We propose a mesh-based variational autoencoder architecture that is able to cope with meshes with irregular connectivity and nonlinear deformations. To help localize deformations, we introduce sparse regularization in this framework, along with spectral graph convolutional operations. Through modifying the regularization formulation and allowing dynamic change of sparsity ranges, we improve the visual quality and reconstruction ability of the extracted deformation components. As an important application of localized deformation components and a novel approach on its own, we further develop a neural shape editing method, achieving shape editing and deformation component extraction in a unified framework, and ensuring plausibility of the edited shapes.
We propose a novel framework which we call mesh variational autoencoders, to explore the probabilistic latent space of 3D surfaces. The framework is easy to train, and requires very few training examples. We also propose an extended model which allows flexibly adjusting the significance of different latent variables by altering the prior distribution.