DeepPrimitive: Image decomposition by layered primitive detection

The perception of the visual world through basic building blocks, such as cubes, spheres, and cones, gives human beings a parsimonious understanding of the visual world. Thus, efforts to find primitive-based geometric interpretations of visual data date back to 1970s studies of visual media. However, due to the difficulty of primitive fitting in the pre-deep learning age, this research approach faded from the main stage, and the vision community turned primarily to semantic image understanding. In this paper, we revisit the classical problem of building geometric interpretations of images, using supervised deep learning tools. We build a framework to detect primitives from images in a layered manner by modifying the YOLO network; an RNN with a novel loss function is then used to equip this network with the capability to predict primitives with a variable number of parameters. We compare our pipeline to traditional and other baseline learning methods, demonstrating that our layered detection model has higher accuracy and performs better reconstruction.