CrossLink: joint understanding of image and 3D model collections through shape and camera pose variations

Collections of images and 3D models hide in them many interesting aspects of our surroundings. Significant efforts have been devoted to organize and explore such data repositories. Most such efforts, however, process the two data modalities separately, and do not take full advantage of the complementary information that exist in different domains, which can help to solve difficult problems in one by exploiting the structure in the other. Beyond the obvious difference in data representations, a key difficulty in such joint analysis lies in the significant variability in the structure and inherent properties of the 2D and 3D data collections, which hinders cross-domain analysis and exploration. We introduce CrossLink, a system for joint image-3D model processing that uses the complementary strengths of each data modality to facilitate analysis and exploration. We first show how our system significantly improves the quality of text-based 3D model search by using side information coming from an image database. We then demonstrate how to consistently align the filtered 3D model collections, and then use them to re-sort image collections based on pose and shape attributes. We evaluate our framework both quantitatively and qualitatively on 20 object categories of 2D image and 3D model collections, and quantitatively demonstrate how a wide variety of tasks in each data modality can strongly benefit from the complementary information present in the other, paving the way to a richer 2D and 3D processing toolbox.