Pascal Fua | EPFL Graph Search

Pascal Fua received an engineering degree from Ecole Polytechnique, Paris, in 1984 and the Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of Orsay in 1989. He then worked at SRI International and INRIA Sophia-Antipolis as a Computer Scientist. He joined EPFL in 1996 where he is now a Professor in the School of Computer and Communication Science and heads the Computer Vision Laboratory. His research interests include shape modeling and motion recovery from images, analysis of microscopy images, and Augmented Reality. His research interests include shape modeling and motion recovery from images, analysis of microscopy images, and machine learning. He has (co)authored over 300 publications in refereed journals and conferences. He is an IEEE Fellow and has been an Associate Editor of IEEE journal Transactions for Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence. He often serves as program committee member, area chair, and program chair of major vision conferences and has cofounded three spinoff companies (Pix4D, PlayfulVision, and NeuralConcept).

A method and system for enforcing smoothness constraints on surface meshes from a graph convolutional neural network

Pascal Fua, Pamuditha Udaranga Wickramasinghe

A method for enforcing smoothness constraints on surface meshes produced by a Graph Convolutional Neural Network (GCNN) including the steps of reading image data from a memory, the image data including two-dimensional image data representing a three-dimensional object or a three-dimensional image stack of the three-dimensional object, performing a GCNN mesh deformation step on the image data to obtain an approximation of a surface of the three-dimensional object, the surface represented by triangulated surface meshes, at least some vertices of the triangulated surface meshes having a different number of neighboring vertices compared to other vertices in a same triangulated surface mesh, and performing a deep active surface model (DASM) transformation step on the triangulated surface meshes to obtain a corrected representation of the surface of three-dimensional object to improve smoothness of the surface.

2023

Automatic Parameterization for Aerodynamic Shape Optimization via Deep Geometric Learning

Pascal Fua, Zhen Wei

We propose two deep learning models that fully automate shape parameterization for aerodynamic shape optimization. Both models are optimized to parameterize via deep geometric learning to embed human prior knowledge into learned geometric patterns, eliminating the need for further handcrafting. The Latent Space Model (LSM) learns a low-dimensional latent representation of an object from a dataset of various geometries, while the Direct Mapping Model (DMM) builds parameterization on the fly using only one geometry of interest. We also devise a novel regularization loss that efficiently integrates volumetric mesh deformation into the parameterization model. The models directly manipulate the high-dimensional mesh data by moving vertices. LSM and DMM are fully differentiable, enabling gradient-based, end-to-end pipeline design and plug-and-play deployment of surrogate models or adjoint solvers. We perform shape optimization experiments on 2D airfoils and discuss the applicable scenarios for the two models.

2023

BigNeuron: a resource to benchmark and predict performance of algorithms for automated tracing of neurons in light microscopy datasets

Pascal Fua, Sean Lewis Hill, Xiang Li, Amos Sironi, Yuhang Wang, Jian Yang, Jian Zhou

BigNeuron is an open community bench-testing platform with the goal of setting open standards for accurate and fast automatic neuron tracing. We gathered a diverse set of image volumes across several species that is representative of the data obtained in many neuroscience laboratories interested in neuron tracing. Here, we report generated gold standard manual annotations for a subset of the available imaging datasets and quantified tracing quality for 35 automatic tracing algorithms. The goal of generating such a hand-curated diverse dataset is to advance the development of tracing algorithms and enable generalizable benchmarking. Together with image quality features, we pooled the data in an interactive web application that enables users and developers to perform principal component analysis, t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding, correlation and clustering, visualization of imaging and tracing data, and benchmarking of automatic tracing algorithms in user-defined data subsets. The image quality metrics explain most of the variance in the data, followed by neuromorphological features related to neuron size. We observed that diverse algorithms can provide complementary information to obtain accurate results and developed a method to iteratively combine methods and generate consensus reconstructions. The consensus trees obtained provide estimates of the neuron structure ground truth that typically outperform single algorithms in noisy datasets. However, specific algorithms may outperform the consensus tree strategy in specific imaging conditions. Finally, to aid users in predicting the most accurate automatic tracing results without manual annotations for comparison, we used support vector machine regression to predict reconstruction quality given an image volume and a set of automatic tracings. This resource describes a collection of neurons from a variety of light microscopy-based datasets, which can serve as a gold standard for testing automated tracing algorithms, as shown by comparison of the performance of 35 algorithms.

NATURE PORTFOLIO2023

BigNeuron: a resource to benchmark and predict performance of algorithms for automated tracing of neurons in light microscopy datasets

Pascal Fua, Sean Lewis Hill, Xiang Li, Amos Sironi, Yuhang Wang, Jian Yang, Jian Zhou

NATURE PORTFOLIO2023