new

Get trending papers in your email inbox!

Subscribe

byAK and the research community

Mar 14

Adaptive Shells for Efficient Neural Radiance Field Rendering

Neural radiance fields achieve unprecedented quality for novel view synthesis, but their volumetric formulation remains expensive, requiring a huge number of samples to render high-resolution images. Volumetric encodings are essential to represent fuzzy geometry such as foliage and hair, and they are well-suited for stochastic optimization. Yet, many scenes ultimately consist largely of solid surfaces which can be accurately rendered by a single sample per pixel. Based on this insight, we propose a neural radiance formulation that smoothly transitions between volumetric- and surface-based rendering, greatly accelerating rendering speed and even improving visual fidelity. Our method constructs an explicit mesh envelope which spatially bounds a neural volumetric representation. In solid regions, the envelope nearly converges to a surface and can often be rendered with a single sample. To this end, we generalize the NeuS formulation with a learned spatially-varying kernel size which encodes the spread of the density, fitting a wide kernel to volume-like regions and a tight kernel to surface-like regions. We then extract an explicit mesh of a narrow band around the surface, with width determined by the kernel size, and fine-tune the radiance field within this band. At inference time, we cast rays against the mesh and evaluate the radiance field only within the enclosed region, greatly reducing the number of samples required. Experiments show that our approach enables efficient rendering at very high fidelity. We also demonstrate that the extracted envelope enables downstream applications such as animation and simulation.

Direct Voxel Grid Optimization: Super-fast Convergence for Radiance Fields Reconstruction

We present a super-fast convergence approach to reconstructing the per-scene radiance field from a set of images that capture the scene with known poses. This task, which is often applied to novel view synthesis, is recently revolutionized by Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) for its state-of-the-art quality and flexibility. However, NeRF and its variants require a lengthy training time ranging from hours to days for a single scene. In contrast, our approach achieves NeRF-comparable quality and converges rapidly from scratch in less than 15 minutes with a single GPU. We adopt a representation consisting of a density voxel grid for scene geometry and a feature voxel grid with a shallow network for complex view-dependent appearance. Modeling with explicit and discretized volume representations is not new, but we propose two simple yet non-trivial techniques that contribute to fast convergence speed and high-quality output. First, we introduce the post-activation interpolation on voxel density, which is capable of producing sharp surfaces in lower grid resolution. Second, direct voxel density optimization is prone to suboptimal geometry solutions, so we robustify the optimization process by imposing several priors. Finally, evaluation on five inward-facing benchmarks shows that our method matches, if not surpasses, NeRF's quality, yet it only takes about 15 minutes to train from scratch for a new scene.

Representing Long Volumetric Video with Temporal Gaussian Hierarchy

This paper aims to address the challenge of reconstructing long volumetric videos from multi-view RGB videos. Recent dynamic view synthesis methods leverage powerful 4D representations, like feature grids or point cloud sequences, to achieve high-quality rendering results. However, they are typically limited to short (1~2s) video clips and often suffer from large memory footprints when dealing with longer videos. To solve this issue, we propose a novel 4D representation, named Temporal Gaussian Hierarchy, to compactly model long volumetric videos. Our key observation is that there are generally various degrees of temporal redundancy in dynamic scenes, which consist of areas changing at different speeds. Motivated by this, our approach builds a multi-level hierarchy of 4D Gaussian primitives, where each level separately describes scene regions with different degrees of content change, and adaptively shares Gaussian primitives to represent unchanged scene content over different temporal segments, thus effectively reducing the number of Gaussian primitives. In addition, the tree-like structure of the Gaussian hierarchy allows us to efficiently represent the scene at a particular moment with a subset of Gaussian primitives, leading to nearly constant GPU memory usage during the training or rendering regardless of the video length. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our method over alternative methods in terms of training cost, rendering speed, and storage usage. To our knowledge, this work is the first approach capable of efficiently handling minutes of volumetric video data while maintaining state-of-the-art rendering quality. Our project page is available at: https://zju3dv.github.io/longvolcap.

Compact 3D Gaussian Representation for Radiance Field

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) have demonstrated remarkable potential in capturing complex 3D scenes with high fidelity. However, one persistent challenge that hinders the widespread adoption of NeRFs is the computational bottleneck due to the volumetric rendering. On the other hand, 3D Gaussian splatting (3DGS) has recently emerged as an alternative representation that leverages a 3D Gaussisan-based representation and adopts the rasterization pipeline to render the images rather than volumetric rendering, achieving very fast rendering speed and promising image quality. However, a significant drawback arises as 3DGS entails a substantial number of 3D Gaussians to maintain the high fidelity of the rendered images, which requires a large amount of memory and storage. To address this critical issue, we place a specific emphasis on two key objectives: reducing the number of Gaussian points without sacrificing performance and compressing the Gaussian attributes, such as view-dependent color and covariance. To this end, we propose a learnable mask strategy that significantly reduces the number of Gaussians while preserving high performance. In addition, we propose a compact but effective representation of view-dependent color by employing a grid-based neural field rather than relying on spherical harmonics. Finally, we learn codebooks to compactly represent the geometric attributes of Gaussian by vector quantization. In our extensive experiments, we consistently show over 10times reduced storage and enhanced rendering speed, while maintaining the quality of the scene representation, compared to 3DGS. Our work provides a comprehensive framework for 3D scene representation, achieving high performance, fast training, compactness, and real-time rendering. Our project page is available at https://maincold2.github.io/c3dgs/.

Analytic-Splatting: Anti-Aliased 3D Gaussian Splatting via Analytic Integration

The 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) gained its popularity recently by combining the advantages of both primitive-based and volumetric 3D representations, resulting in improved quality and efficiency for 3D scene rendering. However, 3DGS is not alias-free, and its rendering at varying resolutions could produce severe blurring or jaggies. This is because 3DGS treats each pixel as an isolated, single point rather than as an area, causing insensitivity to changes in the footprints of pixels. Consequently, this discrete sampling scheme inevitably results in aliasing, owing to the restricted sampling bandwidth. In this paper, we derive an analytical solution to address this issue. More specifically, we use a conditioned logistic function as the analytic approximation of the cumulative distribution function (CDF) in a one-dimensional Gaussian signal and calculate the Gaussian integral by subtracting the CDFs. We then introduce this approximation in the two-dimensional pixel shading, and present Analytic-Splatting, which analytically approximates the Gaussian integral within the 2D-pixel window area to better capture the intensity response of each pixel. Moreover, we use the approximated response of the pixel window integral area to participate in the transmittance calculation of volume rendering, making Analytic-Splatting sensitive to the changes in pixel footprint at different resolutions. Experiments on various datasets validate that our approach has better anti-aliasing capability that gives more details and better fidelity.

Mixture of Volumetric Primitives for Efficient Neural Rendering

Real-time rendering and animation of humans is a core function in games, movies, and telepresence applications. Existing methods have a number of drawbacks we aim to address with our work. Triangle meshes have difficulty modeling thin structures like hair, volumetric representations like Neural Volumes are too low-resolution given a reasonable memory budget, and high-resolution implicit representations like Neural Radiance Fields are too slow for use in real-time applications. We present Mixture of Volumetric Primitives (MVP), a representation for rendering dynamic 3D content that combines the completeness of volumetric representations with the efficiency of primitive-based rendering, e.g., point-based or mesh-based methods. Our approach achieves this by leveraging spatially shared computation with a deconvolutional architecture and by minimizing computation in empty regions of space with volumetric primitives that can move to cover only occupied regions. Our parameterization supports the integration of correspondence and tracking constraints, while being robust to areas where classical tracking fails, such as around thin or translucent structures and areas with large topological variability. MVP is a hybrid that generalizes both volumetric and primitive-based representations. Through a series of extensive experiments we demonstrate that it inherits the strengths of each, while avoiding many of their limitations. We also compare our approach to several state-of-the-art methods and demonstrate that MVP produces superior results in terms of quality and runtime performance.

Structural Multiplane Image: Bridging Neural View Synthesis and 3D Reconstruction

The Multiplane Image (MPI), containing a set of fronto-parallel RGBA layers, is an effective and efficient representation for view synthesis from sparse inputs. Yet, its fixed structure limits the performance, especially for surfaces imaged at oblique angles. We introduce the Structural MPI (S-MPI), where the plane structure approximates 3D scenes concisely. Conveying RGBA contexts with geometrically-faithful structures, the S-MPI directly bridges view synthesis and 3D reconstruction. It can not only overcome the critical limitations of MPI, i.e., discretization artifacts from sloped surfaces and abuse of redundant layers, and can also acquire planar 3D reconstruction. Despite the intuition and demand of applying S-MPI, great challenges are introduced, e.g., high-fidelity approximation for both RGBA layers and plane poses, multi-view consistency, non-planar regions modeling, and efficient rendering with intersected planes. Accordingly, we propose a transformer-based network based on a segmentation model. It predicts compact and expressive S-MPI layers with their corresponding masks, poses, and RGBA contexts. Non-planar regions are inclusively handled as a special case in our unified framework. Multi-view consistency is ensured by sharing global proxy embeddings, which encode plane-level features covering the complete 3D scenes with aligned coordinates. Intensive experiments show that our method outperforms both previous state-of-the-art MPI-based view synthesis methods and planar reconstruction methods.

ScatterFormer: Efficient Voxel Transformer with Scattered Linear Attention

Window-based transformers excel in large-scale point cloud understanding by capturing context-aware representations with affordable attention computation in a more localized manner. However, the sparse nature of point clouds leads to a significant variance in the number of voxels per window. Existing methods group the voxels in each window into fixed-length sequences through extensive sorting and padding operations, resulting in a non-negligible computational and memory overhead. In this paper, we introduce ScatterFormer, which to the best of our knowledge, is the first to directly apply attention to voxels across different windows as a single sequence. The key of ScatterFormer is a Scattered Linear Attention (SLA) module, which leverages the pre-computation of key-value pairs in linear attention to enable parallel computation on the variable-length voxel sequences divided by windows. Leveraging the hierarchical structure of GPUs and shared memory, we propose a chunk-wise algorithm that reduces the SLA module's latency to less than 1 millisecond on moderate GPUs. Furthermore, we develop a cross-window interaction module that improves the locality and connectivity of voxel features across different windows, eliminating the need for extensive window shifting. Our proposed ScatterFormer demonstrates 73.8 mAP (L2) on the Waymo Open Dataset and 72.4 NDS on the NuScenes dataset, running at an outstanding detection rate of 23 FPS.The code is available at https://github.com/skyhehe123/ScatterFormer{https://github.com/skyhehe123/ScatterFormer}.

Efficient Encoding of Graphics Primitives with Simplex-based Structures

Grid-based structures are commonly used to encode explicit features for graphics primitives such as images, signed distance functions (SDF), and neural radiance fields (NeRF) due to their simple implementation. However, in n-dimensional space, calculating the value of a sampled point requires interpolating the values of its 2^n neighboring vertices. The exponential scaling with dimension leads to significant computational overheads. To address this issue, we propose a simplex-based approach for encoding graphics primitives. The number of vertices in a simplex-based structure increases linearly with dimension, making it a more efficient and generalizable alternative to grid-based representations. Using the non-axis-aligned simplicial structure property, we derive and prove a coordinate transformation, simplicial subdivision, and barycentric interpolation scheme for efficient sampling, which resembles transformation procedures in the simplex noise algorithm. Finally, we use hash tables to store multiresolution features of all interest points in the simplicial grid, which are passed into a tiny fully connected neural network to parameterize graphics primitives. We implemented a detailed simplex-based structure encoding algorithm in C++ and CUDA using the methods outlined in our approach. In the 2D image fitting task, the proposed method is capable of fitting a giga-pixel image with 9.4% less time compared to the baseline method proposed by instant-ngp, while maintaining the same quality and compression rate. In the volumetric rendering setup, we observe a maximum 41.2% speedup when the samples are dense enough.

