine learning due to the complexity of the data structure and its support for both continuous non-Euclidean geometric entities and discrete topological entities. In this paper, we propose a unified representation for B-rep data that exploits the U and V parameter domain of curves and surfaces to model geometry, and an adjacency graph to explicitly model topology. This leads to a unique and efficient network architecture, UV-Net, that couples image and graph convolutional neural networks in a compute and memory-efficient manner. To aid in future research we present a synthetic labelled B-rep dataset, SolidLetters, derived from human designed fonts with variations in both geometry and topology. Finally we demonstrate that UV-Net can generalize to supervised and unsupervised tasks on five datasets, while outperforming alternate 3D shape representations such as point clouds, voxels, and meshes.
The ultimate goal of this indoor mapping research is to automatically reconstruct a floorplan simply by walking through a house with a smartphone in a pocket. This paper tackles this problem by proposing FloorNet, a novel deep neural architecture. The challenge lies in the processing of RGBD streams spanning a large 3D space. FloorNet effectively processes the data through three neural network branches: 1) PointNet with 3D points, exploiting the 3D information; 2) CNN with a 2D point density image in a top-down view, enhancing the local spatial reasoning; and 3) CNN with RGB images, utilizing the full image information. FloorNet exchanges intermediate features across the branches to exploit the best of all the architectures. We have created a benchmark for floorplan reconstruction by acquiring RGBD video streams for 155 residential houses or apartments with Google Tango phones and annotating complete floorplan information. Our qualitative and quantitative evaluations demonstrate that the fusion of three branches effectively improves the reconstruction quality. We hope that the paper together with the benchmark will be an important step towards solving a challenging vector-graphics reconstruction problem. Code and data are available at https://github.com/art-programmer/FloorNet.