iFusion: Inverting Diffusion for Pose-Free Reconstruction from Sparse Views

We present iFusion, a novel 3D object reconstruction framework that requires only two views with unknown camera poses. While single-view reconstruction yields visually appealing results, it can deviate significantly from the actual object, especially on unseen sides. Additional views improve reconstruction fidelity but necessitate known camera poses. However, assuming the availability of pose may be unrealistic, and existing pose estimators fail in sparse view scenarios. To address this, we harness a pre-trained novel view synthesis diffusion model, which embeds implicit knowledge about the geometry and appearance of diverse objects. Our strategy unfolds in three steps: (1) We invert the diffusion model for camera pose estimation instead of synthesizing novel views. (2) The diffusion model is fine-tuned using provided views and estimated poses, turned into a novel view synthesizer tailored for the target object. (3) Leveraging registered views and the fine-tuned diffusion model, we reconstruct the 3D object. Experiments demonstrate strong performance in both pose estimation and novel view synthesis. Moreover, iFusion seamlessly integrates with various reconstruction methods and enhances them.

360-MLC: Multi-view Layout Consistency for Self-training and Hyper-parameter Tuning

We present 360-MLC, a self-training method based on multi-view layout consistency for finetuning monocular room-layout models using unlabeled 360-images only. This can be valuable in practical scenarios where a pre-trained model needs to be adapted to a new data domain without using any ground truth annotations. Our simple yet effective assumption is that multiple layout estimations in the same scene must define a consistent geometry regardless of their camera positions. Based on this idea, we leverage a pre-trained model to project estimated layout boundaries from several camera views into the 3D world coordinate. Then, we re-project them back to the spherical coordinate and build a probability function, from which we sample the pseudo-labels for self-training. To handle unconfident pseudo-labels, we evaluate the variance in the re-projected boundaries as an uncertainty value to weight each pseudo-label in our loss function during training. In addition, since ground truth annotations are not available during training nor in testing, we leverage the entropy information in multiple layout estimations as a quantitative metric to measure the geometry consistency of the scene, allowing us to evaluate any layout estimator for hyper-parameter tuning, including model selection without ground truth annotations. Experimental results show that our solution achieves favorable performance against state-of-the-art methods when self-training from three publicly available source datasets to a unique, newly labeled dataset consisting of multi-view of the same scenes.

360-DFPE: Leveraging Monocular 360-Layouts for Direct Floor Plan Estimation

We present 360-DFPE, a sequential floor plan estimation method that directly takes 360-images as input without relying on active sensors or 3D information. Our approach leverages a loosely coupled integration between a monocular visual SLAM solution and a monocular 360-room layout approach, which estimate camera poses and layout geometries, respectively. Since our task is to sequentially capture the floor plan using monocular images, the entire scene structure, room instances, and room shapes are unknown. To tackle these challenges, we first handle the scale difference between visual odometry and layout geometry via formulating an entropy minimization process, which enables us to directly align 360-layouts without knowing the entire scene in advance. Second, to sequentially identify individual rooms, we propose a novel room identification algorithm that tracks every room along the camera exploration using geometry information. Lastly, to estimate the final shape of the room, we propose a shortest path algorithm with an iterative coarse-to-fine strategy, which improves prior formulations with higher accuracy and faster run-time. Moreover, we collect a new floor plan dataset with challenging large-scale scenes, providing both point clouds and sequential 360-image information. Experimental results show that our monocular solution achieves favorable performance against the current state-of-the-art algorithms that rely on active sensors and require the entire scene reconstruction data in advance. Our code and dataset will be released soon.

Robust 360-8PA: Redesigning The Normalized 8-point Algorithm for 360-FoV Images

This paper presents a novel preconditioning strategy for the classic 8-point algorithm (8-PA) for estimating an essential matrix from 360-FoV images (i.e., equirectangular images) in spherical projection. To alleviate the effect of uneven key-feature distributions and outlier correspondences, which can potentially decrease the accuracy of an essential matrix, our method optimizes a non-rigid transformation to deform a spherical camera into a new spatial domain, defining a new constraint and a more robust and accurate solution for an essential matrix. Through several experiments using random synthetic points, 360-FoV, and fish-eye images, we demonstrate that our normalization can increase the camera pose accuracy by about 20% without significantly overhead the computation time. In addition, we present further benefits of our method through both a constant weighted least-square optimization that improves further the well known Gold Standard Method (GSM) (i.e., the non-linear optimization by using epipolar errors); and a relaxation of the number of RANSAC iterations, both showing that our normalization outcomes a more reliable, robust, and accurate solution.