VQ-NeRF: Vector Quantization Enhances Implicit Neural Representations

Recent advancements in implicit neural representations have contributed to high-fidelity surface reconstruction and photorealistic novel view synthesis. However, the computational complexity inherent in these methodologies presents a substantial impediment, constraining the attainable frame rates and resolutions in practical applications. In response to this predicament, we propose VQ-NeRF, an effective and efficient pipeline for enhancing implicit neural representations via vector quantization. The essence of our method involves reducing the sampling space of NeRF to a lower resolution and subsequently reinstating it to the original size utilizing a pre-trained VAE decoder, thereby effectively mitigating the sampling time bottleneck encountered during rendering. Although the codebook furnishes representative features, reconstructing fine texture details of the scene remains challenging due to high compression rates. To overcome this constraint, we design an innovative multi-scale NeRF sampling scheme that concurrently optimizes the NeRF model at both compressed and original scales to enhance the network's ability to preserve fine details. Furthermore, we incorporate a semantic loss function to improve the geometric fidelity and semantic coherence of our 3D reconstructions. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our model in achieving the optimal trade-off between rendering quality and efficiency. Evaluation on the DTU, BlendMVS, and H3DS datasets confirms the superior performance of our approach.

Lighting Every Darkness with 3DGS: Fast Training and Real-Time Rendering for HDR View Synthesis

Volumetric rendering based methods, like NeRF, excel in HDR view synthesis from RAWimages, especially for nighttime scenes. While, they suffer from long training times and cannot perform real-time rendering due to dense sampling requirements. The advent of 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) enables real-time rendering and faster training. However, implementing RAW image-based view synthesis directly using 3DGS is challenging due to its inherent drawbacks: 1) in nighttime scenes, extremely low SNR leads to poor structure-from-motion (SfM) estimation in distant views; 2) the limited representation capacity of spherical harmonics (SH) function is unsuitable for RAW linear color space; and 3) inaccurate scene structure hampers downstream tasks such as refocusing. To address these issues, we propose LE3D (Lighting Every darkness with 3DGS). Our method proposes Cone Scatter Initialization to enrich the estimation of SfM, and replaces SH with a Color MLP to represent the RAW linear color space. Additionally, we introduce depth distortion and near-far regularizations to improve the accuracy of scene structure for downstream tasks. These designs enable LE3D to perform real-time novel view synthesis, HDR rendering, refocusing, and tone-mapping changes. Compared to previous volumetric rendering based methods, LE3D reduces training time to 1% and improves rendering speed by up to 4,000 times for 2K resolution images in terms of FPS. Code and viewer can be found in https://github.com/Srameo/LE3D .

Compact 3D Gaussian Splatting for Static and Dynamic Radiance Fields

3D Gaussian splatting (3DGS) has recently emerged as an alternative representation that leverages a 3D Gaussian-based representation and introduces an approximated volumetric rendering, achieving very fast rendering speed and promising image quality. Furthermore, subsequent studies have successfully extended 3DGS to dynamic 3D scenes, demonstrating its wide range of applications. However, a significant drawback arises as 3DGS and its following methods entail a substantial number of Gaussians to maintain the high fidelity of the rendered images, which requires a large amount of memory and storage. To address this critical issue, we place a specific emphasis on two key objectives: reducing the number of Gaussian points without sacrificing performance and compressing the Gaussian attributes, such as view-dependent color and covariance. To this end, we propose a learnable mask strategy that significantly reduces the number of Gaussians while preserving high performance. In addition, we propose a compact but effective representation of view-dependent color by employing a grid-based neural field rather than relying on spherical harmonics. Finally, we learn codebooks to compactly represent the geometric and temporal attributes by residual vector quantization. With model compression techniques such as quantization and entropy coding, we consistently show over 25x reduced storage and enhanced rendering speed compared to 3DGS for static scenes, while maintaining the quality of the scene representation. For dynamic scenes, our approach achieves more than 12x storage efficiency and retains a high-quality reconstruction compared to the existing state-of-the-art methods. Our work provides a comprehensive framework for 3D scene representation, achieving high performance, fast training, compactness, and real-time rendering. Our project page is available at https://maincold2.github.io/c3dgs/.

EmbodiedSAM: Online Segment Any 3D Thing in Real Time

Embodied tasks require the agent to fully understand 3D scenes simultaneously with its exploration, so an online, real-time, fine-grained and highly-generalized 3D perception model is desperately needed. Since high-quality 3D data is limited, directly training such a model in 3D is almost infeasible. Meanwhile, vision foundation models (VFM) has revolutionized the field of 2D computer vision with superior performance, which makes the use of VFM to assist embodied 3D perception a promising direction. However, most existing VFM-assisted 3D perception methods are either offline or too slow that cannot be applied in practical embodied tasks. In this paper, we aim to leverage Segment Anything Model (SAM) for real-time 3D instance segmentation in an online setting. This is a challenging problem since future frames are not available in the input streaming RGB-D video, and an instance may be observed in several frames so object matching between frames is required. To address these challenges, we first propose a geometric-aware query lifting module to represent the 2D masks generated by SAM by 3D-aware queries, which is then iteratively refined by a dual-level query decoder. In this way, the 2D masks are transferred to fine-grained shapes on 3D point clouds. Benefit from the query representation for 3D masks, we can compute the similarity matrix between the 3D masks from different views by efficient matrix operation, which enables real-time inference. Experiments on ScanNet, ScanNet200, SceneNN and 3RScan show our method achieves leading performance even compared with offline methods. Our method also demonstrates great generalization ability in several zero-shot dataset transferring experiments and show great potential in open-vocabulary and data-efficient setting. Code and demo are available at https://xuxw98.github.io/ESAM/, with only one RTX 3090 GPU required for training and evaluation.

Designing BERT for Convolutional Networks: Sparse and Hierarchical Masked Modeling

We identify and overcome two key obstacles in extending the success of BERT-style pre-training, or the masked image modeling, to convolutional networks (convnets): (i) convolution operation cannot handle irregular, random-masked input images; (ii) the single-scale nature of BERT pre-training is inconsistent with convnet's hierarchical structure. For (i), we treat unmasked pixels as sparse voxels of 3D point clouds and use sparse convolution to encode. This is the first use of sparse convolution for 2D masked modeling. For (ii), we develop a hierarchical decoder to reconstruct images from multi-scale encoded features. Our method called Sparse masKed modeling (SparK) is general: it can be used directly on any convolutional model without backbone modifications. We validate it on both classical (ResNet) and modern (ConvNeXt) models: on three downstream tasks, it surpasses both state-of-the-art contrastive learning and transformer-based masked modeling by similarly large margins (around +1.0%). Improvements on object detection and instance segmentation are more substantial (up to +3.5%), verifying the strong transferability of features learned. We also find its favorable scaling behavior by observing more gains on larger models. All this evidence reveals a promising future of generative pre-training on convnets. Codes and models are released at https://github.com/keyu-tian/SparK.

RayGauss: Volumetric Gaussian-Based Ray Casting for Photorealistic Novel View Synthesis

Differentiable volumetric rendering-based methods made significant progress in novel view synthesis. On one hand, innovative methods have replaced the Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) network with locally parameterized structures, enabling high-quality renderings in a reasonable time. On the other hand, approaches have used differentiable splatting instead of NeRF's ray casting to optimize radiance fields rapidly using Gaussian kernels, allowing for fine adaptation to the scene. However, differentiable ray casting of irregularly spaced kernels has been scarcely explored, while splatting, despite enabling fast rendering times, is susceptible to clearly visible artifacts. Our work closes this gap by providing a physically consistent formulation of the emitted radiance c and density {\sigma}, decomposed with Gaussian functions associated with Spherical Gaussians/Harmonics for all-frequency colorimetric representation. We also introduce a method enabling differentiable ray casting of irregularly distributed Gaussians using an algorithm that integrates radiance fields slab by slab and leverages a BVH structure. This allows our approach to finely adapt to the scene while avoiding splatting artifacts. As a result, we achieve superior rendering quality compared to the state-of-the-art while maintaining reasonable training times and achieving inference speeds of 25 FPS on the Blender dataset. Project page with videos and code: https://raygauss.github.io/

Compact 3D Scene Representation via Self-Organizing Gaussian Grids

3D Gaussian Splatting has recently emerged as a highly promising technique for modeling of static 3D scenes. In contrast to Neural Radiance Fields, it utilizes efficient rasterization allowing for very fast rendering at high-quality. However, the storage size is significantly higher, which hinders practical deployment, e.g.~on resource constrained devices. In this paper, we introduce a compact scene representation organizing the parameters of 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) into a 2D grid with local homogeneity, ensuring a drastic reduction in storage requirements without compromising visual quality during rendering. Central to our idea is the explicit exploitation of perceptual redundancies present in natural scenes. In essence, the inherent nature of a scene allows for numerous permutations of Gaussian parameters to equivalently represent it. To this end, we propose a novel highly parallel algorithm that regularly arranges the high-dimensional Gaussian parameters into a 2D grid while preserving their neighborhood structure. During training, we further enforce local smoothness between the sorted parameters in the grid. The uncompressed Gaussians use the same structure as 3DGS, ensuring a seamless integration with established renderers. Our method achieves a reduction factor of 8x to 26x in size for complex scenes with no increase in training time, marking a substantial leap forward in the domain of 3D scene distribution and consumption. Additional information can be found on our project page: https://fraunhoferhhi.github.io/Self-Organizing-Gaussians/

Binary Opacity Grids: Capturing Fine Geometric Detail for Mesh-Based View Synthesis

While surface-based view synthesis algorithms are appealing due to their low computational requirements, they often struggle to reproduce thin structures. In contrast, more expensive methods that model the scene's geometry as a volumetric density field (e.g. NeRF) excel at reconstructing fine geometric detail. However, density fields often represent geometry in a "fuzzy" manner, which hinders exact localization of the surface. In this work, we modify density fields to encourage them to converge towards surfaces, without compromising their ability to reconstruct thin structures. First, we employ a discrete opacity grid representation instead of a continuous density field, which allows opacity values to discontinuously transition from zero to one at the surface. Second, we anti-alias by casting multiple rays per pixel, which allows occlusion boundaries and subpixel structures to be modelled without using semi-transparent voxels. Third, we minimize the binary entropy of the opacity values, which facilitates the extraction of surface geometry by encouraging opacity values to binarize towards the end of training. Lastly, we develop a fusion-based meshing strategy followed by mesh simplification and appearance model fitting. The compact meshes produced by our model can be rendered in real-time on mobile devices and achieve significantly higher view synthesis quality compared to existing mesh-based approaches.

What You See is What You GAN: Rendering Every Pixel for High-Fidelity Geometry in 3D GANs

3D-aware Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have shown remarkable progress in learning to generate multi-view-consistent images and 3D geometries of scenes from collections of 2D images via neural volume rendering. Yet, the significant memory and computational costs of dense sampling in volume rendering have forced 3D GANs to adopt patch-based training or employ low-resolution rendering with post-processing 2D super resolution, which sacrifices multiview consistency and the quality of resolved geometry. Consequently, 3D GANs have not yet been able to fully resolve the rich 3D geometry present in 2D images. In this work, we propose techniques to scale neural volume rendering to the much higher resolution of native 2D images, thereby resolving fine-grained 3D geometry with unprecedented detail. Our approach employs learning-based samplers for accelerating neural rendering for 3D GAN training using up to 5 times fewer depth samples. This enables us to explicitly "render every pixel" of the full-resolution image during training and inference without post-processing superresolution in 2D. Together with our strategy to learn high-quality surface geometry, our method synthesizes high-resolution 3D geometry and strictly view-consistent images while maintaining image quality on par with baselines relying on post-processing super resolution. We demonstrate state-of-the-art 3D gemetric quality on FFHQ and AFHQ, setting a new standard for unsupervised learning of 3D shapes in 3D GANs.

