Multi-View Azimuth Stereo via Tangent Space Consistency

We present a method for 3D reconstruction only using calibrated multi-view surface azimuth maps. Our method, multi-view azimuth stereo, is effective for textureless or specular surfaces, which are difficult for conventional multi-view stereo methods. We introduce the concept of tangent space consistency: Multi-view azimuth observations of a surface point should be lifted to the same tangent space. Leveraging this consistency, we recover the shape by optimizing a neural implicit surface representation. Our method harnesses the robust azimuth estimation capabilities of photometric stereo methods or polarization imaging while bypassing potentially complex zenith angle estimation. Experiments using azimuth maps from various sources validate the accurate shape recovery with our method, even without zenith angles.

Text-Guided Scene Sketch-to-Photo Synthesis

We propose a method for scene-level sketch-to-photo synthesis with text guidance. Although object-level sketch-to-photo synthesis has been widely studied, whole-scene synthesis is still challenging without reference photos that adequately reflect the target style. To this end, we leverage knowledge from recent large-scale pre-trained generative models, resulting in text-guided sketch-to-photo synthesis without the need for reference images. To train our model, we use self-supervised learning from a set of photographs. Specifically, we use a pre-trained edge detector that maps both color and sketch images into a standardized edge domain, which reduces the gap between photograph-based edge images (during training) and hand-drawn sketch images (during inference). We implement our method by fine-tuning a latent diffusion model (i.e., Stable Diffusion) with sketch and text conditions. Experiments show that the proposed method translates original sketch images that are not extracted from color images into photos with compelling visual quality.

Descriptor-Free Multi-View Region Matching for Instance-Wise 3D Reconstruction

This paper proposes a multi-view extension of instance segmentation without relying on texture or shape descriptor matching. Multi-view instance segmentation becomes challenging for scenes with repetitive textures and shapes, e.g., plant leaves, due to the difficulty of multi-view matching using texture or shape descriptors. To this end, we propose a multi-view region matching method based on epipolar geometry, which does not rely on any feature descriptors. We further show that the epipolar region matching can be easily integrated into instance segmentation and effective for instance-wise 3D reconstruction. Experiments demonstrate the improved accuracy of multi-view instance matching and the 3D reconstruction compared to the baseline methods.

Probabilistic Plant Modeling via Multi-View Image-to-Image Translation

This paper describes a method for inferring three-dimensional (3D) plant branch structures that are hidden under leaves from multi-view observations. Unlike previous geometric approaches that heavily rely on the visibility of the branches or use parametric branching models, our method makes statistical inferences of branch structures in a probabilistic framework. By inferring the probability of branch existence using a Bayesian extension of image-to-image translation applied to each of multi-view images, our method generates a probabilistic plant 3D model, which represents the 3D branching pattern that cannot be directly observed. Experiments demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed approach in generating convincing branch structures in comparison to prior approaches.