Learning Geometric-Aware Properties in 2D Representation Using Lightweight CAD Models, or Zero Real 3D Pairs

Cross-modal training using 2D-3D paired datasets, such as those containing multi-view images and 3D scene scans, presents an effective way to enhance 2D scene understanding by introducing geometric and view-invariance priors into 2D features. However, the need for large-scale scene datasets can impede scalability and further improvements. This paper explores an alternative learning method by leveraging a lightweight and publicly available type of 3D data in the form of CAD models. We construct a 3D space with geometric-aware alignment where the similarity in this space reflects the geometric similarity of CAD models based on the Chamfer distance. The acquired geometric-aware properties are then induced into 2D features, which boost performance on downstream tasks more effectively than existing RGB-CAD approaches. Our technique is not limited to paired RGB-CAD datasets. By training exclusively on pseudo pairs generated from CAD-based reconstruction methods, we enhance the performance of SOTA 2D pre-trained models that use ResNet-50 or ViT-B backbones on various 2D understanding tasks. We also achieve comparable results to SOTA methods trained on scene scans on four tasks in NYUv2, SUNRGB-D, indoor ADE20k, and indoor/outdoor COCO, despite using lightweight CAD models or pseudo data.