Hi3D: Pursuing High-Resolution Image-to-3D Generation with Video Diffusion Models

Despite having tremendous progress in image-to-3D generation, existing methods still struggle to produce multi-view consistent images with high-resolution textures in detail, especially in the paradigm of 2D diffusion that lacks 3D awareness. In this work, we present High-resolution Image-to-3D model (Hi3D), a new video diffusion based paradigm that redefines a single image to multi-view images as 3D-aware sequential image generation (i.e., orbital video generation). This methodology delves into the underlying temporal consistency knowledge in video diffusion model that generalizes well to geometry consistency across multiple views in 3D generation. Technically, Hi3D first empowers the pre-trained video diffusion model with 3D-aware prior (camera pose condition), yielding multi-view images with low-resolution texture details. A 3D-aware video-to-video refiner is learnt to further scale up the multi-view images with high-resolution texture details. Such high-resolution multi-view images are further augmented with novel views through 3D Gaussian Splatting, which are finally leveraged to obtain high-fidelity meshes via 3D reconstruction. Extensive experiments on both novel view synthesis and single view reconstruction demonstrate that our Hi3D manages to produce superior multi-view consistency images with highly-detailed textures. Source code and data are available at https://github.com/yanghb22-fdu/Hi3D-Official.

GridFormer: Point-Grid Transformer for Surface Reconstruction

Implicit neural networks have emerged as a crucial technology in 3D surface reconstruction. To reconstruct continuous surfaces from discrete point clouds, encoding the input points into regular grid features (plane or volume) has been commonly employed in existing approaches. However, these methods typically use the grid as an index for uniformly scattering point features. Compared with the irregular point features, the regular grid features may sacrifice some reconstruction details but improve efficiency. To take full advantage of these two types of features, we introduce a novel and high-efficiency attention mechanism between the grid and point features named Point-Grid Transformer (GridFormer). This mechanism treats the grid as a transfer point connecting the space and point cloud. Our method maximizes the spatial expressiveness of grid features and maintains computational efficiency. Furthermore, optimizing predictions over the entire space could potentially result in blurred boundaries. To address this issue, we further propose a boundary optimization strategy incorporating margin binary cross-entropy loss and boundary sampling. This approach enables us to achieve a more precise representation of the object structure. Our experiments validate that our method is effective and outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches under widely used benchmarks by producing more precise geometry reconstructions. The code is available at https://github.com/list17/GridFormer.

Bilateral Guided Radiance Field Processing

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) achieves unprecedented performance in synthesizing novel view synthesis, utilizing multi-view consistency. When capturing multiple inputs, image signal processing (ISP) in modern cameras will independently enhance them, including exposure adjustment, color correction, local tone mapping, etc. While these processings greatly improve image quality, they often break the multi-view consistency assumption, leading to "floaters" in the reconstructed radiance fields. To address this concern without compromising visual aesthetics, we aim to first disentangle the enhancement by ISP at the NeRF training stage and re-apply user-desired enhancements to the reconstructed radiance fields at the finishing stage. Furthermore, to make the re-applied enhancements consistent between novel views, we need to perform imaging signal processing in 3D space (i.e. "3D ISP"). For this goal, we adopt the bilateral grid, a locally-affine model, as a generalized representation of ISP processing. Specifically, we optimize per-view 3D bilateral grids with radiance fields to approximate the effects of camera pipelines for each input view. To achieve user-adjustable 3D finishing, we propose to learn a low-rank 4D bilateral grid from a given single view edit, lifting photo enhancements to the whole 3D scene. We demonstrate our approach can boost the visual quality of novel view synthesis by effectively removing floaters and performing enhancements from user retouching. The source code and our data are available at: https://bilarfpro.github.io.

ProNeRF: Learning Efficient Projection-Aware Ray Sampling for Fine-Grained Implicit Neural Radiance Fields

Recent advances in neural rendering have shown that, albeit slow, implicit compact models can learn a scene's geometries and view-dependent appearances from multiple views. To maintain such a small memory footprint but achieve faster inference times, recent works have adopted `sampler' networks that adaptively sample a small subset of points along each ray in the implicit neural radiance fields. Although these methods achieve up to a 10times reduction in rendering time, they still suffer from considerable quality degradation compared to the vanilla NeRF. In contrast, we propose ProNeRF, which provides an optimal trade-off between memory footprint (similar to NeRF), speed (faster than HyperReel), and quality (better than K-Planes). ProNeRF is equipped with a novel projection-aware sampling (PAS) network together with a new training strategy for ray exploration and exploitation, allowing for efficient fine-grained particle sampling. Our ProNeRF yields state-of-the-art metrics, being 15-23x faster with 0.65dB higher PSNR than NeRF and yielding 0.95dB higher PSNR than the best published sampler-based method, HyperReel. Our exploration and exploitation training strategy allows ProNeRF to learn the full scenes' color and density distributions while also learning efficient ray sampling focused on the highest-density regions. We provide extensive experimental results that support the effectiveness of our method on the widely adopted forward-facing and 360 datasets, LLFF and Blender, respectively.

CuNeRF: Cube-Based Neural Radiance Field for Zero-Shot Medical Image Arbitrary-Scale Super Resolution

Medical image arbitrary-scale super-resolution (MIASSR) has recently gained widespread attention, aiming to super sample medical volumes at arbitrary scales via a single model. However, existing MIASSR methods face two major limitations: (i) reliance on high-resolution (HR) volumes and (ii) limited generalization ability, which restricts their application in various scenarios. To overcome these limitations, we propose Cube-based Neural Radiance Field (CuNeRF), a zero-shot MIASSR framework that can yield medical images at arbitrary scales and viewpoints in a continuous domain. Unlike existing MIASSR methods that fit the mapping between low-resolution (LR) and HR volumes, CuNeRF focuses on building a coordinate-intensity continuous representation from LR volumes without the need for HR references. This is achieved by the proposed differentiable modules: including cube-based sampling, isotropic volume rendering, and cube-based hierarchical rendering. Through extensive experiments on magnetic resource imaging (MRI) and computed tomography (CT) modalities, we demonstrate that CuNeRF outperforms state-of-the-art MIASSR methods. CuNeRF yields better visual verisimilitude and reduces aliasing artifacts at various upsampling factors. Moreover, our CuNeRF does not need any LR-HR training pairs, which is more flexible and easier to be used than others. Our code will be publicly available soon.

SMERF: Streamable Memory Efficient Radiance Fields for Real-Time Large-Scene Exploration

Recent techniques for real-time view synthesis have rapidly advanced in fidelity and speed, and modern methods are capable of rendering near-photorealistic scenes at interactive frame rates. At the same time, a tension has arisen between explicit scene representations amenable to rasterization and neural fields built on ray marching, with state-of-the-art instances of the latter surpassing the former in quality while being prohibitively expensive for real-time applications. In this work, we introduce SMERF, a view synthesis approach that achieves state-of-the-art accuracy among real-time methods on large scenes with footprints up to 300 m^2 at a volumetric resolution of 3.5 mm^3. Our method is built upon two primary contributions: a hierarchical model partitioning scheme, which increases model capacity while constraining compute and memory consumption, and a distillation training strategy that simultaneously yields high fidelity and internal consistency. Our approach enables full six degrees of freedom (6DOF) navigation within a web browser and renders in real-time on commodity smartphones and laptops. Extensive experiments show that our method exceeds the current state-of-the-art in real-time novel view synthesis by 0.78 dB on standard benchmarks and 1.78 dB on large scenes, renders frames three orders of magnitude faster than state-of-the-art radiance field models, and achieves real-time performance across a wide variety of commodity devices, including smartphones. We encourage readers to explore these models interactively at our project website: https://smerf-3d.github.io.

GVGEN: Text-to-3D Generation with Volumetric Representation

In recent years, 3D Gaussian splatting has emerged as a powerful technique for 3D reconstruction and generation, known for its fast and high-quality rendering capabilities. To address these shortcomings, this paper introduces a novel diffusion-based framework, GVGEN, designed to efficiently generate 3D Gaussian representations from text input. We propose two innovative techniques:(1) Structured Volumetric Representation. We first arrange disorganized 3D Gaussian points as a structured form GaussianVolume. This transformation allows the capture of intricate texture details within a volume composed of a fixed number of Gaussians. To better optimize the representation of these details, we propose a unique pruning and densifying method named the Candidate Pool Strategy, enhancing detail fidelity through selective optimization. (2) Coarse-to-fine Generation Pipeline. To simplify the generation of GaussianVolume and empower the model to generate instances with detailed 3D geometry, we propose a coarse-to-fine pipeline. It initially constructs a basic geometric structure, followed by the prediction of complete Gaussian attributes. Our framework, GVGEN, demonstrates superior performance in qualitative and quantitative assessments compared to existing 3D generation methods. Simultaneously, it maintains a fast generation speed (sim7 seconds), effectively striking a balance between quality and efficiency.

MPI-Flow: Learning Realistic Optical Flow with Multiplane Images

The accuracy of learning-based optical flow estimation models heavily relies on the realism of the training datasets. Current approaches for generating such datasets either employ synthetic data or generate images with limited realism. However, the domain gap of these data with real-world scenes constrains the generalization of the trained model to real-world applications. To address this issue, we investigate generating realistic optical flow datasets from real-world images. Firstly, to generate highly realistic new images, we construct a layered depth representation, known as multiplane images (MPI), from single-view images. This allows us to generate novel view images that are highly realistic. To generate optical flow maps that correspond accurately to the new image, we calculate the optical flows of each plane using the camera matrix and plane depths. We then project these layered optical flows into the output optical flow map with volume rendering. Secondly, to ensure the realism of motion, we present an independent object motion module that can separate the camera and dynamic object motion in MPI. This module addresses the deficiency in MPI-based single-view methods, where optical flow is generated only by camera motion and does not account for any object movement. We additionally devise a depth-aware inpainting module to merge new images with dynamic objects and address unnatural motion occlusions. We show the superior performance of our method through extensive experiments on real-world datasets. Moreover, our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance in both unsupervised and supervised training of learning-based models. The code will be made publicly available at: https://github.com/Sharpiless/MPI-Flow.

DaGAN++: Depth-Aware Generative Adversarial Network for Talking Head Video Generation

Predominant techniques on talking head generation largely depend on 2D information, including facial appearances and motions from input face images. Nevertheless, dense 3D facial geometry, such as pixel-wise depth, plays a critical role in constructing accurate 3D facial structures and suppressing complex background noises for generation. However, dense 3D annotations for facial videos is prohibitively costly to obtain. In this work, firstly, we present a novel self-supervised method for learning dense 3D facial geometry (ie, depth) from face videos, without requiring camera parameters and 3D geometry annotations in training. We further propose a strategy to learn pixel-level uncertainties to perceive more reliable rigid-motion pixels for geometry learning. Secondly, we design an effective geometry-guided facial keypoint estimation module, providing accurate keypoints for generating motion fields. Lastly, we develop a 3D-aware cross-modal (ie, appearance and depth) attention mechanism, which can be applied to each generation layer, to capture facial geometries in a coarse-to-fine manner. Extensive experiments are conducted on three challenging benchmarks (ie, VoxCeleb1, VoxCeleb2, and HDTF). The results demonstrate that our proposed framework can generate highly realistic-looking reenacted talking videos, with new state-of-the-art performances established on these benchmarks. The codes and trained models are publicly available on the GitHub project page at https://github.com/harlanhong/CVPR2022-DaGAN

VCD-Texture: Variance Alignment based 3D-2D Co-Denoising for Text-Guided Texturing

Recent research on texture synthesis for 3D shapes benefits a lot from dramatically developed 2D text-to-image diffusion models, including inpainting-based and optimization-based approaches. However, these methods ignore the modal gap between the 2D diffusion model and 3D objects, which primarily render 3D objects into 2D images and texture each image separately. In this paper, we revisit the texture synthesis and propose a Variance alignment based 3D-2D Collaborative Denoising framework, dubbed VCD-Texture, to address these issues. Formally, we first unify both 2D and 3D latent feature learning in diffusion self-attention modules with re-projected 3D attention receptive fields. Subsequently, the denoised multi-view 2D latent features are aggregated into 3D space and then rasterized back to formulate more consistent 2D predictions. However, the rasterization process suffers from an intractable variance bias, which is theoretically addressed by the proposed variance alignment, achieving high-fidelity texture synthesis. Moreover, we present an inpainting refinement to further improve the details with conflicting regions. Notably, there is not a publicly available benchmark to evaluate texture synthesis, which hinders its development. Thus we construct a new evaluation set built upon three open-source 3D datasets and propose to use four metrics to thoroughly validate the texturing performance. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that VCD-Texture achieves superior performance against other counterparts.

