Neural Radiance Transfer Fields for Relightable Novel-view Synthesis with Global Illumination

Given a set of images of a scene, the re-rendering of this scene from novel views and lighting conditions is an important and challenging problem in Computer Vision and Graphics. On the one hand, most existing works in Computer Vision usually impose many assumptions regarding the image formation process, e.g. direct illumination and predefined materials, to make scene parameter estimation tractable. On the other hand, mature Computer Graphics tools allow modeling of complex photo-realistic light transport given all the scene parameters. Combining these approaches, we propose a method for scene relighting under novel views by learning a neural precomputed radiance transfer function, which implicitly handles global illumination effects using novel environment maps. Our method can be solely supervised on a set of real images of the scene under a single unknown lighting condition. To disambiguate the task during training, we tightly integrate a differentiable path tracer in the training process and propose a combination of a synthesized OLAT and a real image loss. Results show that the recovered disentanglement of scene parameters improves significantly over the current state of the art and, thus, also our re-rendering results are more realistic and accurate.

Seeing 3D Objects in a Single Image via Self-Supervised Static-Dynamic Disentanglement

Human perception reliably identifies movable and immovable parts of 3D scenes, and completes the 3D structure of objects and background from incomplete observations. We learn this skill not via labeled examples, but simply by observing objects move. In this work, we propose an approach that observes unlabeled multi-view videos at training time and learns to map a single image observation of a complex scene, such as a street with cars, to a 3D neural scene representation that is disentangled into movable and immovable parts while plausibly completing its 3D structure. We separately parameterize movable and immovable scene parts via 2D neural ground plans. These ground plans are 2D grids of features aligned with the ground plane that can be locally decoded into 3D neural radiance fields. Our model is trained self-supervised via neural rendering. We demonstrate that the structure inherent to our disentangled 3D representation enables a variety of downstream tasks in street-scale 3D scenes using simple heuristics, such as extraction of object-centric 3D representations, novel view synthesis, instance segmentation, and 3D bounding box prediction, highlighting its value as a backbone for data-efficient 3D scene understanding models. This disentanglement further enables scene editing via object manipulation such as deletion, insertion, and rigid-body motion.

GAN2X: Non-Lambertian Inverse Rendering of Image GANs

2D images are observations of the 3D physical world depicted with the geometry, material, and illumination components. Recovering these underlying intrinsic components from 2D images, also known as inverse rendering, usually requires a supervised setting with paired images collected from multiple viewpoints and lighting conditions, which is resource-demanding. In this work, we present GAN2X, a new method for unsupervised inverse rendering that only uses unpaired images for training. Unlike previous Shape-from-GAN approaches that mainly focus on 3D shapes, we take the first attempt to also recover non-Lambertian material properties by exploiting the pseudo paired data generated by a GAN. To achieve precise inverse rendering, we devise a specularity-aware neural surface representation that continuously models the geometry and material properties. A shading-based refinement technique is adopted to further distill information in the target image and recover more fine details. Experiments demonstrate that GAN2X can accurately decompose 2D images to 3D shape, albedo, and specular properties for different object categories, and achieves the state-of-the-art performance for unsupervised single-view 3D face reconstruction. We also show its applications in downstream tasks including real image editing and lifting 2D GANs to decomposed 3D GANs.

HDSDF: Hybrid Directional and Signed Distance Functions for Fast Inverse Rendering

Implicit neural representations of 3D shapes form strong priors that are useful for various applications, such as single and multiple view 3D reconstruction. A downside of existing neural representations is that they require multiple network evaluations for rendering, which leads to high computational costs. This limitation forms a bottleneck particularly in the context of inverse problems, such as image-based 3D reconstruction. To address this issue, in this paper (i) we propose a novel hybrid 3D object representation based on a signed distance function (SDF) that we augment with a directional distance function (DDF), so that we can predict distances to the object surface from any point on a sphere enclosing the object. Moreover, (ii) using the proposed hybrid representation we address the multi-view consistency problem common in existing DDF representations. We evaluate our novel hybrid representation on the task of single-view depth reconstruction and show that our method is several times faster compared to competing methods, while at the same time achieving better reconstruction accuracy.

