Image-based geometric modeling and novel view synthesis based on sparse, large-baseline samplings are challenging but important tasks for emerging multimedia applications such as virtual reality and immersive telepresence. Existing methods fail to produce satisfactory results due to the limitation on inferring reliable depth information over such challenging reference conditions. With the popularization of commercial light field (LF) cameras, capturing LF images (LFIs) is as convenient as taking regular photos, and geometry information can be reliably inferred. This inspires us to use a sparse set of LF captures to render high-quality novel views globally. However, fusion of LF captures from multiple angles is challenging due to the scale inconsistency caused by various capture settings. To overcome this challenge, we propose a novel scale-consistent volume rescaling algorithm that robustly aligns the disparity probability volumes (DPV) among different captures for scale-consistent global geometry fusion. Based on the fused DPV projected to the target camera frustum, novel learning-based modules have been proposed (i.e., the attention-guided multi-scale residual fusion module, and the disparity field guided deep re-regularization module) which comprehensively regularize noisy observations from heterogeneous captures for high-quality rendering of novel LFIs. Both quantitative and qualitative experiments over the Stanford Lytro Multi-view LF dataset show that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods significantly under different experiment settings for disparity inference and LF synthesis.
ShanghaiTech University（上海科技大学）；Stereye Intelligent Technology Co.,Ltd.（视辰智能科技有限公司）；Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）
Some of the most exciting experiences that Metaverse promises to offer, for instance, live interactions with virtual characters in virtual environments, require real-time photo-realistic rendering. 3D reconstruction approaches to rendering, active or passive, still require extensive cleanup work to fix the meshes or point clouds. In this paper, we present a neural volumography technique called neural volumetric video or NeuVV to support immersive, interactive, and spatial-temporal rendering of volumetric video contents with photo-realism and in real-time. The core of NeuVV is to efficiently en…
University of Oxford（牛津大学）；NAVER LABS Europe（NAVER欧洲实验室）
We present Neural Feature Fusion Fields (N3F), a method that improves dense 2D image feature extractors when the latter are applied to the analysis of multiple images reconstructible as a 3D scene. Given an image feature extractor, for example pre-trained using self-supervision, N3F uses it as a teacher to learn a student network defined in 3D space. The 3D student network is similar to a neural radiance field that distills said features and can be trained with the usual differentiable rendering machinery. As a consequence, N3F is readily applicable to most neural rendering formulations, inclu…
Microsoft Research Asia（微软亚洲研究院）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）
Recent research advance has significantly improved the visual realism of immersive 3D video communication. In this work we present a method to further enhance this immersive experience by adding the hand touch capability ("remote hand clapping"). In our system, each meeting participant sits in front of a large screen with haptic feedback. The local participant can reach his hand out to the screen and perform hand clapping with the remote participant as if the two participants were only separated by a virtual glass. A key challenge in emulating the remote hand touch is the realistic rendering o…
Universität Hamburg（汉堡大学）；Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron DESY（德国电子同步加速器研究所（DESY））
Neural radiance field (NeRF), in particular its extension by instant neural graphics primitives, is a novel rendering method for view synthesis that uses real-world images to build photo-realistic immersive virtual scenes. Despite its potential, research on the combination of NeRF and virtual reality (VR) remains sparse. Currently, there is no integration into typical VR systems available, and the performance and suitability of NeRF implementations for VR have not been evaluated, for instance, for different scene complexities or screen resolutions. In this paper, we present and evaluate a NeRF…
Hybrid Foveated Path Tracing with Peripheral Gaussians for Immersive Anatomy
Technical University of Munich (TUM), Germany（慕尼黑技术大学）；TUM University Hospital, Orthopedics and Sports Orthopedics（TUM大学医院，骨科和运动骨科）；Human-Centered Computing and Extended Reality Lab (HEX)（以人为本计算与扩展现实实验室）；Munich Institute of Robotics and Machine Intelligence (MIRMI)（慕尼黑机器人与机器智能研究所）
Envisioning a Next Generation Extended Reality Conferencing System with Efficient Photorealistic Human Rendering
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；University of Miami（迈阿密大学）；Arizona State University（亚利桑那州立大学）；Futurewei Technologies（华为未来技术研究院）