EvaSurf: Efficient View-Aware Implicit Textured Surface Reconstruction on Mobile Devices

Reconstructing real-world 3D objects has numerous applications in computer vision, such as virtual reality, video games, and animations. Ideally, 3D reconstruction methods should generate high-fidelity results with 3D consistency in real-time. Traditional methods match pixels between images using photo-consistency constraints or learned features, while differentiable rendering methods like Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) use differentiable volume rendering or surface-based representation to generate high-fidelity scenes. However, these methods require excessive runtime for rendering, making them impractical for daily applications. To address these challenges, we present EvaSurf, an Efficient View-Aware implicit textured Surface reconstruction method on mobile devices. In our method, we first employ an efficient surface-based model with a multi-view supervision module to ensure accurate mesh reconstruction. To enable high-fidelity rendering, we learn an implicit texture embedded with a set of Gaussian lobes to capture view-dependent information. Furthermore, with the explicit geometry and the implicit texture, we can employ a lightweight neural shader to reduce the expense of computation and further support real-time rendering on common mobile devices. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method can reconstruct high-quality appearance and accurate mesh on both synthetic and real-world datasets. Moreover, our method can be trained in just 1-2 hours using a single GPU and run on mobile devices at over 40 FPS (Frames Per Second), with a final package required for rendering taking up only 40-50 MB.

Robust Dual Gaussian Splatting for Immersive Human-centric Volumetric Videos

Volumetric video represents a transformative advancement in visual media, enabling users to freely navigate immersive virtual experiences and narrowing the gap between digital and real worlds. However, the need for extensive manual intervention to stabilize mesh sequences and the generation of excessively large assets in existing workflows impedes broader adoption. In this paper, we present a novel Gaussian-based approach, dubbed DualGS, for real-time and high-fidelity playback of complex human performance with excellent compression ratios. Our key idea in DualGS is to separately represent motion and appearance using the corresponding skin and joint Gaussians. Such an explicit disentanglement can significantly reduce motion redundancy and enhance temporal coherence. We begin by initializing the DualGS and anchoring skin Gaussians to joint Gaussians at the first frame. Subsequently, we employ a coarse-to-fine training strategy for frame-by-frame human performance modeling. It includes a coarse alignment phase for overall motion prediction as well as a fine-grained optimization for robust tracking and high-fidelity rendering. To integrate volumetric video seamlessly into VR environments, we efficiently compress motion using entropy encoding and appearance using codec compression coupled with a persistent codebook. Our approach achieves a compression ratio of up to 120 times, only requiring approximately 350KB of storage per frame. We demonstrate the efficacy of our representation through photo-realistic, free-view experiences on VR headsets, enabling users to immersively watch musicians in performance and feel the rhythm of the notes at the performers' fingertips.

CoherentGS: Sparse Novel View Synthesis with Coherent 3D Gaussians

The field of 3D reconstruction from images has rapidly evolved in the past few years, first with the introduction of Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) and more recently with 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS). The latter provides a significant edge over NeRF in terms of the training and inference speed, as well as the reconstruction quality. Although 3DGS works well for dense input images, the unstructured point-cloud like representation quickly overfits to the more challenging setup of extremely sparse input images (e.g., 3 images), creating a representation that appears as a jumble of needles from novel views. To address this issue, we propose regularized optimization and depth-based initialization. Our key idea is to introduce a structured Gaussian representation that can be controlled in 2D image space. We then constraint the Gaussians, in particular their position, and prevent them from moving independently during optimization. Specifically, we introduce single and multiview constraints through an implicit convolutional decoder and a total variation loss, respectively. With the coherency introduced to the Gaussians, we further constrain the optimization through a flow-based loss function. To support our regularized optimization, we propose an approach to initialize the Gaussians using monocular depth estimates at each input view. We demonstrate significant improvements compared to the state-of-the-art sparse-view NeRF-based approaches on a variety of scenes.

S3IM: Stochastic Structural SIMilarity and Its Unreasonable Effectiveness for Neural Fields

Recently, Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) has shown great success in rendering novel-view images of a given scene by learning an implicit representation with only posed RGB images. NeRF and relevant neural field methods (e.g., neural surface representation) typically optimize a point-wise loss and make point-wise predictions, where one data point corresponds to one pixel. Unfortunately, this line of research failed to use the collective supervision of distant pixels, although it is known that pixels in an image or scene can provide rich structural information. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to design a nonlocal multiplex training paradigm for NeRF and relevant neural field methods via a novel Stochastic Structural SIMilarity (S3IM) loss that processes multiple data points as a whole set instead of process multiple inputs independently. Our extensive experiments demonstrate the unreasonable effectiveness of S3IM in improving NeRF and neural surface representation for nearly free. The improvements of quality metrics can be particularly significant for those relatively difficult tasks: e.g., the test MSE loss unexpectedly drops by more than 90% for TensoRF and DVGO over eight novel view synthesis tasks; a 198% F-score gain and a 64% Chamfer L_{1} distance reduction for NeuS over eight surface reconstruction tasks. Moreover, S3IM is consistently robust even with sparse inputs, corrupted images, and dynamic scenes.

Mixed Neural Voxels for Fast Multi-view Video Synthesis

Synthesizing high-fidelity videos from real-world multi-view input is challenging because of the complexities of real-world environments and highly dynamic motions. Previous works based on neural radiance fields have demonstrated high-quality reconstructions of dynamic scenes. However, training such models on real-world scenes is time-consuming, usually taking days or weeks. In this paper, we present a novel method named MixVoxels to better represent the dynamic scenes with fast training speed and competitive rendering qualities. The proposed MixVoxels represents the 4D dynamic scenes as a mixture of static and dynamic voxels and processes them with different networks. In this way, the computation of the required modalities for static voxels can be processed by a lightweight model, which essentially reduces the amount of computation, especially for many daily dynamic scenes dominated by the static background. To separate the two kinds of voxels, we propose a novel variation field to estimate the temporal variance of each voxel. For the dynamic voxels, we design an inner-product time query method to efficiently query multiple time steps, which is essential to recover the high-dynamic motions. As a result, with 15 minutes of training for dynamic scenes with inputs of 300-frame videos, MixVoxels achieves better PSNR than previous methods. Codes and trained models are available at https://github.com/fengres/mixvoxels

Pushing Auto-regressive Models for 3D Shape Generation at Capacity and Scalability

Auto-regressive models have achieved impressive results in 2D image generation by modeling joint distributions in grid space. In this paper, we extend auto-regressive models to 3D domains, and seek a stronger ability of 3D shape generation by improving auto-regressive models at capacity and scalability simultaneously. Firstly, we leverage an ensemble of publicly available 3D datasets to facilitate the training of large-scale models. It consists of a comprehensive collection of approximately 900,000 objects, with multiple properties of meshes, points, voxels, rendered images, and text captions. This diverse labeled dataset, termed Objaverse-Mix, empowers our model to learn from a wide range of object variations. However, directly applying 3D auto-regression encounters critical challenges of high computational demands on volumetric grids and ambiguous auto-regressive order along grid dimensions, resulting in inferior quality of 3D shapes. To this end, we then present a novel framework Argus3D in terms of capacity. Concretely, our approach introduces discrete representation learning based on a latent vector instead of volumetric grids, which not only reduces computational costs but also preserves essential geometric details by learning the joint distributions in a more tractable order. The capacity of conditional generation can thus be realized by simply concatenating various conditioning inputs to the latent vector, such as point clouds, categories, images, and texts. In addition, thanks to the simplicity of our model architecture, we naturally scale up our approach to a larger model with an impressive 3.6 billion parameters, further enhancing the quality of versatile 3D generation. Extensive experiments on four generation tasks demonstrate that Argus3D can synthesize diverse and faithful shapes across multiple categories, achieving remarkable performance.

IDArb: Intrinsic Decomposition for Arbitrary Number of Input Views and Illuminations

Capturing geometric and material information from images remains a fundamental challenge in computer vision and graphics. Traditional optimization-based methods often require hours of computational time to reconstruct geometry, material properties, and environmental lighting from dense multi-view inputs, while still struggling with inherent ambiguities between lighting and material. On the other hand, learning-based approaches leverage rich material priors from existing 3D object datasets but face challenges with maintaining multi-view consistency. In this paper, we introduce IDArb, a diffusion-based model designed to perform intrinsic decomposition on an arbitrary number of images under varying illuminations. Our method achieves accurate and multi-view consistent estimation on surface normals and material properties. This is made possible through a novel cross-view, cross-domain attention module and an illumination-augmented, view-adaptive training strategy. Additionally, we introduce ARB-Objaverse, a new dataset that provides large-scale multi-view intrinsic data and renderings under diverse lighting conditions, supporting robust training. Extensive experiments demonstrate that IDArb outperforms state-of-the-art methods both qualitatively and quantitatively. Moreover, our approach facilitates a range of downstream tasks, including single-image relighting, photometric stereo, and 3D reconstruction, highlighting its broad applications in realistic 3D content creation.

Mosaic-SDF for 3D Generative Models

Current diffusion or flow-based generative models for 3D shapes divide to two: distilling pre-trained 2D image diffusion models, and training directly on 3D shapes. When training a diffusion or flow models on 3D shapes a crucial design choice is the shape representation. An effective shape representation needs to adhere three design principles: it should allow an efficient conversion of large 3D datasets to the representation form; it should provide a good tradeoff of approximation power versus number of parameters; and it should have a simple tensorial form that is compatible with existing powerful neural architectures. While standard 3D shape representations such as volumetric grids and point clouds do not adhere to all these principles simultaneously, we advocate in this paper a new representation that does. We introduce Mosaic-SDF (M-SDF): a simple 3D shape representation that approximates the Signed Distance Function (SDF) of a given shape by using a set of local grids spread near the shape's boundary. The M-SDF representation is fast to compute for each shape individually making it readily parallelizable; it is parameter efficient as it only covers the space around the shape's boundary; and it has a simple matrix form, compatible with Transformer-based architectures. We demonstrate the efficacy of the M-SDF representation by using it to train a 3D generative flow model including class-conditioned generation with the 3D Warehouse dataset, and text-to-3D generation using a dataset of about 600k caption-shape pairs.

Spherical Space Feature Decomposition for Guided Depth Map Super-Resolution

Guided depth map super-resolution (GDSR), as a hot topic in multi-modal image processing, aims to upsample low-resolution (LR) depth maps with additional information involved in high-resolution (HR) RGB images from the same scene. The critical step of this task is to effectively extract domain-shared and domain-private RGB/depth features. In addition, three detailed issues, namely blurry edges, noisy surfaces, and over-transferred RGB texture, need to be addressed. In this paper, we propose the Spherical Space feature Decomposition Network (SSDNet) to solve the above issues. To better model cross-modality features, Restormer block-based RGB/depth encoders are employed for extracting local-global features. Then, the extracted features are mapped to the spherical space to complete the separation of private features and the alignment of shared features. Shared features of RGB are fused with the depth features to complete the GDSR task. Subsequently, a spherical contrast refinement (SCR) module is proposed to further address the detail issues. Patches that are classified according to imperfect categories are input into the SCR module, where the patch features are pulled closer to the ground truth and pushed away from the corresponding imperfect samples in the spherical feature space via contrastive learning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method can achieve state-of-the-art results on four test datasets, as well as successfully generalize to real-world scenes. The code is available at https://github.com/Zhaozixiang1228/GDSR-SSDNet.

