Some extract from papers, but may be minorly modified by me.
Data-Driven 3D Primitives for Single Image Understanding
How do you infer the 3D properties of the world from a 2D image? This question has
intrigued researchers in psychology and computer vision for decades. Over the years, researchers have proposed many theories to explain how the brain can recover rich information about the 3D world from a single 2D projection. While there is agreement on many of the cues and constraints involved (e.g., texture gradient and planarity), recovering the 3D structure of the world from a single image is still an
enormously difficult and unsolved problem.
At the heart of the 3D inference problem is the question: What are the right primitives (representations) for inferring the 3D world from a 2D image? It is not clear what kind of 3D primitives
can be directly detected in images and be used for subsequent 3D reasoning. There is a rich literature proposing a myriad of 3D primitives ranging from edges and surfaces to volumetric primitives such as generalized cylinders, geons and cuboids. While these 3D primitives make sense intuitively, they are often hard to detect because they are not discriminative in appearance. On the other hand, primitives based on appearance might be easy to detect but can be geometrically uninformative.
They propose geometric primitives which are
visually-discriminative, or easily recognized in a scene, and
geometrically-informative, or
conveying information about the 3D world when recognized.
GeoNet: Geometric Neural Network for Joint Depth and Surface Normal Estimation
Albeit the great advancement in this filed (depth estimation), we notice that most previous methods deal with depth and normal estimation independently, which
possibly make their prediction inconsistent without considering the close underlying geometry relationship. For example, as demonstrated in [], the predicted depth map cloud be
distorted in planar regions. It is thus
intriguing to ask what if one considers the fact that surface normal does not change much in planar regions. This thought motivates us to design new models, which are exactly based on above simple fact and
yet potentially show a vital direction in this field, to exploit the inevitable geometric relationship between depth and surface normal for more accurate estimation.