PhysAvatar: Learning the Physics of Dressed 3D Avatars from Visual Observations

Modeling and rendering photorealistic avatars is of crucial importance in many applications. Existing methods that build a 3D avatar from visual observations, however, struggle to reconstruct clothed humans. We introduce PhysAvatar, a novel framework that combines inverse rendering with inverse physics to automatically estimate the shape and appearance of a human from multi-view video data along with the physical parameters of the fabric of their clothes. For this purpose, we adopt a mesh-aligned 4D Gaussian technique for spatio-temporal mesh tracking as well as a physically based inverse renderer to estimate the intrinsic material properties. PhysAvatar integrates a physics simulator to estimate the physical parameters of the garments using gradient-based optimization in a principled manner. These novel capabilities enable PhysAvatar to create high-quality novel-view renderings of avatars dressed in loose-fitting clothes under motions and lighting conditions not seen in the training data. This marks a significant advancement towards modeling photorealistic digital humans using physically based inverse rendering with physics in the loop. Our project website is at: https://qingqing-zhao.github.io/PhysAvatar

Alchemist: Parametric Control of Material Properties with Diffusion Models

We propose a method to control material attributes of objects like roughness, metallic, albedo, and transparency in real images. Our method capitalizes on the generative prior of text-to-image models known for photorealism, employing a scalar value and instructions to alter low-level material properties. Addressing the lack of datasets with controlled material attributes, we generated an object-centric synthetic dataset with physically-based materials. Fine-tuning a modified pre-trained text-to-image model on this synthetic dataset enables us to edit material properties in real-world images while preserving all other attributes. We show the potential application of our model to material edited NeRFs.

ZeroNVS: Zero-Shot 360-Degree View Synthesis from a Single Real Image

We introduce a 3D-aware diffusion model, ZeroNVS, for single-image novel view synthesis for in-the-wild scenes. While existing methods are designed for single objects with masked backgrounds, we propose new techniques to address challenges introduced by in-the-wild multi-object scenes with complex backgrounds. Specifically, we train a generative prior on a mixture of data sources that capture object-centric, indoor, and outdoor scenes. To address issues from data mixture such as depth-scale ambiguity, we propose a novel camera conditioning parameterization and normalization scheme. Further, we observe that Score Distillation Sampling (SDS) tends to truncate the distribution of complex backgrounds during distillation of 360-degree scenes, and propose "SDS anchoring" to improve the diversity of synthesized novel views. Our model sets a new state-of-the-art result in LPIPS on the DTU dataset in the zero-shot setting, even outperforming methods specifically trained on DTU. We further adapt the challenging Mip-NeRF 360 dataset as a new benchmark for single-image novel view synthesis, and demonstrate strong performance in this setting. Our code and data are at http://kylesargent.github.io/zeronvs/

Preface: A Data-driven Volumetric Prior for Few-shot Ultra High-resolution Face Synthesis

NeRFs have enabled highly realistic synthesis of human faces including complex appearance and reflectance effects of hair and skin. These methods typically require a large number of multi-view input images, making the process hardware intensive and cumbersome, limiting applicability to unconstrained settings. We propose a novel volumetric human face prior that enables the synthesis of ultra high-resolution novel views of subjects that are not part of the prior's training distribution. This prior model consists of an identity-conditioned NeRF, trained on a dataset of low-resolution multi-view images of diverse humans with known camera calibration. A simple sparse landmark-based 3D alignment of the training dataset allows our model to learn a smooth latent space of geometry and appearance despite a limited number of training identities. A high-quality volumetric representation of a novel subject can be obtained by model fitting to 2 or 3 camera views of arbitrary resolution. Importantly, our method requires as few as two views of casually captured images as input at inference time.

ITI-GEN: Inclusive Text-to-Image Generation

Text-to-image generative models often reflect the biases of the training data, leading to unequal representations of underrepresented groups. This study investigates inclusive text-to-image generative models that generate images based on human-written prompts and ensure the resulting images are uniformly distributed across attributes of interest. Unfortunately, directly expressing the desired attributes in the prompt often leads to sub-optimal results due to linguistic ambiguity or model misrepresentation. Hence, this paper proposes a drastically different approach that adheres to the maxim that "a picture is worth a thousand words". We show that, for some attributes, images can represent concepts more expressively than text. For instance, categories of skin tones are typically hard to specify by text but can be easily represented by example images. Building upon these insights, we propose a novel approach, ITI-GEN, that leverages readily available reference images for Inclusive Text-to-Image GENeration. The key idea is learning a set of prompt embeddings to generate images that can effectively represent all desired attribute categories. More importantly, ITI-GEN requires no model fine-tuning, making it computationally efficient to augment existing text-to-image models. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ITI-GEN largely improves over state-of-the-art models to generate inclusive images from a prompt. Project page: https://czhang0528.github.io/iti-gen.

