Neural Vector Fields for Implicit Surface Representation and Inference

Implicit fields have been very effective to represent and learn 3D shapes accurately. Signed distance fields and occupancy fields are the preferred representations, both with well-studied properties, despite their restriction to closed surfaces. Several other variations and training principles have been proposed with the goal to represent all classes of shapes. In this paper, we develop a novel and yet fundamental representation by considering the unit vector field defined on 3D space: at each point in $\mathbb{R}^3$ the vector points to the closest point on the surface. We theoretically demonstrate that this vector field can be easily transformed to surface density by applying the vector field divergence. Unlike other standard representations, it directly encodes an important physical property of the surface, which is the surface normal. We further show the advantages of our vector field representation, specifically in learning general (open, closed, or multi-layered) surfaces as well as piecewise planar surfaces. We compare our method on several datasets including ShapeNet where the proposed new neural implicit field shows superior accuracy in representing any type of shape, outperforming other standard methods. The code will be released at https://github.com/edomel/ImplicitVF