On Neural BRDFs: A Thorough Comparison of State-of-the-Art Approaches

The bidirectional reflectance distribution function (BRDF) is an essential tool to capture the complex interaction of light and matter. Recently, several works have employed neural methods for BRDF modeling, following various strategies, ranging from utilizing existing parametric models to purely neural parametrizations. While all methods yield impressive results, a comprehensive comparison of the different approaches is missing in the literature. In this work, we present a thorough evaluation of several approaches, including results for qualitative and quantitative reconstruction quality and an analysis of reciprocity and energy conservation. Moreover, we propose two extensions that can be added to existing approaches: A novel additive combination strategy for neural BRDFs that split the reflectance into a diffuse and a specular part, and an input mapping that ensures reciprocity exactly by construction, while previous approaches only ensure it by soft constraints.

FacaDiffy: Inpainting Unseen Facade Parts Using Diffusion Models

High-detail semantic 3D building models are frequently utilized in robotics, geoinformatics, and computer vision. One key aspect of creating such models is employing 2D conflict maps that detect openings' locations in building facades. Yet, in reality, these maps are often incomplete due to obstacles encountered during laser scanning. To address this challenge, we introduce FacaDiffy, a novel method for inpainting unseen facade parts by completing conflict maps with a personalized Stable Diffusion model. Specifically, we first propose a deterministic ray analysis approach to derive 2D conflict maps from existing 3D building models and corresponding laser scanning point clouds. Furthermore, we facilitate the inpainting of unseen facade objects into these 2D conflict maps by leveraging the potential of personalizing a Stable Diffusion model. To complement the scarcity of real-world training data, we also develop a scalable pipeline to produce synthetic conflict maps using random city model generators and annotated facade images. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FacaDiffy achieves state-of-the-art performance in conflict map completion compared to various inpainting baselines and increases the detection rate by $22\%$ when applying the completed conflict maps for high-definition 3D semantic building reconstruction. The code is be publicly available in the corresponding GitHub repository: https://github.com/ThomasFroech/InpaintingofUnseenFacadeObjects

Implicit Neural Surface Deformation with Explicit Velocity Fields

In this work, we introduce the first unsupervised method that simultaneously predicts time-varying neural implicit surfaces and deformations between pairs of point clouds. We propose to model the point movement using an explicit velocity field and directly deform a time-varying implicit field using the modified level-set equation. This equation utilizes an iso-surface evolution with Eikonal constraints in a compact formulation, ensuring the integrity of the signed distance field. By applying a smooth, volume-preserving constraint to the velocity field, our method successfully recovers physically plausible intermediate shapes. Our method is able to handle both rigid and non-rigid deformations without any intermediate shape supervision. Our experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing works, delivering superior results in both quality and efficiency.

Nonisotropic Gaussian Diffusion for Realistic 3D Human Motion Prediction

Probabilistic human motion prediction aims to forecast multiple possible future movements from past observations. While current approaches report high diversity and realism, they often generate motions with undetected limb stretching and jitter. To address this, we introduce SkeletonDiffusion, a latent diffusion model that embeds an explicit inductive bias on the human body within its architecture and training. Our model is trained with a novel nonisotropic Gaussian diffusion formulation that aligns with the natural kinematic structure of the human skeleton. Results show that our approach outperforms conventional isotropic alternatives, consistently generating realistic predictions while avoiding artifacts such as limb distortion. Additionally, we identify a limitation in commonly used diversity metrics, which may inadvertently favor models that produce inconsistent limb lengths within the same sequence. SkeletonDiffusion sets a new benchmark on three real-world datasets, outperforming various baselines across multiple evaluation metrics. Visit our project page: https://ceveloper.github.io/publications/skeletondiffusion/

ZDySS -- Zero-Shot Dynamic Scene Stylization using Gaussian Splatting

Stylizing a dynamic scene based on an exemplar image is critical for various real-world applications, including gaming, filmmaking, and augmented and virtual reality. However, achieving consistent stylization across both spatial and temporal dimensions remains a significant challenge. Most existing methods are designed for static scenes and often require an optimization process for each style image, limiting their adaptability. We introduce ZDySS, a zero-shot stylization framework for dynamic scenes, allowing our model to generalize to previously unseen style images at inference. Our approach employs Gaussian splatting for scene representation, linking each Gaussian to a learned feature vector that renders a feature map for any given view and timestamp. By applying style transfer on the learned feature vectors instead of the rendered feature map, we enhance spatio-temporal consistency across frames. Our method demonstrates superior performance and coherence over state-of-the-art baselines in tests on real-world dynamic scenes, making it a robust solution for practical applications.

