Flatten Anything: Unsupervised Neural Surface Parameterization

TL;DR

This paper introduces an unsupervised neural network model that performs global surface parameterization on 3D data, including unstructured point clouds, without manual pre-processing or mesh connectivity requirements.

Contribution

The Flatten Anything Model (FAM) is a novel neural architecture that automatically handles complex topologies and unstructured data for surface parameterization, eliminating manual surface cutting and pre-processing.

Findings

Operates directly on point clouds without mesh connectivity.

Automatically finds cutting seams for complex topologies.

Outperforms previous methods in universality and quality.

Abstract

Surface parameterization plays an essential role in numerous computer graphics and geometry processing applications. Traditional parameterization approaches are designed for high-quality meshes laboriously created by specialized 3D modelers, thus unable to meet the processing demand for the current explosion of ordinary 3D data. Moreover, their working mechanisms are typically restricted to certain simple topologies, thus relying on cumbersome manual efforts (e.g., surface cutting, part segmentation) for pre-processing. In this paper, we introduce the Flatten Anything Model (FAM), an unsupervised neural architecture to achieve global free-boundary surface parameterization via learning point-wise mappings between 3D points on the target geometric surface and adaptively-deformed UV coordinates within the 2D parameter domain. To mimic the actual physical procedures, we ingeniously construct geometrically-interpretable sub-networks with specific functionalities of surface cutting, UV deforming, unwrapping, and wrapping, which are assembled into a bi-directional cycle mapping framework. Compared with previous methods, our FAM directly operates on discrete surface points without utilizing connectivity information, thus significantly reducing the strict requirements for mesh quality and even applicable to unstructured point cloud data. More importantly, our FAM is fully-automated without the need for pre-cutting and can deal with highly-complex topologies, since its learning process adaptively finds reasonable cutting seams and UV boundaries. Extensive experiments demonstrate the universality, superiority, and inspiring potential of our proposed neural surface parameterization paradigm. Our code is available at https://github.com/keeganhk/FlattenAnything.