AIM 2024 Sparse Neural Rendering Challenge: Dataset and Benchmark

Recent developments in differentiable and neural rendering have made impressive breakthroughs in a variety of 2D and 3D tasks, e.g. novel view synthesis, 3D reconstruction. Typically, differentiable rendering relies on a dense viewpoint coverage of the scene, such that the geometry can be disambiguated from appearance observations alone. Several challenges arise when only a few input views are available, often referred to as sparse or few-shot neural rendering. As this is an underconstrained problem, most existing approaches introduce the use of regularisation, together with a diversity of learnt and hand-crafted priors. A recurring problem in sparse rendering literature is the lack of an homogeneous, up-to-date, dataset and evaluation protocol. While high-resolution datasets are standard in dense reconstruction literature, sparse rendering methods often evaluate with low-resolution images. Additionally, data splits are inconsistent across different manuscripts, and testing ground-truth images are often publicly available, which may lead to over-fitting. In this work, we propose the Sparse Rendering (SpaRe) dataset and benchmark. We introduce a new dataset that follows the setup of the DTU MVS dataset. The dataset is composed of 97 new scenes based on synthetic, high-quality assets. Each scene has up to 64 camera views and 7 lighting configurations, rendered at 1600x1200 resolution. We release a training split of 82 scenes to foster generalizable approaches, and provide an online evaluation platform for the validation and test sets, whose ground-truth images remain hidden. We propose two different sparse configurations (3 and 9 input images respectively). This provides a powerful and convenient tool for reproducible evaluation, and enable researchers easy access to a public leaderboard with the state-of-the-art performance scores. Available at: https://sparebenchmark.github.io/

3D Convex Splatting: Radiance Field Rendering with 3D Smooth Convexes

Recent advances in radiance field reconstruction, such as 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS), have achieved high-quality novel view synthesis and fast rendering by representing scenes with compositions of Gaussian primitives. However, 3D Gaussians present several limitations for scene reconstruction. Accurately capturing hard edges is challenging without significantly increasing the number of Gaussians, creating a large memory footprint. Moreover, they struggle to represent flat surfaces, as they are diffused in space. Without hand-crafted regularizers, they tend to disperse irregularly around the actual surface. To circumvent these issues, we introduce a novel method, named 3D Convex Splatting (3DCS), which leverages 3D smooth convexes as primitives for modeling geometrically-meaningful radiance fields from multi-view images. Smooth convex shapes offer greater flexibility than Gaussians, allowing for a better representation of 3D scenes with hard edges and dense volumes using fewer primitives. Powered by our efficient CUDA-based rasterizer, 3DCS achieves superior performance over 3DGS on benchmarks such as Mip-NeRF360, Tanks and Temples, and Deep Blending. Specifically, our method attains an improvement of up to 0.81 in PSNR and 0.026 in LPIPS compared to 3DGS while maintaining high rendering speeds and reducing the number of required primitives. Our results highlight the potential of 3D Convex Splatting to become the new standard for high-quality scene reconstruction and novel view synthesis. Project page: convexsplatting.github.io.

Householder Projector for Unsupervised Latent Semantics Discovery

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), especially the recent style-based generators (StyleGANs), have versatile semantics in the structured latent space. Latent semantics discovery methods emerge to move around the latent code such that only one factor varies during the traversal. Recently, an unsupervised method proposed a promising direction to directly use the eigenvectors of the projection matrix that maps latent codes to features as the interpretable directions. However, one overlooked fact is that the projection matrix is non-orthogonal and the number of eigenvectors is too large. The non-orthogonality would entangle semantic attributes in the top few eigenvectors, and the large dimensionality might result in meaningless variations among the directions even if the matrix is orthogonal. To avoid these issues, we propose Householder Projector, a flexible and general low-rank orthogonal matrix representation based on Householder transformations, to parameterize the projection matrix. The orthogonality guarantees that the eigenvectors correspond to disentangled interpretable semantics, while the low-rank property encourages that each identified direction has meaningful variations. We integrate our projector into pre-trained StyleGAN2/StyleGAN3 and evaluate the models on several benchmarks. Within only 1% of the original training steps for fine-tuning, our projector helps StyleGANs to discover more disentangled and precise semantic attributes without sacrificing image fidelity.

3DGS-DET: Empower 3D Gaussian Splatting with Boundary Guidance and Box-Focused Sampling for 3D Object Detection

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) are widely used for novel-view synthesis and have been adapted for 3D Object Detection (3DOD), offering a promising approach to 3DOD through view-synthesis representation. However, NeRF faces inherent limitations: (i) limited representational capacity for 3DOD due to its implicit nature, and (ii) slow rendering speeds. Recently, 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has emerged as an explicit 3D representation that addresses these limitations. Inspired by these advantages, this paper introduces 3DGS into 3DOD for the first time, identifying two main challenges: (i) Ambiguous spatial distribution of Gaussian blobs: 3DGS primarily relies on 2D pixel-level supervision, resulting in unclear 3D spatial distribution of Gaussian blobs and poor differentiation between objects and background, which hinders 3DOD; (ii) Excessive background blobs: 2D images often include numerous background pixels, leading to densely reconstructed 3DGS with many noisy Gaussian blobs representing the background, negatively affecting detection. To tackle the challenge (i), we leverage the fact that 3DGS reconstruction is derived from 2D images, and propose an elegant and efficient solution by incorporating 2D Boundary Guidance to significantly enhance the spatial distribution of Gaussian blobs, resulting in clearer differentiation between objects and their background. To address the challenge (ii), we propose a Box-Focused Sampling strategy using 2D boxes to generate object probability distribution in 3D spaces, allowing effective probabilistic sampling in 3D to retain more object blobs and reduce noisy background blobs. Benefiting from our designs, our 3DGS-DET significantly outperforms the SOTA NeRF-based method, NeRF-Det, achieving improvements of +6.6 on [email protected] and +8.1 on [email protected] for the ScanNet dataset, and impressive +31.5 on [email protected] for the ARKITScenes dataset.

MV-JAR: Masked Voxel Jigsaw and Reconstruction for LiDAR-Based Self-Supervised Pre-Training

This paper introduces the Masked Voxel Jigsaw and Reconstruction (MV-JAR) method for LiDAR-based self-supervised pre-training and a carefully designed data-efficient 3D object detection benchmark on the Waymo dataset. Inspired by the scene-voxel-point hierarchy in downstream 3D object detectors, we design masking and reconstruction strategies accounting for voxel distributions in the scene and local point distributions within the voxel. We employ a Reversed-Furthest-Voxel-Sampling strategy to address the uneven distribution of LiDAR points and propose MV-JAR, which combines two techniques for modeling the aforementioned distributions, resulting in superior performance. Our experiments reveal limitations in previous data-efficient experiments, which uniformly sample fine-tuning splits with varying data proportions from each LiDAR sequence, leading to similar data diversity across splits. To address this, we propose a new benchmark that samples scene sequences for diverse fine-tuning splits, ensuring adequate model convergence and providing a more accurate evaluation of pre-training methods. Experiments on our Waymo benchmark and the KITTI dataset demonstrate that MV-JAR consistently and significantly improves 3D detection performance across various data scales, achieving up to a 6.3% increase in mAPH compared to training from scratch. Codes and the benchmark will be available at https://github.com/SmartBot-PJLab/MV-JAR .

PCB-Vision: A Multiscene RGB-Hyperspectral Benchmark Dataset of Printed Circuit Boards

Addressing the critical theme of recycling electronic waste (E-waste), this contribution is dedicated to developing advanced automated data processing pipelines as a basis for decision-making and process control. Aligning with the broader goals of the circular economy and the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), our work leverages non-invasive analysis methods utilizing RGB and hyperspectral imaging data to provide both quantitative and qualitative insights into the E-waste stream composition for optimizing recycling efficiency. In this paper, we introduce 'PCB-Vision'; a pioneering RGB-hyperspectral printed circuit board (PCB) benchmark dataset, comprising 53 RGB images of high spatial resolution paired with their corresponding high spectral resolution hyperspectral data cubes in the visible and near-infrared (VNIR) range. Grounded in open science principles, our dataset provides a comprehensive resource for researchers through high-quality ground truths, focusing on three primary PCB components: integrated circuits (IC), capacitors, and connectors. We provide extensive statistical investigations on the proposed dataset together with the performance of several state-of-the-art (SOTA) models, including U-Net, Attention U-Net, Residual U-Net, LinkNet, and DeepLabv3+. By openly sharing this multi-scene benchmark dataset along with the baseline codes, we hope to foster transparent, traceable, and comparable developments of advanced data processing across various scientific communities, including, but not limited to, computer vision and remote sensing. Emphasizing our commitment to supporting a collaborative and inclusive scientific community, all materials, including code, data, ground truth, and masks, will be accessible at https://github.com/hifexplo/PCBVision.

GeoPix: Multi-Modal Large Language Model for Pixel-level Image Understanding in Remote Sensing

Multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable success in image- and region-level remote sensing (RS) image understanding tasks, such as image captioning, visual question answering, and visual grounding. However, existing RS MLLMs lack the pixel-level dialogue capability, which involves responding to user instructions with segmentation masks for specific instances. In this paper, we propose GeoPix, a RS MLLM that extends image understanding capabilities to the pixel level. This is achieved by equipping the MLLM with a mask predictor, which transforms visual features from the vision encoder into masks conditioned on the LLM's segmentation token embeddings. To facilitate the segmentation of multi-scale objects in RS imagery, a class-wise learnable memory module is integrated into the mask predictor to capture and store class-wise geo-context at the instance level across the entire dataset. In addition, to address the absence of large-scale datasets for training pixel-level RS MLLMs, we construct the GeoPixInstruct dataset, comprising 65,463 images and 140,412 instances, with each instance annotated with text descriptions, bounding boxes, and masks. Furthermore, we develop a two-stage training strategy to balance the distinct requirements of text generation and masks prediction in multi-modal multi-task optimization. Extensive experiments verify the effectiveness and superiority of GeoPix in pixel-level segmentation tasks, while also maintaining competitive performance in image- and region-level benchmarks.

Real-Time Neural Appearance Models

We present a complete system for real-time rendering of scenes with complex appearance previously reserved for offline use. This is achieved with a combination of algorithmic and system level innovations. Our appearance model utilizes learned hierarchical textures that are interpreted using neural decoders, which produce reflectance values and importance-sampled directions. To best utilize the modeling capacity of the decoders, we equip the decoders with two graphics priors. The first prior -- transformation of directions into learned shading frames -- facilitates accurate reconstruction of mesoscale effects. The second prior -- a microfacet sampling distribution -- allows the neural decoder to perform importance sampling efficiently. The resulting appearance model supports anisotropic sampling and level-of-detail rendering, and allows baking deeply layered material graphs into a compact unified neural representation. By exposing hardware accelerated tensor operations to ray tracing shaders, we show that it is possible to inline and execute the neural decoders efficiently inside a real-time path tracer. We analyze scalability with increasing number of neural materials and propose to improve performance using code optimized for coherent and divergent execution. Our neural material shaders can be over an order of magnitude faster than non-neural layered materials. This opens up the door for using film-quality visuals in real-time applications such as games and live previews.

