KTNet: Knowledge Transfer for Unpaired 3D Shape Completion

TL;DR

KTNet introduces a novel knowledge transfer framework with teacher-assistant-student networks to improve unpaired 3D shape completion, significantly outperforming previous methods.

Contribution

The paper presents a new KTNet model that leverages knowledge transfer through a teacher-assistant-student architecture for unpaired 3D shape completion.

Findings

Outperforms previous methods on multiple datasets

Achieves more detailed geometric inference

Demonstrates effective knowledge transfer in 3D shape completion

Abstract

Unpaired 3D object completion aims to predict a complete 3D shape from an incomplete input without knowing the correspondence between the complete and incomplete shapes. In this paper, we propose the novel KTNet to solve this task from the new perspective of knowledge transfer. KTNet elaborates a teacher-assistant-student network to establish multiple knowledge transfer processes. Specifically, the teacher network takes complete shape as input and learns the knowledge of complete shape. The student network takes the incomplete one as input and restores the corresponding complete shape. And the assistant modules not only help to transfer the knowledge of complete shape from the teacher to the student, but also judge the learning effect of the student network. As a result, KTNet makes use of a more comprehensive understanding to establish the geometric correspondence between complete and incomplete shapes in a perspective of knowledge transfer, which enables more detailed geometric inference for generating high-quality complete shapes. We conduct comprehensive experiments on several datasets, and the results show that our method outperforms previous methods of unpaired point cloud completion by a large margin.