Microsoft Research Asia（微软亚洲研究院）；Nanjing University（南京大学）；University of Science and Technology（中国科学技术大学）
The VirtualCube system is a 3D video conference system that attempts to overcome some limitations of conventional technologies. The key ingredient is VirtualCube, an abstract representation of a real-world cubicle instrumented with RGBD cameras for capturing the 3D geometry and texture of a user. We design VirtualCube so that the task of data capturing is standardized and significantly simplified, and everything can be built using off-the-shelf hardware. We use VirtualCubes as the basic building blocks of a virtual conferencing environment, and we provide each VirtualCube user with a surroundi…
ShanghaiTech University（上海科技大学）；Degene；Google（谷歌）；Shanghai Engineering Research Center of Intelligent Vision and Imaging（上海智能视觉与影像工程研究中心）
4D reconstruction and rendering of human activities is critical for immersive VR/AR experience.Recent advances still fail to recover fine geometry and texture results with the level of detail present in the input images from sparse multi-view RGB cameras. In this paper, we propose NeuralHumanFVV, a real-time neural human performance capture and rendering system to generate both high-quality geometry and photo-realistic texture of human activities in arbitrary novel views. We propose a neural geometry generation scheme with a hierarchical sampling strategy for real-time implicit geometry infere…
Co-Occ: Coupling Explicit Feature Fusion with Volume Rendering Regularization for Multi-Modal 3D Semantic Occupancy Prediction
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)（香港科技大学（广州））；HKUST(GZ)（香港科技大学（广州））；The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）
Xi’an Jiaotong University（西安交通大学）；Ant Group（蚂蚁集团）；Tencent AI Lab（腾讯人工智能实验室）
Neural volume rendering enables photo-realistic renderings of a human performer in free-view, a critical task in immersive VR/AR applications. But the practice is severely limited by high computational costs in the rendering process. To solve this problem, we propose the UV Volumes, a new approach that can render an editable free-view video of a human performer in real-time. It separates the high-frequency (i.e., non-smooth) human appearance from the 3D volume, and encodes them into 2D neural texture stacks (NTS). The smooth UV volumes allow much smaller and shallower neural networks to obtain…
Novel view synthesis of static scenes has achieved remarkable advancements in producing photo-realistic results. However, key challenges remain for immersive rendering of dynamic scenes. One of the seminal image-based rendering method, the multi-plane image (MPI), produces high novel-view synthesis quality for static scenes. But modelling dynamic contents by MPI is not studied. In this paper, we propose a novel Temporal-MPI representation which is able to encode the rich 3D and dynamic variation information throughout the entire video as compact temporal basis and coefficients jointly learned.…
UnsOcc: 3D Semantic Occupancy Prediction in Unstructured Scene via Rendering Fusion
School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学人工智能学院）；Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；Waytous Inc.（Waytous公司）
Holoported Characters: Real-time Free-viewpoint Rendering of Humans from Sparse RGB Cameras
Max Planck Institute for Informatics（马克斯·普朗克信息学研究所）；Saarland University（萨尔大学）；Saarbrücken Research Center for Visual Computing, Interaction and AI（萨尔布吕肯视觉计算、交互与人工智能研究中心）
SPORTS: Simultaneous Panoptic Odometry, Rendering, Tracking and Segmentation for Urban Scenes Understanding
School of Information Science and Engineering, Yunnan University（云南大学信息科学与工程学院）；Yunnan University（云南大学）；School of Information and Electronics, Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学信息与电子学院）；Yunnan Key Laboratory of Intelligent Systems and Computing（智能系统与计算重点实验室）
The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；SmartMore（思谋科技）
Synthesizing photo-realistic images from a point cloud is challenging because of the sparsity of point cloud representation. Recent Neural Radiance Fields and extensions are proposed to synthesize realistic images from 2D input. In this paper, we present Point2Pix as a novel point renderer to link the 3D sparse point clouds with 2D dense image pixels. Taking advantage of the point cloud 3D prior and NeRF rendering pipeline, our method can synthesize high-quality images from colored point clouds, generally for novel indoor scenes. To improve the efficiency of ray sampling, we propose point-guid…
Cornell University（康奈尔大学）；University of California, Irvine（加州大学欧文分校）；Facebook Reality Labs（Facebook现实实验室）
Reconstructing the shape and appearance of real-world objects using measured 2D images has been a long-standing problem in computer vision. In this paper, we introduce a new analysis-by-synthesis technique capable of producing high-quality reconstructions through robust coarse-to-fine optimization and physics-based differentiable rendering. Unlike most previous methods that handle geometry and reflectance largely separately, our method unifies the optimization of both by leveraging image gradients with respect to both object reflectance and geometry. To obtain physically accurate gradient esti…
