Optimal viewpoint prediction is an essential task in many computer graphics applications. Unfortunately, common viewpoint qualities suffer from two major drawbacks: dependency on clean surface meshes, which are not always available, and the lack of closed-form expressions, which requires a costly search involving rendering. To overcome these limitations we propose to separate viewpoint selection from rendering through an end-to-end learning approach, whereby we reduce the influence of the mesh quality by predicting viewpoints from unstructured point clouds instead of polygonal meshes. While this makes our approach insensitive to the mesh discretization during evaluation, it only becomes possible when resolving label ambiguities that arise in this context. Therefore, we additionally propose to incorporate the label generation into the training procedure, making the label decision adaptive to the current network predictions. We show how our proposed approach allows for learning viewpoint predictions for models from different object categories and for different viewpoint qualities. Additionally, we show that prediction times are reduced from several minutes to a fraction of a second, as compared to state-of-the-art (SOTA) viewpoint quality evaluation. We will further release the code and training data, which will to our knowledge be the biggest viewpoint quality dataset available.
Viewpoint Recommendation for Point Cloud Labeling through Interaction Cost Modeling
School of Data Science, Fudan University（复旦大学数据科学学院）；Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford（牛津大学计算机科学系）；College of Intelligence and Computing, Tianjin University（天津大学智能与计算学院）；Shanghai Key Laboratory of Data Science, Shanghai（上海数据科学重点实验室）
Recent work has made significant progress in learning object meshes with weak supervision. Soft Rasterization methods have achieved accurate 3D reconstruction from 2D images with viewpoint supervision only. In this work, we further reduce the labeling effort by allowing such 3D reconstruction methods leverage unlabeled images. In order to obtain the viewpoints for these unlabeled images, we propose to use a Siamese network that takes two images as input and outputs whether they correspond to the same viewpoint. During training, we minimize the cross entropy loss to maximize the probability of …
Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) have demonstrated superior novel view synthesis performance but are slow at rendering. To speed up the volume rendering process, many acceleration methods have been proposed at the cost of large memory consumption. To push the frontier of the efficiency-memory trade-off, we explore a new perspective to accelerate NeRF rendering, leveraging a key fact that the viewpoint change is usually smooth and continuous in interactive viewpoint control. This allows us to leverage the information of preceding viewpoints to reduce the number of rendered pixels as well as the nu…
This paper aims to tackle the challenge of efficiently producing interactive free-viewpoint videos. Some recent works equip neural radiance fields with image encoders, enabling them to generalize across scenes. When processing dynamic scenes, they can simply treat each video frame as an individual scene and perform novel view synthesis to generate free-viewpoint videos. However, their rendering process is slow and cannot support interactive applications. A major factor is that they sample lots of points in empty space when inferring radiance fields. We propose a novel scene representation, cal…
Institute for AI Industry Research (AIR), Tsinghua University（清华大学人工智能产业研究院）；McGill University（麦吉尔大学）；Intel Labs China, Peking University（北京大学英特尔中国实验室）
Semantic understanding of 3D point clouds is important for various robotics applications. Given that point-wise semantic annotation is expensive, in this paper, we address the challenge of learning models with extremely sparse labels. The core problem is how to leverage numerous unlabeled points. To this end, we propose a self-supervised 3D representation learning framework named viewpoint bottleneck. It optimizes a mutual-information based objective, which is applied on point clouds under different viewpoints. A principled analysis shows that viewpoint bottleneck leads to an elegant surrogate…
CUHK-Shenzhen（香港中文大学（深圳））；SmartMore Corporation（思谋科技）；CUHK（香港中文大学）；Shanghai AI Laboratory（上海人工智能实验室）
Neural radiance fields (NeRF) show great success in novel view synthesis. However, in real-world scenes, recovering high-quality details from the source images is still challenging for the existing NeRF-based approaches, due to the potential imperfect calibration information and scene representation inaccuracy. Even with high-quality training frames, the synthetic novel views produced by NeRF models still suffer from notable rendering artifacts, such as noise, blur, etc. Towards to improve the synthesis quality of NeRF-based approaches, we propose NeRFLiX, a general NeRF-agnostic restorer para…
Neural Radiance Fields for Novel View Synthesis in Monocular Gastroscopy
Tokyo Institute of Technology（东京工业大学）；International University of Health and Welfare Ichikawa Hospital（国际医疗福祉大学市川医院）；Tsujinaka Hospital Kashiwanoha（辻仲医院柏之叶）
Computational Media Innovation Centre, Victoria University of Wellington（惠灵顿维多利亚大学计算媒体创新中心）；School of Engineering and Computer Science, Victoria University of Wellington（惠灵顿维多利亚大学工程与计算机科学学院）
Six degrees-of-freedom (6-DoF) video provides telepresence by enabling users to move around in the captured scene with a wide field of regard. Compared to methods requiring sophisticated camera setups, the image-based rendering method based on photogrammetry can work with images captured with any poses, which is more suitable for casual users. However, existing image-based rendering methods are based on perspective images. When used to reconstruct 6-DoF views, it often requires capturing hundreds of images, making data capture a tedious and time-consuming process. In contrast to traditional pe…
Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory（计算机科学与人工智能实验室）；Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）
Deep neural network (DNN) architectures have been shown to outperform traditional pipelines for object segmentation and pose estimation using RGBD data, but the performance of these DNN pipelines is directly tied to how representative the training data is of the true data. Hence a key requirement for employing these methods in practice is to have a large set of labeled data for your specific robotic manipulation task, a requirement that is not generally satisfied by existing datasets. In this paper we develop a pipeline to rapidly generate high quality RGBD data with pixelwise labels and objec…
4DGC: Rate-Aware 4D Gaussian Compression for Efficient Streamable Free-Viewpoint Video
Cooperative Medianet Innovation Center, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学合作Medianet创新中心）；School of Electronic Information and Electrical Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学电子信息与电气工程学院）；School of Artificial Intelligence, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学人工智能学院）
ShanghaiTech University（上海科技大学）；Stereye Intelligent Technology Co.,Ltd.（眸视智能科技有限公司）；DGene Digital Technology Co., Ltd.（叠境数字科技有限公司）
Generating free-viewpoint videos is critical for immersive VR/AR experience but recent neural advances still lack the editing ability to manipulate the visual perception for large dynamic scenes. To fill this gap, in this paper we propose the first approach for editable photo-realistic free-viewpoint video generation for large-scale dynamic scenes using only sparse 16 cameras. The core of our approach is a new layered neural representation, where each dynamic entity including the environment itself is formulated into a space-time coherent neural layered radiance representation called ST-NeRF. …