Disentangled3D: Learning a 3D Generative Model with Disentangled Geometry and Appearance from Monocular Images

Learning 3D generative models from a dataset of monocular images enables self-supervised 3D reasoning and controllable synthesis. State-of-the-art 3D generative models are GANs which use neural 3D volumetric representations for synthesis. Images are synthesized by rendering the volumes from a given camera. These models can disentangle the 3D scene from the camera viewpoint in any generated image. However, most models do not disentangle other factors of image formation, such as geometry and appearance. In this paper, we design a 3D GAN which can learn a disentangled model of objects, just from monocular observations. Our model can disentangle the geometry and appearance variations in the scene, i.e., we can independently sample from the geometry and appearance spaces of the generative model. This is achieved using a novel non-rigid deformable scene formulation. A 3D volume which represents an object instance is computed as a non-rigidly deformed canonical 3D volume. Our method learns the canonical volume, as well as its deformations, jointly during training. This formulation also helps us improve the disentanglement between the 3D scene and the camera viewpoints using a novel pose regularization loss defined on the 3D deformation field. In addition, we further model the inverse deformations, enabling the computation of dense correspondences between images generated by our model. Finally, we design an approach to embed real images into the latent space of our disentangled generative model, enabling editing of real images.

Advances in Neural Rendering

Synthesizing photo-realistic images and videos is at the heart of computer graphics and has been the focus of decades of research. Traditionally, synthetic images of a scene are generated using rendering algorithms such as rasterization or ray tracing, which take specifically defined representations of geometry and material properties as input. Collectively, these inputs define the actual scene and what is rendered, and are referred to as the scene representation (where a scene consists of one or more objects). Example scene representations are triangle meshes with accompanied textures (e.g., created by an artist), point clouds (e.g., from a depth sensor), volumetric grids (e.g., from a CT scan), or implicit surface functions (e.g., truncated signed distance fields). The reconstruction of such a scene representation from observations using differentiable rendering losses is known as inverse graphics or inverse rendering. Neural rendering is closely related, and combines ideas from classical computer graphics and machine learning to create algorithms for synthesizing images from real-world observations. Neural rendering is a leap forward towards the goal of synthesizing photo-realistic image and video content. In recent years, we have seen immense progress in this field through hundreds of publications that show different ways to inject learnable components into the rendering pipeline. This state-of-the-art report on advances in neural rendering focuses on methods that combine classical rendering principles with learned 3D scene representations, often now referred to as neural scene representations. A key advantage of these methods is that they are 3D-consistent by design, enabling applications such as novel viewpoint synthesis of a captured scene. In addition to methods that handle static scenes, we cover neural scene representations for modeling non-rigidly deforming objects...

StyleVideoGAN: A Temporal Generative Model using a Pretrained StyleGAN

Generative adversarial models (GANs) continue to produce advances in terms of the visual quality of still images, as well as the learning of temporal correlations. However, few works manage to combine these two interesting capabilities for the synthesis of video content: Most methods require an extensive training dataset in order to learn temporal correlations, while being rather limited in the resolution and visual quality of their output frames. In this paper, we present a novel approach to the video synthesis problem that helps to greatly improve visual quality and drastically reduce the amount of training data and resources necessary for generating video content. Our formulation separates the spatial domain, in which individual frames are synthesized, from the temporal domain, in which motion is generated. For the spatial domain we make use of a pre-trained StyleGAN network, the latent space of which allows control over the appearance of the objects it was trained for. The expressive power of this model allows us to embed our training videos in the StyleGAN latent space. Our temporal architecture is then trained not on sequences of RGB frames, but on sequences of StyleGAN latent codes. The advantageous properties of the StyleGAN space simplify the discovery of temporal correlations. We demonstrate that it suffices to train our temporal architecture on only 10 minutes of footage of 1 subject for about 6 hours. After training, our model can not only generate new portrait videos for the training subject, but also for any random subject which can be embedded in the StyleGAN space.

