Seams, distortions, wasted UV space, vertex-duplication, and varying resolution over the surface are the most prominent issues of the standard UV-based texturing of meshes. These issues are particularly acute when automatic UV-unwrapping techniques are used. For this reason, instead of generating textures in automatically generated UV-planes like most state-of-the-art methods, we propose to represent textures as coloured point-clouds whose colours are generated by a denoising diffusion probabilistic model constrained to operate on the surface of 3D objects. Our sampling and resolution agnostic generative model heavily relies on heat diffusion over the surface of the meshes for spatial communication between points. To enable processing of arbitrarily sampled point-cloud textures and ensure long-distance texture consistency we introduce a fast re-sampling of the mesh spectral properties used during the heat diffusion and introduce a novel heat-diffusion-based self-attention mechanism. Our code and pre-trained models are available at github.com/simofoti/UV3-TeD.

Minimally-invasive surgery (MIS) and robot-assisted minimally invasive (RAMIS) surgery offer well-documented benefits to patients such as reduced post-operative pain and shorter hospital stays.However, the automation of MIS and RAMIS through the use of AI has been slow due to difficulties in data acquisition and curation, partially caused by the ethical considerations of training, testing and deploying AI models in medical environments.We introduce \texttt{SARAMIS}, the first large-scale dataset of anatomically derived 3D rendering assets of the human abdominal anatomy.Using previously existing, open-source CT datasets of the human anatomy, we derive novel 3D meshes, tetrahedral volumes, textures and diffuse maps for over 104 different anatomical targets in the human body, representing the largest, open-source dataset of 3D rendering assets for synthetic simulation of vision tasks in MIS+RAMIS, increasing the availability of openly available 3D meshes in the literature by three orders of magnitude.We supplement our dataset with a series of GPU-enabled rendering environments, which can be used to generate datasets for realistic MIS/RAMIS tasks.Finally, we present an example of the use of \texttt{SARAMIS} assets for an autonomous navigation task in colonoscopy from CT abdomen-pelvis scans for the first time in the literature.\texttt{SARAMIS} is publically made available at https://github.com/NMontanaBrown/saramis/, with assets released under a CC-BY-NC-SA license.

Designing realistic digital humans is extremely complex. Most data-driven generative models used to simplify the creation of their underlying geometric shape do not offer control over the generation of local shape attributes. In this paper, we overcome this limitation by introducing a novel loss function grounded in spectral geometry and applicable to different neural-network-based generative models of 3D head and body meshes. Encouraging the latent variables of mesh variational autoencoders (VAEs) or generative adversarial networks (GANs) to follow the local eigenprojections of identity attributes, we improve latent disentanglement and properly decouple the attribute creation. Experimental results show that our local eigenprojection disentangled (LED) models not only offer improved disentanglement with respect to the state-of-the-art, but also maintain good generation capabilities with training times comparable to the vanilla implementations of the models. Our code and pre-trained models are available at github.com/simofoti/LocalEigenprojDisentangled.

Learning a disentangled, interpretable, and structured latent representation in 3D generative models of faces and bodies is still an open problem. The problem is particularly acute when control over identity features is required. In this paper, we propose an intuitive yet effective self-supervised approach to train a 3D shape variational autoencoder (VAE) which encourages a disentangled latent representation of identity features. Curating the mini-batch generation by swapping arbitrary features across different shapes allows to define a loss function leveraging known differences and similarities in the latent representations. Experimental results conducted on 3D meshes show that state-of-the-art methods for latent disentanglement are not able to disentangle identity features of faces and bodies. Our proposed method properly decouples the generation of such features while maintaining good representation and reconstruction capabilities. Our code and pretrained models are available at github.com/simofoti/3DVAE-SwapDisentangled.