XScale-NVS: Cross-Scale Novel View Synthesis with Hash Featurized Manifold

We propose XScale-NVS for high-fidelity cross-scale novel view synthesis of real-world large-scale scenes. Existing representations based on explicit surface suffer from discretization resolution or UV distortion, while implicit volumetric representations lack scalability for large scenes due to the dispersed weight distribution and surface ambiguity. In light of the above challenges, we introduce hash featurized manifold, a novel hash-based featurization coupled with a deferred neural rendering framework. This approach fully unlocks the expressivity of the representation by explicitly concentrating the hash entries on the 2D manifold, thus effectively representing highly detailed contents independent of the discretization resolution. We also introduce a novel dataset, namely GigaNVS, to benchmark cross-scale, high-resolution novel view synthesis of realworld large-scale scenes. Our method significantly outperforms competing baselines on various real-world scenes, yielding an average LPIPS that is 40% lower than prior state-of-the-art on the challenging GigaNVS benchmark. Please see our project page at: xscalenvs.github.io.

Den-SOFT: Dense Space-Oriented Light Field DataseT for 6-DOF Immersive Experience

We have built a custom mobile multi-camera large-space dense light field capture system, which provides a series of high-quality and sufficiently dense light field images for various scenarios. Our aim is to contribute to the development of popular 3D scene reconstruction algorithms such as IBRnet, NeRF, and 3D Gaussian splitting. More importantly, the collected dataset, which is much denser than existing datasets, may also inspire space-oriented light field reconstruction, which is potentially different from object-centric 3D reconstruction, for immersive VR/AR experiences. We utilized a total of 40 GoPro 10 cameras, capturing images of 5k resolution. The number of photos captured for each scene is no less than 1000, and the average density (view number within a unit sphere) is 134.68. It is also worth noting that our system is capable of efficiently capturing large outdoor scenes. Addressing the current lack of large-space and dense light field datasets, we made efforts to include elements such as sky, reflections, lights and shadows that are of interest to researchers in the field of 3D reconstruction during the data capture process. Finally, we validated the effectiveness of our provided dataset on three popular algorithms and also integrated the reconstructed 3DGS results into the Unity engine, demonstrating the potential of utilizing our datasets to enhance the realism of virtual reality (VR) and create feasible interactive spaces. The dataset is available at our project website.

OmniSeg3D: Omniversal 3D Segmentation via Hierarchical Contrastive Learning

Towards holistic understanding of 3D scenes, a general 3D segmentation method is needed that can segment diverse objects without restrictions on object quantity or categories, while also reflecting the inherent hierarchical structure. To achieve this, we propose OmniSeg3D, an omniversal segmentation method aims for segmenting anything in 3D all at once. The key insight is to lift multi-view inconsistent 2D segmentations into a consistent 3D feature field through a hierarchical contrastive learning framework, which is accomplished by two steps. Firstly, we design a novel hierarchical representation based on category-agnostic 2D segmentations to model the multi-level relationship among pixels. Secondly, image features rendered from the 3D feature field are clustered at different levels, which can be further drawn closer or pushed apart according to the hierarchical relationship between different levels. In tackling the challenges posed by inconsistent 2D segmentations, this framework yields a global consistent 3D feature field, which further enables hierarchical segmentation, multi-object selection, and global discretization. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on high-quality 3D segmentation and accurate hierarchical structure understanding. A graphical user interface further facilitates flexible interaction for omniversal 3D segmentation.

PARF: Primitive-Aware Radiance Fusion for Indoor Scene Novel View Synthesis

This paper proposes a method for fast scene radiance field reconstruction with strong novel view synthesis performance and convenient scene editing functionality. The key idea is to fully utilize semantic parsing and primitive extraction for constraining and accelerating the radiance field reconstruction process. To fulfill this goal, a primitive-aware hybrid rendering strategy was proposed to enjoy the best of both volumetric and primitive rendering. We further contribute a reconstruction pipeline conducts primitive parsing and radiance field learning iteratively for each input frame which successfully fuses semantic, primitive, and radiance information into a single framework. Extensive evaluations demonstrate the fast reconstruction ability, high rendering quality, and convenient editing functionality of our method.