Brown University（布朗大学）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；University of Bath（巴斯大学）
We introduce a method to convert stereo 360° (omnidirectional stereo) imagery into a layered, multi-sphere image representation for six degree-of-freedom (6DoF) rendering. Stereo 360° imagery can be captured from multi-camera systems for virtual reality (VR), but lacks motion parallax and correct-in-all-directions disparity cues. Together, these can quickly lead to VR sickness when viewing content. One solution is to try and generate a format suitable for 6DoF rendering, such as by estimating depth. However, this raises questions as to how to handle disoccluded regions in dynamic scenes. Our a…
Recent advancements in differentiable rendering and 3D reasoning have driven exciting results in novel view synthesis from a single image. Despite realistic results, methods are limited to relatively small view change. In order to synthesize immersive scenes, models must also be able to extrapolate. We present an approach that fuses 3D reasoning with autoregressive modeling to outpaint large view changes in a 3D-consistent manner, enabling scene synthesis. We demonstrate considerable improvement in single image large-angle view synthesis results compared to a variety of methods and possible va…
ShanghaiTech University（上海科技大学）；NeuDim Digital Technology (Shanghai) Co.,Ltd.（纽迪姆数字科技（上海）有限公司）；DGene Digital Technology Co., Ltd.（帝晶数字科技有限公司）；KU Leuven（鲁汶大学）
We have recently seen tremendous progress in the neural advances for photo-real human modeling and rendering. However, it's still challenging to integrate them into an existing mesh-based pipeline for downstream applications. In this paper, we present a comprehensive neural approach for high-quality reconstruction, compression, and rendering of human performances from dense multi-view videos. Our core intuition is to bridge the traditional animated mesh workflow with a new class of highly efficient neural techniques. We first introduce a neural surface reconstructor for high-quality surface ge…
This paper introduces temporal image fusion. The proposed technique builds upon previous research in exposure fusion and expands it to deal with the limited Temporal Dynamic Range of existing sensors and camera technologies. In particular, temporal image fusion enables the rendering of long-exposure effects on full frame-rate video, as well as the generation of arbitrarily long exposures from a sequence of images of the same scene taken over time. We explore the problem of temporal under-exposure, and show how it can be addressed by selectively enhancing dynamic structure. Finally, we show tha…
Monte Carlo rendering algorithms are widely used to produce photorealistic computer graphics images. However, these algorithms need to sample a substantial amount of rays per pixel to enable proper global illumination and thus require an immense amount of computation. In this paper, we present a hybrid rendering method to speed up Monte Carlo rendering algorithms. Our method first generates two versions of a rendering: one at a low resolution with a high sample rate (LRHS) and the other at a high resolution with a low sample rate (HRLS). We then develop a deep convolutional neural network to f…
With the emergence of neural radiance fields (NeRFs), view synthesis quality has reached an unprecedented level. Compared to traditional mesh-based assets, this volumetric representation is more powerful in expressing scene geometry but inevitably suffers from high rendering costs and can hardly be involved in further processes like editing, posing significant difficulties in combination with the existing graphics pipeline. In this paper, we present a hybrid volume-mesh representation, VMesh, which depicts an object with a textured mesh along with an auxiliary sparse volume. VMesh retains the …
Spatial audio, which focuses on immersive 3D sound rendering, is widely applied in the acoustic industry. One of the key problems of current spatial audio rendering methods is the lack of personalization based on different anatomies of individuals, which is essential to produce accurate sound source positions. In this work, we address this problem from an interdisciplinary perspective. The rendering of spatial audio is strongly correlated with the 3D shape of human bodies, particularly ears. To this end, we propose to achieve personalized spatial audio by reconstructing 3D human ears with sing…
VoxNeRF: Bridging Voxel Representation and Neural Radiance Fields for Enhanced Indoor View Synthesis
Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；Huawei Munich Research Center（华为慕尼黑研究中心）；Munich Center for Machine Learning（慕尼黑机器学习中心）；University of Stuttgart（斯图加特大学）；Karlsruhe University of Applied Sciences（卡尔斯鲁厄应用技术大学）
