Introducing 3D Computer Vision and Geometry

In this chapter, we will learn about some basic concepts of 3D computer vision and geometry that will be especially useful for later chapters in this book. We will start by discussing what rendering, rasterization, and shading are. We will go through different lighting models and shading models, such as point light sources, directional light sources, ambient lighting, diffusion, highlights, and shininess. We will go through a coding example for rendering a mesh model using different lighting models and parameters.

We will then learn how to use PyTorch for solving optimization problems. Particularly, we will go through stochastic gradient descent over heterogeneous mini-batches, which becomes possible by using PyTorch3D. We will also learn about different formats for mini-batches in PyTorch3D, including the list, padded, and packed formats, and learn how to convert between the different formats.

In the last part of the chapter, we will...