IntrinsicAvatar: Physically Based Inverse Rendering of Dynamic Humans from Monocular Videos via Explicit Ray Tracing

We present IntrinsicAvatar, a novel approach to recovering the intrinsic properties of clothed human avatars including geometry, albedo, material, and environment lighting from only monocular videos. Recent advancements in human-based neural rendering have enabled high-quality geometry and appearance reconstruction of clothed humans from just monocular videos. However, these methods bake intrinsic properties such as albedo, material, and environment lighting into a single entangled neural representation. On the other hand, only a handful of works tackle the problem of estimating geometry and disentangled appearance properties of clothed humans from monocular videos. They usually achieve limited quality and disentanglement due to approximations of secondary shading effects via learned MLPs. In this work, we propose to model secondary shading effects explicitly via Monte-Carlo ray tracing. We model the rendering process of clothed humans as a volumetric scattering process, and combine ray tracing with body articulation. Our approach can recover high-quality geometry, albedo, material, and lighting properties of clothed humans from a single monocular video, without requiring supervised pre-training using ground truth materials. Furthermore, since we explicitly model the volumetric scattering process and ray tracing, our model naturally generalizes to novel poses, enabling animation of the reconstructed avatar in novel lighting conditions.

DreamCraft3D: Hierarchical 3D Generation with Bootstrapped Diffusion Prior

We present DreamCraft3D, a hierarchical 3D content generation method that produces high-fidelity and coherent 3D objects. We tackle the problem by leveraging a 2D reference image to guide the stages of geometry sculpting and texture boosting. A central focus of this work is to address the consistency issue that existing works encounter. To sculpt geometries that render coherently, we perform score distillation sampling via a view-dependent diffusion model. This 3D prior, alongside several training strategies, prioritizes the geometry consistency but compromises the texture fidelity. We further propose Bootstrapped Score Distillation to specifically boost the texture. We train a personalized diffusion model, Dreambooth, on the augmented renderings of the scene, imbuing it with 3D knowledge of the scene being optimized. The score distillation from this 3D-aware diffusion prior provides view-consistent guidance for the scene. Notably, through an alternating optimization of the diffusion prior and 3D scene representation, we achieve mutually reinforcing improvements: the optimized 3D scene aids in training the scene-specific diffusion model, which offers increasingly view-consistent guidance for 3D optimization. The optimization is thus bootstrapped and leads to substantial texture boosting. With tailored 3D priors throughout the hierarchical generation, DreamCraft3D generates coherent 3D objects with photorealistic renderings, advancing the state-of-the-art in 3D content generation. Code available at https://github.com/deepseek-ai/DreamCraft3D.

Efficient Meshy Neural Fields for Animatable Human Avatars

Efficiently digitizing high-fidelity animatable human avatars from videos is a challenging and active research topic. Recent volume rendering-based neural representations open a new way for human digitization with their friendly usability and photo-realistic reconstruction quality. However, they are inefficient for long optimization times and slow inference speed; their implicit nature results in entangled geometry, materials, and dynamics of humans, which are hard to edit afterward. Such drawbacks prevent their direct applicability to downstream applications, especially the prominent rasterization-based graphic ones. We present EMA, a method that Efficiently learns Meshy neural fields to reconstruct animatable human Avatars. It jointly optimizes explicit triangular canonical mesh, spatial-varying material, and motion dynamics, via inverse rendering in an end-to-end fashion. Each above component is derived from separate neural fields, relaxing the requirement of a template, or rigging. The mesh representation is highly compatible with the efficient rasterization-based renderer, thus our method only takes about an hour of training and can render in real-time. Moreover, only minutes of optimization is enough for plausible reconstruction results. The disentanglement of meshes enables direct downstream applications. Extensive experiments illustrate the very competitive performance and significant speed boost against previous methods. We also showcase applications including novel pose synthesis, material editing, and relighting. The project page: https://xk-huang.github.io/ema/.

Differentiable Blocks World: Qualitative 3D Decomposition by Rendering Primitives

Given a set of calibrated images of a scene, we present an approach that produces a simple, compact, and actionable 3D world representation by means of 3D primitives. While many approaches focus on recovering high-fidelity 3D scenes, we focus on parsing a scene into mid-level 3D representations made of a small set of textured primitives. Such representations are interpretable, easy to manipulate and suited for physics-based simulations. Moreover, unlike existing primitive decomposition methods that rely on 3D input data, our approach operates directly on images through differentiable rendering. Specifically, we model primitives as textured superquadric meshes and optimize their parameters from scratch with an image rendering loss. We highlight the importance of modeling transparency for each primitive, which is critical for optimization and also enables handling varying numbers of primitives. We show that the resulting textured primitives faithfully reconstruct the input images and accurately model the visible 3D points, while providing amodal shape completions of unseen object regions. We compare our approach to the state of the art on diverse scenes from DTU, and demonstrate its robustness on real-life captures from BlendedMVS and Nerfstudio. We also showcase how our results can be used to effortlessly edit a scene or perform physical simulations. Code and video results are available at https://www.tmonnier.com/DBW .

Volumetric Capture of Humans with a Single RGBD Camera via Semi-Parametric Learning

Volumetric (4D) performance capture is fundamental for AR/VR content generation. Whereas previous work in 4D performance capture has shown impressive results in studio settings, the technology is still far from being accessible to a typical consumer who, at best, might own a single RGBD sensor. Thus, in this work, we propose a method to synthesize free viewpoint renderings using a single RGBD camera. The key insight is to leverage previously seen "calibration" images of a given user to extrapolate what should be rendered in a novel viewpoint from the data available in the sensor. Given these past observations from multiple viewpoints, and the current RGBD image from a fixed view, we propose an end-to-end framework that fuses both these data sources to generate novel renderings of the performer. We demonstrate that the method can produce high fidelity images, and handle extreme changes in subject pose and camera viewpoints. We also show that the system generalizes to performers not seen in the training data. We run exhaustive experiments demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed semi-parametric model (i.e. calibration images available to the neural network) compared to other state of the art machine learned solutions. Further, we compare the method with more traditional pipelines that employ multi-view capture. We show that our framework is able to achieve compelling results, with substantially less infrastructure than previously required.

A Survey on 3D Gaussian Splatting

3D Gaussian splatting (GS) has recently emerged as a transformative technique in the realm of explicit radiance field and computer graphics. This innovative approach, characterized by the utilization of millions of learnable 3D Gaussians, represents a significant departure from mainstream neural radiance field approaches, which predominantly use implicit, coordinate-based models to map spatial coordinates to pixel values. 3D GS, with its explicit scene representation and differentiable rendering algorithm, not only promises real-time rendering capability but also introduces unprecedented levels of editability. This positions 3D GS as a potential game-changer for the next generation of 3D reconstruction and representation. In the present paper, we provide the first systematic overview of the recent developments and critical contributions in the domain of 3D GS. We begin with a detailed exploration of the underlying principles and the driving forces behind the emergence of 3D GS, laying the groundwork for understanding its significance. A focal point of our discussion is the practical applicability of 3D GS. By enabling unprecedented rendering speed, 3D GS opens up a plethora of applications, ranging from virtual reality to interactive media and beyond. This is complemented by a comparative analysis of leading 3D GS models, evaluated across various benchmark tasks to highlight their performance and practical utility. The survey concludes by identifying current challenges and suggesting potential avenues for future research in this domain. Through this survey, we aim to provide a valuable resource for both newcomers and seasoned researchers, fostering further exploration and advancement in applicable and explicit radiance field representation.

F3D-Gaus: Feed-forward 3D-aware Generation on ImageNet with Cycle-Aggregative Gaussian Splatting

This paper tackles the problem of generalizable 3D-aware generation from monocular datasets, e.g., ImageNet. The key challenge of this task is learning a robust 3D-aware representation without multi-view or dynamic data, while ensuring consistent texture and geometry across different viewpoints. Although some baseline methods are capable of 3D-aware generation, the quality of the generated images still lags behind state-of-the-art 2D generation approaches, which excel in producing high-quality, detailed images. To address this severe limitation, we propose a novel feed-forward pipeline based on pixel-aligned Gaussian Splatting, coined as F3D-Gaus, which can produce more realistic and reliable 3D renderings from monocular inputs. In addition, we introduce a self-supervised cycle-aggregative constraint to enforce cross-view consistency in the learned 3D representation. This training strategy naturally allows aggregation of multiple aligned Gaussian primitives and significantly alleviates the interpolation limitations inherent in single-view pixel-aligned Gaussian Splatting. Furthermore, we incorporate video model priors to perform geometry-aware refinement, enhancing the generation of fine details in wide-viewpoint scenarios and improving the model's capability to capture intricate 3D textures. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach not only achieves high-quality, multi-view consistent 3D-aware generation from monocular datasets, but also significantly improves training and inference efficiency.

V^3: Viewing Volumetric Videos on Mobiles via Streamable 2D Dynamic Gaussians

Experiencing high-fidelity volumetric video as seamlessly as 2D videos is a long-held dream. However, current dynamic 3DGS methods, despite their high rendering quality, face challenges in streaming on mobile devices due to computational and bandwidth constraints. In this paper, we introduce V3(Viewing Volumetric Videos), a novel approach that enables high-quality mobile rendering through the streaming of dynamic Gaussians. Our key innovation is to view dynamic 3DGS as 2D videos, facilitating the use of hardware video codecs. Additionally, we propose a two-stage training strategy to reduce storage requirements with rapid training speed. The first stage employs hash encoding and shallow MLP to learn motion, then reduces the number of Gaussians through pruning to meet the streaming requirements, while the second stage fine tunes other Gaussian attributes using residual entropy loss and temporal loss to improve temporal continuity. This strategy, which disentangles motion and appearance, maintains high rendering quality with compact storage requirements. Meanwhile, we designed a multi-platform player to decode and render 2D Gaussian videos. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of V3, outperforming other methods by enabling high-quality rendering and streaming on common devices, which is unseen before. As the first to stream dynamic Gaussians on mobile devices, our companion player offers users an unprecedented volumetric video experience, including smooth scrolling and instant sharing. Our project page with source code is available at https://authoritywang.github.io/v3/.

Camera Calibration through Geometric Constraints from Rotation and Projection Matrices

The process of camera calibration involves estimating the intrinsic and extrinsic parameters, which are essential for accurately performing tasks such as 3D reconstruction, object tracking and augmented reality. In this work, we propose a novel constraints-based loss for measuring the intrinsic (focal length: (f_x, f_y) and principal point: (p_x, p_y)) and extrinsic (baseline: (b), disparity: (d), translation: (t_x, t_y, t_z), and rotation specifically pitch: (theta_p)) camera parameters. Our novel constraints are based on geometric properties inherent in the camera model, including the anatomy of the projection matrix (vanishing points, image of world origin, axis planes) and the orthonormality of the rotation matrix. Thus we proposed a novel Unsupervised Geometric Constraint Loss (UGCL) via a multitask learning framework. Our methodology is a hybrid approach that employs the learning power of a neural network to estimate the desired parameters along with the underlying mathematical properties inherent in the camera projection matrix. This distinctive approach not only enhances the interpretability of the model but also facilitates a more informed learning process. Additionally, we introduce a new CVGL Camera Calibration dataset, featuring over 900 configurations of camera parameters, incorporating 63,600 image pairs that closely mirror real-world conditions. By training and testing on both synthetic and real-world datasets, our proposed approach demonstrates improvements across all parameters when compared to the state-of-the-art (SOTA) benchmarks. The code and the updated dataset can be found here: https://github.com/CVLABLUMS/CVGL-Camera-Calibration

SUDS: Scalable Urban Dynamic Scenes

We extend neural radiance fields (NeRFs) to dynamic large-scale urban scenes. Prior work tends to reconstruct single video clips of short durations (up to 10 seconds). Two reasons are that such methods (a) tend to scale linearly with the number of moving objects and input videos because a separate model is built for each and (b) tend to require supervision via 3D bounding boxes and panoptic labels, obtained manually or via category-specific models. As a step towards truly open-world reconstructions of dynamic cities, we introduce two key innovations: (a) we factorize the scene into three separate hash table data structures to efficiently encode static, dynamic, and far-field radiance fields, and (b) we make use of unlabeled target signals consisting of RGB images, sparse LiDAR, off-the-shelf self-supervised 2D descriptors, and most importantly, 2D optical flow. Operationalizing such inputs via photometric, geometric, and feature-metric reconstruction losses enables SUDS to decompose dynamic scenes into the static background, individual objects, and their motions. When combined with our multi-branch table representation, such reconstructions can be scaled to tens of thousands of objects across 1.2 million frames from 1700 videos spanning geospatial footprints of hundreds of kilometers, (to our knowledge) the largest dynamic NeRF built to date. We present qualitative initial results on a variety of tasks enabled by our representations, including novel-view synthesis of dynamic urban scenes, unsupervised 3D instance segmentation, and unsupervised 3D cuboid detection. To compare to prior work, we also evaluate on KITTI and Virtual KITTI 2, surpassing state-of-the-art methods that rely on ground truth 3D bounding box annotations while being 10x quicker to train.

