Pixel2point: 3D Object Reconstruction From a Single Image Using CNN and Initial Sphere

3D reconstruction from a single image has many useful applications. However, it is a challenging and ill-posed problem as various candidates can be a solution for the reconstruction. In this paper, we propose a simple, yet powerful, CNN model that generates a point cloud of an object from a single image. 3D data can be represented in different ways. Point clouds have proven to be a common and simple representation. The proposed model was trained end-to-end on synthetic data with 3D supervision. It takes a single image of an object and generates a point cloud with a fixed number of points. An initial point cloud of a sphere shape is used to improve the generated point cloud. The proposed model was tested on synthetic and real data. Qualitative evaluations demonstrate that the proposed model is able to generate point clouds that are very close to the ground-truth. Also, the initial point cloud has improved the final results as it distributes the points on the object surface evenly. Furthermore, the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art in solving this problem quantitatively and qualitatively on synthetic and real images. The proposed model illustrates an outstanding generalization to the new and unseen images and scenes.