3DNN: 3D Nearest Neighbor

In this paper, we describe a data-driven approach to leverage repositories of 3D models for scene understanding. Our ability to relate what we see in an image to a large collection of 3D models allows us to transfer information from these models, creating a rich understanding of the scene. We develop a framework for auto-calibrating a camera, rendering 3D models from the viewpoint an image was taken, and computing a similarity measure between each 3D model and an input image. We demonstrate this data-driven approach in the context of geometry estimation and show the ability to find the identities, poses and styles of objects in a scene. The true benefit of 3DNN compared to a traditional 2D nearest-neighbor approach is that by generalizing across viewpoints, we free ourselves from the need to have training examples captured from all possible viewpoints. Thus, we are able to achieve comparable results using orders of magnitude less data, and recognize objects from never-before-seen viewpoints. In this work, we describe the 3DNN algorithm and rigorously evaluate its performance for the tasks of geometry estimation and object detection/segmentation, as well as two novel applications: affordance estimation and photorealistic object insertion.