Egocentric Videoconferencing

We introduce a method for egocentric videoconferencing that enables hands-free video calls, for instance by people wearing smart glasses or other mixed-reality devices. Videoconferencing portrays valuable non-verbal communication and face expression cues, but usually requires a front-facing camera. Using a frontal camera in a hands-free setting when a person is on the move is impractical. Even holding a mobile phone camera in the front of the face while sitting for a long duration is not convenient. To overcome these issues, we propose a low-cost wearable egocentric camera setup that can be integrated into smart glasses. Our goal is to mimic a classical video call, and therefore, we transform the egocentric perspective of this camera into a front facing video. To this end, we employ a conditional generative adversarial neural network that learns a transition from the highly distorted egocentric views to frontal views common in videoconferencing. Our approach learns to transfer expression details directly from the egocentric view without using a complex intermediate parametric expressions model, as it is used by related face reenactment methods. We successfully handle subtle expressions, not easily captured by parametric blendshape-based solutions, e.g., tongue movement, eye movements, eye blinking, strong expressions and depth varying movements. To get control over the rigid head movements in the target view, we condition the generator on synthetic renderings of a moving neutral face. This allows us to synthesis results at different head poses. Our technique produces temporally smooth video-realistic renderings in real-time using a video-to-video translation network in conjunction with a temporal discriminator. We demonstrate the improved capabilities of our technique by comparing against related state-of-the art approaches.

Efficient and Differentiable Shadow Computation for Inverse Problems

Differentiable rendering has received increasing interest for image-based inverse problems. It can benefit traditional optimization-based solutions to inverse problems, but also allows for self-supervision of learning-based approaches for which training data with ground truth annotation is hard to obtain. However, existing differentiable renderers either do not model visibility of the light sources from the different points in the scene, responsible for shadows in the images, or are too slow for being used to train deep architectures over thousands of iterations. To this end, we propose an accurate yet efficient approach for differentiable visibility and soft shadow computation. Our approach is based on the spherical harmonics approximations of the scene illumination and visibility, where the occluding surface is approximated with spheres. This allows for a significantly more efficient shadow computation compared to methods based on ray tracing. As our formulation is differentiable, it can be used to solve inverse problems such as texture, illumination, rigid pose, and geometric deformation recovery from images using analysis-by-synthesis optimization.

PhotoApp: Photorealistic Appearance Editing of Head Portraits

Photorealistic editing of portraits is a challenging task as humans are very sensitive to inconsistencies in faces. We present an approach for high-quality intuitive editing of the camera viewpoint and scene illumination in a portrait image. This requires our method to capture and control the full reflectance field of the person in the image. Most editing approaches rely on supervised learning using training data captured with setups such as light and camera stages. Such datasets are expensive to acquire, not readily available and do not capture all the rich variations of in-the-wild portrait images. In addition, most supervised approaches only focus on relighting, and do not allow camera viewpoint editing. Thus, they only capture and control a subset of the reflectance field. Recently, portrait editing has been demonstrated by operating in the generative model space of StyleGAN. While such approaches do not require direct supervision, there is a significant loss of quality when compared to the supervised approaches. In this paper, we present a method which learns from limited supervised training data. The training images only include people in a fixed neutral expression with eyes closed, without much hair or background variations. Each person is captured under 150 one-light-at-a-time conditions and under 8 camera poses. Instead of training directly in the image space, we design a supervised problem which learns transformations in the latent space of StyleGAN. This combines the best of supervised learning and generative adversarial modeling. We show that the StyleGAN prior allows for generalisation to different expressions, hairstyles and backgrounds. This produces high-quality photorealistic results for in-the-wild images and significantly outperforms existing methods. Our approach can edit the illumination and pose simultaneously, and runs at interactive rates.