VisDiff: SDF-Guided Polygon Generation for Visibility Reconstruction and Recognition
Rahul Moorthy, Jun-Jee Chao, Volkan Isler

TL;DR
VisDiff is a diffusion-based method that reconstructs polygons from visibility graphs by estimating the signed distance function, enabling better learning of visibility relationships and outperforming existing methods.
Contribution
We introduce VisDiff, a novel diffusion approach that uses SDF estimation for polygon reconstruction from visibility graphs, addressing limitations of previous methods.
Findings
Achieved 26% improvement in F1-Score over standard methods.
Demonstrated effective learning of visibility relationships.
Provided a curated dataset for benchmarking.
Abstract
The ability to capture rich representations of combinatorial structures has enabled the application of machine learning to tasks such as analysis and generation of floorplans, terrains, images, and animations. Recent work has primarily focused on understanding structures with well-defined features, neighborhoods, or underlying distance metrics, while those lacking such characteristics remain largely unstudied. Examples of these combinatorial structures can be found in polygons, where a small change in the vertex locations causes a significant rearrangement of the combinatorial structure, expressed as a visibility or triangulation graphs. Current representation learning approaches fail to capture structures without well-defined features and distance metrics. In this paper, we study the open problem of Visibility Reconstruction: Given a visibility graph , construct a polygon whose…
Peer Reviews
Decision·Submitted to ICLR 2025
Good performance with respect to the baselines on the generated dataset
1) the problem is a bit contrived, in the sense that the way it is evaluated the focus is not in shape analysis, but on extracting something from the chosen skeletal representation. This results in no analysis on the underlying problem, thus not using any of the several datasets that have been used by the community for several years, and comparisons to approaches that can only be described as baselines for the problem actually analyzed. This severely limits the readership of this paper. Further
To my understanding, this is the first paper to design a deep model specifically for generating polygons from visibility graphs.
Novelty: First, I am not sure about novelty. On one hand, this paper seems to be the first to propose a deep generative model for generating polygons from vis. graphs (I think so because no such paper is cited). Though there has been a lot of theoretical results and algorithms on visibility graphs of polygons, these are not deep models. On the other hand, I am not sure if this alone should guarantee acceptance. The proposed model is composed of well-known blocks and does not bring any really n
1. The paper was easy to follow, as the target problems were explained clearly. 2. The approach seems to be novel. It cleverly applied generative model for solving this kind of geometric / topological problem. However, I could be wrong as I'm not an expert about this topic. 3. The results clearly show that this approach is better than the other baselines.
1. There is no comparison with the baselines for the out of distribution data (Table 2), which makes it hard to see if this approach is better than the baselines for such data. 2. As far as I know, the diffusion denoisinig process takes some computational cost, and this paper says that it generated 50 polygons from the given visibility graph and chose the best one among them, which might have led to longer computation time than the other baseline methods. It would be better to have analysis abo
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Taxonomy
TopicsRobotics and Sensor-Based Localization · Advanced Image and Video Retrieval Techniques · 3D Surveying and Cultural Heritage
MethodsSparse Evolutionary Training