Pix2Shape: Towards Unsupervised Learning of 3D Scenes from Images using a View-based Representation

We infer and generate three-dimensional (3D) scene information from a single input image and without supervision. This problem is under-explored, with most prior work relying on supervision from, e.g., 3D ground-truth, multiple images of a scene, image silhouettes or key-points. We propose Pix2Shape, an approach to solve this problem with four components: (i) an encoder that infers the latent 3D representation from an image, (ii) a decoder that generates an explicit 2.5D surfel-based reconstruction of a scene from the latent code (iii) a differentiable renderer that synthesizes a 2D image from the surfel representation, and (iv) a critic network trained to discriminate between images generated by the decoder-renderer and those from a training distribution. Pix2Shape can generate complex 3D scenes that scale with the view-dependent on-screen resolution, unlike representations that capture world-space resolution, i.e., voxels or meshes. We show that Pix2Shape learns a consistent scene representation in its encoded latent space and that the decoder can then be applied to this latent representation in order to synthesize the scene from a novel viewpoint. We evaluate Pix2Shape with experiments on the ShapeNet dataset as well as on a novel benchmark we developed, called 3D-IQTT, to evaluate models based on their ability to enable 3d spatial reasoning. Qualitative and quantitative evaluation demonstrate Pix2Shape's ability to solve scene reconstruction, generation, and understanding tasks.

Enhancing High-Resolution 3D Generation through Pixel-wise Gradient Clipping

High-resolution 3D object generation remains a challenging task primarily due to the limited availability of comprehensive annotated training data. Recent advancements have aimed to overcome this constraint by harnessing image generative models, pretrained on extensive curated web datasets, using knowledge transfer techniques like Score Distillation Sampling (SDS). Efficiently addressing the requirements of high-resolution rendering often necessitates the adoption of latent representation-based models, such as the Latent Diffusion Model (LDM). In this framework, a significant challenge arises: To compute gradients for individual image pixels, it is necessary to backpropagate gradients from the designated latent space through the frozen components of the image model, such as the VAE encoder used within LDM. However, this gradient propagation pathway has never been optimized, remaining uncontrolled during training. We find that the unregulated gradients adversely affect the 3D model's capacity in acquiring texture-related information from the image generative model, leading to poor quality appearance synthesis. To address this overarching challenge, we propose an innovative operation termed Pixel-wise Gradient Clipping (PGC) designed for seamless integration into existing 3D generative models, thereby enhancing their synthesis quality. Specifically, we control the magnitude of stochastic gradients by clipping the pixel-wise gradients efficiently, while preserving crucial texture-related gradient directions. Despite this simplicity and minimal extra cost, extensive experiments demonstrate the efficacy of our PGC in enhancing the performance of existing 3D generative models for high-resolution object rendering.

HollowNeRF: Pruning Hashgrid-Based NeRFs with Trainable Collision Mitigation

Neural radiance fields (NeRF) have garnered significant attention, with recent works such as Instant-NGP accelerating NeRF training and evaluation through a combination of hashgrid-based positional encoding and neural networks. However, effectively leveraging the spatial sparsity of 3D scenes remains a challenge. To cull away unnecessary regions of the feature grid, existing solutions rely on prior knowledge of object shape or periodically estimate object shape during training by repeated model evaluations, which are costly and wasteful. To address this issue, we propose HollowNeRF, a novel compression solution for hashgrid-based NeRF which automatically sparsifies the feature grid during the training phase. Instead of directly compressing dense features, HollowNeRF trains a coarse 3D saliency mask that guides efficient feature pruning, and employs an alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) pruner to sparsify the 3D saliency mask during training. By exploiting the sparsity in the 3D scene to redistribute hash collisions, HollowNeRF improves rendering quality while using a fraction of the parameters of comparable state-of-the-art solutions, leading to a better cost-accuracy trade-off. Our method delivers comparable rendering quality to Instant-NGP, while utilizing just 31% of the parameters. In addition, our solution can achieve a PSNR accuracy gain of up to 1dB using only 56% of the parameters.

Cross-D Conv: Cross-Dimensional Transferable Knowledge Base via Fourier Shifting Operation

In biomedical imaging analysis, the dichotomy between 2D and 3D data presents a significant challenge. While 3D volumes offer superior real-world applicability, they are less available for each modality and not easy to train in large scale, whereas 2D samples are abundant but less comprehensive. This paper introduces the Cross-D Conv operation, a novel approach that bridges the dimensional gap by learning the phase shifting in the Fourier domain. Our method enables seamless weight transfer between 2D and 3D convolution operations, effectively facilitating cross-dimensional learning. The proposed architecture leverages the abundance of 2D training data to enhance 3D model performance, offering a practical solution to the multimodal data scarcity challenge in 3D medical model pretraining. Experimental validation on the RadImagenet (2D) and multimodal (3D) sets demonstrates that our approach achieves comparable or superior performance in feature quality assessment comparable to conventional methods. The enhanced convolution operation presents new opportunities for developing efficient classification and segmentation models in medical imaging. This work represents an advancement in cross-dimensional and multi-modal medical image analysis, offering a robust framework for utilizing 2D priors in 3D model pretraining or vice versa while maintaining computational efficiency.

DSVT: Dynamic Sparse Voxel Transformer with Rotated Sets

Designing an efficient yet deployment-friendly 3D backbone to handle sparse point clouds is a fundamental problem in 3D perception. Compared with the customized sparse convolution, the attention mechanism in Transformers is more appropriate for flexibly modeling long-range relationships and is easier to be deployed in real-world applications. However, due to the sparse characteristics of point clouds, it is non-trivial to apply a standard transformer on sparse points. In this paper, we present Dynamic Sparse Voxel Transformer (DSVT), a single-stride window-based voxel Transformer backbone for outdoor 3D perception. In order to efficiently process sparse points in parallel, we propose Dynamic Sparse Window Attention, which partitions a series of local regions in each window according to its sparsity and then computes the features of all regions in a fully parallel manner. To allow the cross-set connection, we design a rotated set partitioning strategy that alternates between two partitioning configurations in consecutive self-attention layers. To support effective downsampling and better encode geometric information, we also propose an attention-style 3D pooling module on sparse points, which is powerful and deployment-friendly without utilizing any customized CUDA operations. Our model achieves state-of-the-art performance with a broad range of 3D perception tasks. More importantly, DSVT can be easily deployed by TensorRT with real-time inference speed (27Hz). Code will be available at https://github.com/Haiyang-W/DSVT.

Efficient View Synthesis with Neural Radiance Distribution Field

Recent work on Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) has demonstrated significant advances in high-quality view synthesis. A major limitation of NeRF is its low rendering efficiency due to the need for multiple network forwardings to render a single pixel. Existing methods to improve NeRF either reduce the number of required samples or optimize the implementation to accelerate the network forwarding. Despite these efforts, the problem of multiple sampling persists due to the intrinsic representation of radiance fields. In contrast, Neural Light Fields (NeLF) reduce the computation cost of NeRF by querying only one single network forwarding per pixel. To achieve a close visual quality to NeRF, existing NeLF methods require significantly larger network capacities which limits their rendering efficiency in practice. In this work, we propose a new representation called Neural Radiance Distribution Field (NeRDF) that targets efficient view synthesis in real-time. Specifically, we use a small network similar to NeRF while preserving the rendering speed with a single network forwarding per pixel as in NeLF. The key is to model the radiance distribution along each ray with frequency basis and predict frequency weights using the network. Pixel values are then computed via volume rendering on radiance distributions. Experiments show that our proposed method offers a better trade-off among speed, quality, and network size than existing methods: we achieve a ~254x speed-up over NeRF with similar network size, with only a marginal performance decline. Our project page is at yushuang-wu.github.io/NeRDF.

Volume Rendering of Neural Implicit Surfaces

Neural volume rendering became increasingly popular recently due to its success in synthesizing novel views of a scene from a sparse set of input images. So far, the geometry learned by neural volume rendering techniques was modeled using a generic density function. Furthermore, the geometry itself was extracted using an arbitrary level set of the density function leading to a noisy, often low fidelity reconstruction. The goal of this paper is to improve geometry representation and reconstruction in neural volume rendering. We achieve that by modeling the volume density as a function of the geometry. This is in contrast to previous work modeling the geometry as a function of the volume density. In more detail, we define the volume density function as Laplace's cumulative distribution function (CDF) applied to a signed distance function (SDF) representation. This simple density representation has three benefits: (i) it provides a useful inductive bias to the geometry learned in the neural volume rendering process; (ii) it facilitates a bound on the opacity approximation error, leading to an accurate sampling of the viewing ray. Accurate sampling is important to provide a precise coupling of geometry and radiance; and (iii) it allows efficient unsupervised disentanglement of shape and appearance in volume rendering. Applying this new density representation to challenging scene multiview datasets produced high quality geometry reconstructions, outperforming relevant baselines. Furthermore, switching shape and appearance between scenes is possible due to the disentanglement of the two.

FaVoR: Features via Voxel Rendering for Camera Relocalization

Camera relocalization methods range from dense image alignment to direct camera pose regression from a query image. Among these, sparse feature matching stands out as an efficient, versatile, and generally lightweight approach with numerous applications. However, feature-based methods often struggle with significant viewpoint and appearance changes, leading to matching failures and inaccurate pose estimates. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel approach that leverages a globally sparse yet locally dense 3D representation of 2D features. By tracking and triangulating landmarks over a sequence of frames, we construct a sparse voxel map optimized to render image patch descriptors observed during tracking. Given an initial pose estimate, we first synthesize descriptors from the voxels using volumetric rendering and then perform feature matching to estimate the camera pose. This methodology enables the generation of descriptors for unseen views, enhancing robustness to view changes. We extensively evaluate our method on the 7-Scenes and Cambridge Landmarks datasets. Our results show that our method significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art feature representation techniques in indoor environments, achieving up to a 39% improvement in median translation error. Additionally, our approach yields comparable results to other methods for outdoor scenarios while maintaining lower memory and computational costs.

Urban Radiance Field Representation with Deformable Neural Mesh Primitives

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) have achieved great success in the past few years. However, most current methods still require intensive resources due to ray marching-based rendering. To construct urban-level radiance fields efficiently, we design Deformable Neural Mesh Primitive~(DNMP), and propose to parameterize the entire scene with such primitives. The DNMP is a flexible and compact neural variant of classic mesh representation, which enjoys both the efficiency of rasterization-based rendering and the powerful neural representation capability for photo-realistic image synthesis. Specifically, a DNMP consists of a set of connected deformable mesh vertices with paired vertex features to parameterize the geometry and radiance information of a local area. To constrain the degree of freedom for optimization and lower the storage budgets, we enforce the shape of each primitive to be decoded from a relatively low-dimensional latent space. The rendering colors are decoded from the vertex features (interpolated with rasterization) by a view-dependent MLP. The DNMP provides a new paradigm for urban-level scene representation with appealing properties: (1) High-quality rendering. Our method achieves leading performance for novel view synthesis in urban scenarios. (2) Low computational costs. Our representation enables fast rendering (2.07ms/1k pixels) and low peak memory usage (110MB/1k pixels). We also present a lightweight version that can run 33times faster than vanilla NeRFs, and comparable to the highly-optimized Instant-NGP (0.61 vs 0.71ms/1k pixels). Project page: https://dnmp.github.io/{https://dnmp.github.io/}.