TEGLO: High Fidelity Canonical Texture Mapping from Single-View Images

Recent work in Neural Fields (NFs) learn 3D representations from class-specific single view image collections. However, they are unable to reconstruct the input data preserving high-frequency details. Further, these methods do not disentangle appearance from geometry and hence are not suitable for tasks such as texture transfer and editing. In this work, we propose TEGLO (Textured EG3D-GLO) for learning 3D representations from single view in-the-wild image collections for a given class of objects. We accomplish this by training a conditional Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) without any explicit 3D supervision. We equip our method with editing capabilities by creating a dense correspondence mapping to a 2D canonical space. We demonstrate that such mapping enables texture transfer and texture editing without requiring meshes with shared topology. Our key insight is that by mapping the input image pixels onto the texture space we can achieve near perfect reconstruction (>= 74 dB PSNR at 1024^2 resolution). Our formulation allows for high quality 3D consistent novel view synthesis with high-frequency details at megapixel image resolution.

MELON: NeRF with Unposed Images Using Equivalence Class Estimation

Neural radiance fields enable novel-view synthesis and scene reconstruction with photorealistic quality from a few images, but require known and accurate camera poses. Conventional pose estimation algorithms fail on smooth or self-similar scenes, while methods performing inverse rendering from unposed views require a rough initialization of the camera orientations. The main difficulty of pose estimation lies in real-life objects being almost invariant under certain transformations, making the photometric distance between rendered views non-convex with respect to the camera parameters. Using an equivalence relation that matches the distribution of local minima in camera space, we reduce this space to its quotient set, in which pose estimation becomes a more convex problem. Using a neural-network to regularize pose estimation, we demonstrate that our method - MELON - can reconstruct a neural radiance field from unposed images with state-of-the-art accuracy while requiring ten times fewer views than adversarial approaches.

Attention Beats Concatenation for Conditioning Neural Fields

Neural fields model signals by mapping coordinate inputs to sampled values. They are becoming an increasingly important backbone architecture across many fields from vision and graphics to biology and astronomy. In this paper, we explore the differences between common conditioning mechanisms within these networks, an essential ingredient in shifting neural fields from memorization of signals to generalization, where the set of signals lying on a manifold is modelled jointly. In particular, we are interested in the scaling behaviour of these mechanisms to increasingly high-dimensional conditioning variables. As we show in our experiments, high-dimensional conditioning is key to modelling complex data distributions, thus it is important to determine what architecture choices best enable this when working on such problems. To this end, we run experiments modelling 2D, 3D, and 4D signals with neural fields, employing concatenation, hyper-network, and attention-based conditioning strategies -- a necessary but laborious effort that has not been performed in the literature. We find that attention-based conditioning outperforms other approaches in a variety of settings.

Kubric: A scalable dataset generator

Data is the driving force of machine learning, with the amount and quality of training data often being more important for the performance of a system than architecture and training details. But collecting, processing and annotating real data at scale is difficult, expensive, and frequently raises additional privacy, fairness and legal concerns. Synthetic data is a powerful tool with the potential to address these shortcomings: 1) it is cheap 2) supports rich ground-truth annotations 3) offers full control over data and 4) can circumvent or mitigate problems regarding bias, privacy and licensing. Unfortunately, software tools for effective data generation are less mature than those for architecture design and training, which leads to fragmented generation efforts. To address these problems we introduce Kubric, an open-source Python framework that interfaces with PyBullet and Blender to generate photo-realistic scenes, with rich annotations, and seamlessly scales to large jobs distributed over thousands of machines, and generating TBs of data. We demonstrate the effectiveness of Kubric by presenting a series of 13 different generated datasets for tasks ranging from studying 3D NeRF models to optical flow estimation. We release Kubric, the used assets, all of the generation code, as well as the rendered datasets for reuse and modification.

Solving Inverse Problems with NerfGANs

We introduce a novel framework for solving inverse problems using NeRF-style generative models. We are interested in the problem of 3-D scene reconstruction given a single 2-D image and known camera parameters. We show that naively optimizing the latent space leads to artifacts and poor novel view rendering. We attribute this problem to volume obstructions that are clear in the 3-D geometry and become visible in the renderings of novel views. We propose a novel radiance field regularization method to obtain better 3-D surfaces and improved novel views given single view observations. Our method naturally extends to general inverse problems including inpainting where one observes only partially a single view. We experimentally evaluate our method, achieving visual improvements and performance boosts over the baselines in a wide range of tasks. Our method achieves $30-40\%$ MSE reduction and $15-25\%$ reduction in LPIPS loss compared to the previous state of the art.