UniLoc: Towards Universal Place Recognition Using Any Single Modality

To date, most place recognition methods focus on single-modality retrieval. While they perform well in specific environments, cross-modal methods offer greater flexibility by allowing seamless switching between map and query sources. It also promises to reduce computation requirements by having a unified model, and achieving greater sample efficiency by sharing parameters. In this work, we develop a universal solution to place recognition, UniLoc, that works with any single query modality (natural language, image, or point cloud). UniLoc leverages recent advances in large-scale contrastive learning, and learns by matching hierarchically at two levels: instance-level matching and scene-level matching. Specifically, we propose a novel Self-Attention based Pooling (SAP) module to evaluate the importance of instance descriptors when aggregated into a place-level descriptor. Experiments on the KITTI-360 dataset demonstrate the benefits of cross-modality for place recognition, achieving superior performance in cross-modal settings and competitive results also for uni-modal scenarios. Our project page is publicly available at https://yan-xia.github.io/projects/UniLoc/.

TrafficLoc: Localizing Traffic Surveillance Cameras in 3D Scenes

We tackle the problem of localizing the traffic surveillance cameras in cooperative perception. To overcome the lack of large-scale real-world intersection datasets, we introduce Carla Intersection, a new simulated dataset with 75 urban and rural intersections in Carla. Moreover, we introduce a novel neural network, TrafficLoc, localizing traffic cameras within a 3D reference map. TrafficLoc employs a coarse-to-fine matching pipeline. For image-point cloud feature fusion, we propose a novel Geometry-guided Attention Loss to address cross-modal viewpoint inconsistencies. During coarse matching, we propose an Inter-Intra Contrastive Learning to achieve precise alignment while preserving distinctiveness among local intra-features within image patch-point group pairs. Besides, we introduce Dense Training Alignment with a soft-argmax operator to consider additional features when regressing the final position. Extensive experiments show that our TrafficLoc improves the localization accuracy over the state-of-the-art Image-to-point cloud registration methods by a large margin (up to 86%) on Carla Intersection and generalizes well to real-world data. TrafficLoc also achieves new SOTA performance on KITTI and NuScenes datasets, demonstrating strong localization ability across both in-vehicle and traffic cameras. Our project page is publicly available at https://tum-luk.github.io/projects/trafficloc/.

CoE: Deep Coupled Embedding for Non-Rigid Point Cloud Correspondences

The interest in matching non-rigidly deformed shapes represented as raw point clouds is rising due to the proliferation of low-cost 3D sensors. Yet, the task is challenging since point clouds are irregular and there is a lack of intrinsic shape information. We propose to tackle these challenges by learning a new shape representation -- a per-point high dimensional embedding, in an embedding space where semantically similar points share similar embeddings. The learned embedding has multiple beneficial properties: it is aware of the underlying shape geometry and is robust to shape deformations and various shape artefacts, such as noise and partiality. Consequently, this embedding can be directly employed to retrieve high-quality dense correspondences through a simple nearest neighbor search in the embedding space. Extensive experiments demonstrate new state-of-the-art results and robustness in numerous challenging non-rigid shape matching benchmarks and show its great potential in other shape analysis tasks, such as segmentation.

DynSUP: Dynamic Gaussian Splatting from An Unposed Image Pair

Recent advances in 3D Gaussian Splatting have shown promising results. Existing methods typically assume static scenes and/or multiple images with prior poses. Dynamics, sparse views, and unknown poses significantly increase the problem complexity due to insufficient geometric constraints. To overcome this challenge, we propose a method that can use only two images without prior poses to fit Gaussians in dynamic environments. To achieve this, we introduce two technical contributions. First, we propose an object-level two-view bundle adjustment. This strategy decomposes dynamic scenes into piece-wise rigid components, and jointly estimates the camera pose and motions of dynamic objects. Second, we design an SE(3) field-driven Gaussian training method. It enables fine-grained motion modeling through learnable per-Gaussian transformations. Our method leads to high-fidelity novel view synthesis of dynamic scenes while accurately preserving temporal consistency and object motion. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches designed for the cases of static environments, multiple images, and/or known poses. Our project page is available at https://colin-de.github.io/DynSUP/.

SADG: Segment Any Dynamic Gaussian Without Object Trackers

Understanding dynamic 3D scenes is fundamental for various applications, including extended reality (XR) and autonomous driving. Effectively integrating semantic information into 3D reconstruction enables holistic representation that opens opportunities for immersive and interactive applications. We introduce SADG, Segment Any Dynamic Gaussian Without Object Trackers, a novel approach that combines dynamic Gaussian Splatting representation and semantic information without reliance on object IDs. In contrast to existing works, we do not rely on supervision based on object identities to enable consistent segmentation of dynamic 3D objects. To this end, we propose to learn semantically-aware features by leveraging masks generated from the Segment Anything Model (SAM) and utilizing our novel contrastive learning objective based on hard pixel mining. The learned Gaussian features can be effectively clustered without further post-processing. This enables fast computation for further object-level editing, such as object removal, composition, and style transfer by manipulating the Gaussians in the scene. We further extend several dynamic novel-view datasets with segmentation benchmarks to enable testing of learned feature fields from unseen viewpoints. We evaluate SADG on proposed benchmarks and demonstrate the superior performance of our approach in segmenting objects within dynamic scenes along with its effectiveness for further downstream editing tasks.