Methods that use neural networks for synthesizing 3D shapes in the form of a part-based representation have been introduced over the last few years. These methods represent shapes as a graph or hierarchy of parts and enable a variety of applications such as shape sampling and reconstruction. However, current methods do not allow easily regenerating individual shape parts according to user preferences. In this paper, we investigate techniques that allow the user to generate multiple, diverse suggestions for individual parts. Specifically, we experiment with multimodal deep generative models that allow sampling diverse suggestions for shape parts and focus on models which have not been considered in previous work on shape synthesis. To provide a comparative study of these techniques, we introduce a method for synthesizing 3D shapes in a part-based representation and evaluate all the part suggestion techniques within this synthesis method. In our method, which is inspired by previous work, shapes are represented as a set of parts in the form of implicit functions which are then positioned in space to form the final shape. Synthesis in this representation is enabled by a neural network architecture based on an implicit decoder and a spatial transformer. We compare the various multimodal generative models by evaluating their performance in generating part suggestions. Our contribution is to show with qualitative and quantitative evaluations which of the new techniques for multimodal part generation perform the best and that a synthesis method based on the top-performing techniques allows the user to more finely control the parts that are generated in the 3D shapes while maintaining high shape fidelity when reconstructing shapes.

Breast cancer continues to be a prominent contributor to female mortality. Ultrasound imaging stands as a widely utilized technique for detecting breast abnormalities. In this paper, we introduce a novel two-stage neural network model to classify breast cancer in ultrasound images. In the first stage, we employ a fully convolutional network (FCN) to perform image segmentation. The FCN learns to predict segmentation masks from the breast ultrasound images, delineating tumor regions. Subsequently, the second stage involves a convolutional neural network (CNN) to classify tumor type, leveraging tumor masks generated by the first stage and the original ultrasound images. Results showcase the added value of the two-stage approach, with our proposed model achieving a classification accuracy of 92.41 %, consistently surpassing the performance of baseline models that rely solely on CNNs for breast ultrasound image classification.

We introduce a modeling tool which can evolve a set of 3D objects in a functionality-aware manner. Our goal is for the evolution to generate large and diverse sets of plausible 3D objects for data augmentation, constrained modeling, as well as open-ended exploration to possibly inspire new designs. Starting with an initial population of 3D objects belonging to one or more functional categories, we evolve the shapes through part recombination to produce generations of hybrids or crossbreeds between parents from the heterogeneous shape collection. Evolutionary selection of offsprings is guided both by a functional plausibility score derived from functionality analysis of shapes in the initial population and user preference, as in a design gallery. Since cross-category hybridization may result in offsprings not belonging to any of the known functional categories, we develop a means for functionality partial matching to evaluate functional plausibility on partial shapes. We show a variety of plausible hybrid shapes generated by our functionality-aware model evolution, which can complement existing datasets as training data and boost the performance of contemporary data-driven segmentation schemes, especially in challenging cases. Our tool supports constrained modeling, allowing users to restrict or steer the model evolution with functionality labels. At the same time, unexpected yet functional object prototypes can emerge during open-ended exploration owing to structure breaking when evolving a heterogeneous collection.

Abstract We introduce an approach to incorporate user guidance into shape generation approaches based on deep networks. Generative networks such as autoencoders and generative adversarial networks are trained to encode shapes into latent vectors, effectively learning a latent shape space that can be sampled for generating new shapes. Our main idea is to enable users to explore the shape space with the use of high‐level semantic keywords. Specifically, the user inputs a set of keywords that describe the general attributes of the shape to be generated, e.g., “four legs” for a chair. Then, our method maps the keywords to a subspace of the latent space, where the subspace captures the shapes possessing the specified attributes. The user then explores only this subspace to search for shapes that satisfy the design goal, in a process similar to using a parametric shape model. Our exploratory approach allows users to model shapes at a high level without the need for advanced artistic skills, in contrast to existing methods that allow to guide the generation with sketching or partial modeling of a shape. Our technical contribution to enable this exploration‐based approach is the introduction of a label regression neural network coupled with shape encoder/decoder networks. The label regression network takes the user‐provided keywords and maps them to distributions in the latent space. We show that our method allows users to explore the shape space and generate a variety of shapes with selected high‐level attributes.