StableDreamer: Taming Noisy Score Distillation Sampling for Text-to-3D

In the realm of text-to-3D generation, utilizing 2D diffusion models through score distillation sampling (SDS) frequently leads to issues such as blurred appearances and multi-faced geometry, primarily due to the intrinsically noisy nature of the SDS loss. Our analysis identifies the core of these challenges as the interaction among noise levels in the 2D diffusion process, the architecture of the diffusion network, and the 3D model representation. To overcome these limitations, we present StableDreamer, a methodology incorporating three advances. First, inspired by InstructNeRF2NeRF, we formalize the equivalence of the SDS generative prior and a simple supervised L2 reconstruction loss. This finding provides a novel tool to debug SDS, which we use to show the impact of time-annealing noise levels on reducing multi-faced geometries. Second, our analysis shows that while image-space diffusion contributes to geometric precision, latent-space diffusion is crucial for vivid color rendition. Based on this observation, StableDreamer introduces a two-stage training strategy that effectively combines these aspects, resulting in high-fidelity 3D models. Third, we adopt an anisotropic 3D Gaussians representation, replacing Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs), to enhance the overall quality, reduce memory usage during training, and accelerate rendering speeds, and better capture semi-transparent objects. StableDreamer reduces multi-face geometries, generates fine details, and converges stably.

OpenNeRF: Open Set 3D Neural Scene Segmentation with Pixel-Wise Features and Rendered Novel Views

Large visual-language models (VLMs), like CLIP, enable open-set image segmentation to segment arbitrary concepts from an image in a zero-shot manner. This goes beyond the traditional closed-set assumption, i.e., where models can only segment classes from a pre-defined training set. More recently, first works on open-set segmentation in 3D scenes have appeared in the literature. These methods are heavily influenced by closed-set 3D convolutional approaches that process point clouds or polygon meshes. However, these 3D scene representations do not align well with the image-based nature of the visual-language models. Indeed, point cloud and 3D meshes typically have a lower resolution than images and the reconstructed 3D scene geometry might not project well to the underlying 2D image sequences used to compute pixel-aligned CLIP features. To address these challenges, we propose OpenNeRF which naturally operates on posed images and directly encodes the VLM features within the NeRF. This is similar in spirit to LERF, however our work shows that using pixel-wise VLM features (instead of global CLIP features) results in an overall less complex architecture without the need for additional DINO regularization. Our OpenNeRF further leverages NeRF's ability to render novel views and extract open-set VLM features from areas that are not well observed in the initial posed images. For 3D point cloud segmentation on the Replica dataset, OpenNeRF outperforms recent open-vocabulary methods such as LERF and OpenScene by at least +4.9 mIoU.

Beyond the Pixel: a Photometrically Calibrated HDR Dataset for Luminance and Color Prediction

Light plays an important role in human well-being. However, most computer vision tasks treat pixels without considering their relationship to physical luminance. To address this shortcoming, we introduce the Laval Photometric Indoor HDR Dataset, the first large-scale photometrically calibrated dataset of high dynamic range 360{\deg} panoramas. Our key contribution is the calibration of an existing, uncalibrated HDR Dataset. We do so by accurately capturing RAW bracketed exposures simultaneously with a professional photometric measurement device (chroma meter) for multiple scenes across a variety of lighting conditions. Using the resulting measurements, we establish the calibration coefficients to be applied to the HDR images. The resulting dataset is a rich representation of indoor scenes which displays a wide range of illuminance and color, and varied types of light sources. We exploit the dataset to introduce three novel tasks, where: per-pixel luminance, per-pixel color and planar illuminance can be predicted from a single input image. Finally, we also capture another smaller photometric dataset with a commercial 360{\deg} camera, to experiment on generalization across cameras. We are optimistic that the release of our datasets and associated code will spark interest in physically accurate light estimation within the community. Dataset and code are available at https://lvsn.github.io/beyondthepixel/.

OReX: Object Reconstruction from Planar Cross-sections Using Neural Fields

Reconstructing 3D shapes from planar cross-sections is a challenge inspired by downstream applications like medical imaging and geographic informatics. The input is an in/out indicator function fully defined on a sparse collection of planes in space, and the output is an interpolation of the indicator function to the entire volume. Previous works addressing this sparse and ill-posed problem either produce low quality results, or rely on additional priors such as target topology, appearance information, or input normal directions. In this paper, we present OReX, a method for 3D shape reconstruction from slices alone, featuring a Neural Field as the interpolation prior. A modest neural network is trained on the input planes to return an inside/outside estimate for a given 3D coordinate, yielding a powerful prior that induces smoothness and self-similarities. The main challenge for this approach is high-frequency details, as the neural prior is overly smoothing. To alleviate this, we offer an iterative estimation architecture and a hierarchical input sampling scheme that encourage coarse-to-fine training, allowing the training process to focus on high frequencies at later stages. In addition, we identify and analyze a ripple-like effect stemming from the mesh extraction step. We mitigate it by regularizing the spatial gradients of the indicator function around input in/out boundaries during network training, tackling the problem at the root. Through extensive qualitative and quantitative experimentation, we demonstrate our method is robust, accurate, and scales well with the size of the input. We report state-of-the-art results compared to previous approaches and recent potential solutions, and demonstrate the benefit of our individual contributions through analysis and ablation studies.

Clustering based Point Cloud Representation Learning for 3D Analysis

Point cloud analysis (such as 3D segmentation and detection) is a challenging task, because of not only the irregular geometries of many millions of unordered points, but also the great variations caused by depth, viewpoint, occlusion, etc. Current studies put much focus on the adaption of neural networks to the complex geometries of point clouds, but are blind to a fundamental question: how to learn an appropriate point embedding space that is aware of both discriminative semantics and challenging variations? As a response, we propose a clustering based supervised learning scheme for point cloud analysis. Unlike current de-facto, scene-wise training paradigm, our algorithm conducts within-class clustering on the point embedding space for automatically discovering subclass patterns which are latent yet representative across scenes. The mined patterns are, in turn, used to repaint the embedding space, so as to respect the underlying distribution of the entire training dataset and improve the robustness to the variations. Our algorithm is principled and readily pluggable to modern point cloud segmentation networks during training, without extra overhead during testing. With various 3D network architectures (i.e., voxel-based, point-based, Transformer-based, automatically searched), our algorithm shows notable improvements on famous point cloud segmentation datasets (i.e.,2.0-2.6% on single-scan and 2.0-2.2% multi-scan of SemanticKITTI, 1.8-1.9% on S3DIS, in terms of mIoU). Our algorithm also demonstrates utility in 3D detection, showing 2.0-3.4% mAP gains on KITTI.

Dynamic Mesh-Aware Radiance Fields

Embedding polygonal mesh assets within photorealistic Neural Radience Fields (NeRF) volumes, such that they can be rendered and their dynamics simulated in a physically consistent manner with the NeRF, is under-explored from the system perspective of integrating NeRF into the traditional graphics pipeline. This paper designs a two-way coupling between mesh and NeRF during rendering and simulation. We first review the light transport equations for both mesh and NeRF, then distill them into an efficient algorithm for updating radiance and throughput along a cast ray with an arbitrary number of bounces. To resolve the discrepancy between the linear color space that the path tracer assumes and the sRGB color space that standard NeRF uses, we train NeRF with High Dynamic Range (HDR) images. We also present a strategy to estimate light sources and cast shadows on the NeRF. Finally, we consider how the hybrid surface-volumetric formulation can be efficiently integrated with a high-performance physics simulator that supports cloth, rigid and soft bodies. The full rendering and simulation system can be run on a GPU at interactive rates. We show that a hybrid system approach outperforms alternatives in visual realism for mesh insertion, because it allows realistic light transport from volumetric NeRF media onto surfaces, which affects the appearance of reflective/refractive surfaces and illumination of diffuse surfaces informed by the dynamic scene.

SparseSSP: 3D Subcellular Structure Prediction from Sparse-View Transmitted Light Images

Traditional fluorescence staining is phototoxic to live cells, slow, and expensive; thus, the subcellular structure prediction (SSP) from transmitted light (TL) images is emerging as a label-free, faster, low-cost alternative. However, existing approaches utilize 3D networks for one-to-one voxel level dense prediction, which necessitates a frequent and time-consuming Z-axis imaging process. Moreover, 3D convolutions inevitably lead to significant computation and GPU memory overhead. Therefore, we propose an efficient framework, SparseSSP, predicting fluorescent intensities within the target voxel grid in an efficient paradigm instead of relying entirely on 3D topologies. In particular, SparseSSP makes two pivotal improvements to prior works. First, SparseSSP introduces a one-to-many voxel mapping paradigm, which permits the sparse TL slices to reconstruct the subcellular structure. Secondly, we propose a hybrid dimensions topology, which folds the Z-axis information into channel features, enabling the 2D network layers to tackle SSP under low computational cost. We conduct extensive experiments to validate the effectiveness and advantages of SparseSSP on diverse sparse imaging ratios, and our approach achieves a leading performance compared to pure 3D topologies. SparseSSP reduces imaging frequencies compared to previous dense-view SSP (i.e., the number of imaging is reduced up to 87.5% at most), which is significant in visualizing rapid biological dynamics on low-cost devices and samples.

Level-S^2fM: Structure from Motion on Neural Level Set of Implicit Surfaces

This paper presents a neural incremental Structure-from-Motion (SfM) approach, Level-S^2fM, which estimates the camera poses and scene geometry from a set of uncalibrated images by learning coordinate MLPs for the implicit surfaces and the radiance fields from the established keypoint correspondences. Our novel formulation poses some new challenges due to inevitable two-view and few-view configurations in the incremental SfM pipeline, which complicates the optimization of coordinate MLPs for volumetric neural rendering with unknown camera poses. Nevertheless, we demonstrate that the strong inductive basis conveying in the 2D correspondences is promising to tackle those challenges by exploiting the relationship between the ray sampling schemes. Based on this, we revisit the pipeline of incremental SfM and renew the key components, including two-view geometry initialization, the camera poses registration, the 3D points triangulation, and Bundle Adjustment, with a fresh perspective based on neural implicit surfaces. By unifying the scene geometry in small MLP networks through coordinate MLPs, our Level-S^2fM treats the zero-level set of the implicit surface as an informative top-down regularization to manage the reconstructed 3D points, reject the outliers in correspondences via querying SDF, and refine the estimated geometries by NBA (Neural BA). Not only does our Level-S^2fM lead to promising results on camera pose estimation and scene geometry reconstruction, but it also shows a promising way for neural implicit rendering without knowing camera extrinsic beforehand.

EpiGRAF: Rethinking training of 3D GANs

A very recent trend in generative modeling is building 3D-aware generators from 2D image collections. To induce the 3D bias, such models typically rely on volumetric rendering, which is expensive to employ at high resolutions. During the past months, there appeared more than 10 works that address this scaling issue by training a separate 2D decoder to upsample a low-resolution image (or a feature tensor) produced from a pure 3D generator. But this solution comes at a cost: not only does it break multi-view consistency (i.e. shape and texture change when the camera moves), but it also learns the geometry in a low fidelity. In this work, we show that it is possible to obtain a high-resolution 3D generator with SotA image quality by following a completely different route of simply training the model patch-wise. We revisit and improve this optimization scheme in two ways. First, we design a location- and scale-aware discriminator to work on patches of different proportions and spatial positions. Second, we modify the patch sampling strategy based on an annealed beta distribution to stabilize training and accelerate the convergence. The resulted model, named EpiGRAF, is an efficient, high-resolution, pure 3D generator, and we test it on four datasets (two introduced in this work) at 256^2 and 512^2 resolutions. It obtains state-of-the-art image quality, high-fidelity geometry and trains {approx} 2.5 times faster than the upsampler-based counterparts. Project website: https://universome.github.io/epigraf.