Camera Splatting for Continuous View Optimization

We propose Camera Splatting, a novel view optimization framework for novel view synthesis. Each camera is modeled as a 3D Gaussian, referred to as a camera splat, and virtual cameras, termed point cameras, are placed at 3D points sampled near the surface to observe the distribution of camera splats. View optimization is achieved by continuously and differentiably refining the camera splats so that desirable target distributions are observed from the point cameras, in a manner similar to the original 3D Gaussian splatting. Compared to the Farthest View Sampling (FVS) approach, our optimized views demonstrate superior performance in capturing complex view-dependent phenomena, including intense metallic reflections and intricate textures such as text.

StyleCariGAN: Caricature Generation via StyleGAN Feature Map Modulation

We present a caricature generation framework based on shape and style manipulation using StyleGAN. Our framework, dubbed StyleCariGAN, automatically creates a realistic and detailed caricature from an input photo with optional controls on shape exaggeration degree and color stylization type. The key component of our method is shape exaggeration blocks that are used for modulating coarse layer feature maps of StyleGAN to produce desirable caricature shape exaggerations. We first build a layer-mixed StyleGAN for photo-to-caricature style conversion by swapping fine layers of the StyleGAN for photos to the corresponding layers of the StyleGAN trained to generate caricatures. Given an input photo, the layer-mixed model produces detailed color stylization for a caricature but without shape exaggerations. We then append shape exaggeration blocks to the coarse layers of the layer-mixed model and train the blocks to create shape exaggerations while preserving the characteristic appearances of the input. Experimental results show that our StyleCariGAN generates realistic and detailed caricatures compared to the current state-of-the-art methods. We demonstrate StyleCariGAN also supports other StyleGAN-based image manipulations, such as facial expression control.