SVQNet: Sparse Voxel-Adjacent Query Network for 4D Spatio-Temporal LiDAR Semantic Segmentation

LiDAR-based semantic perception tasks are critical yet challenging for autonomous driving. Due to the motion of objects and static/dynamic occlusion, temporal information plays an essential role in reinforcing perception by enhancing and completing single-frame knowledge. Previous approaches either directly stack historical frames to the current frame or build a 4D spatio-temporal neighborhood using KNN, which duplicates computation and hinders realtime performance. Based on our observation that stacking all the historical points would damage performance due to a large amount of redundant and misleading information, we propose the Sparse Voxel-Adjacent Query Network (SVQNet) for 4D LiDAR semantic segmentation. To take full advantage of the historical frames high-efficiently, we shunt the historical points into two groups with reference to the current points. One is the Voxel-Adjacent Neighborhood carrying local enhancing knowledge. The other is the Historical Context completing the global knowledge. Then we propose new modules to select and extract the instructive features from the two groups. Our SVQNet achieves state-of-the-art performance in LiDAR semantic segmentation of the SemanticKITTI benchmark and the nuScenes dataset.

ClickSeg: 3D Instance Segmentation with Click-Level Weak Annotations

3D instance segmentation methods often require fully-annotated dense labels for training, which are costly to obtain. In this paper, we present ClickSeg, a novel click-level weakly supervised 3D instance segmentation method that requires one point per instance annotation merely. Such a problem is very challenging due to the extremely limited labels, which has rarely been solved before. We first develop a baseline weakly-supervised training method, which generates pseudo labels for unlabeled data by the model itself. To utilize the property of click-level annotation setting, we further propose a new training framework. Instead of directly using the model inference way, i.e., mean-shift clustering, to generate the pseudo labels, we propose to use k-means with fixed initial seeds: the annotated points. New similarity metrics are further designed for clustering. Experiments on ScanNetV2 and S3DIS datasets show that the proposed ClickSeg surpasses the previous best weakly supervised instance segmentation result by a large margin (e.g., +9.4% mAP on ScanNetV2). Using 0.02% supervision signals merely, ClickSeg achieves $\sim$90% of the accuracy of the fully-supervised counterpart. Meanwhile, it also achieves state-of-the-art semantic segmentation results among weakly supervised methods that use the same annotation settings.

EffLiFe: Efficient Light Field Generation via Hierarchical Sparse Gradient Descent

With the rise of Extended Reality (XR) technology, there is a growing need for real-time light field generation from sparse view inputs. Existing methods can be classified into offline techniques, which can generate high-quality novel views but at the cost of long inference/training time, and online methods, which either lack generalizability or produce unsatisfactory results. However, we have observed that the intrinsic sparse manifold of Multi-plane Images (MPI) enables a significant acceleration of light field generation while maintaining rendering quality. Based on this insight, we introduce EffLiFe, a novel light field optimization method, which leverages the proposed Hierarchical Sparse Gradient Descent (HSGD) to produce high-quality light fields from sparse view images in real time. Technically, the coarse MPI of a scene is first generated using a 3D CNN, and it is further sparsely optimized by focusing only on important MPI gradients in a few iterations. Nevertheless, relying solely on optimization can lead to artifacts at occlusion boundaries. Therefore, we propose an occlusion-aware iterative refinement module that removes visual artifacts in occluded regions by iteratively filtering the input. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves comparable visual quality while being 100x faster on average than state-of-the-art offline methods and delivering better performance (about 2 dB higher in PSNR) compared to other online approaches.

Crowd3D: Towards Hundreds of People Reconstruction from a Single Image

Image-based multi-person reconstruction in wide-field large scenes is critical for crowd analysis and security alert. However, existing methods cannot deal with large scenes containing hundreds of people, which encounter the challenges of large number of people, large variations in human scale, and complex spatial distribution. In this paper, we propose Crowd3D, the first framework to reconstruct the 3D poses, shapes and locations of hundreds of people with global consistency from a single large-scene image. The core of our approach is to convert the problem of complex crowd localization into pixel localization with the help of our newly defined concept, Human-scene Virtual Interaction Point (HVIP). To reconstruct the crowd with global consistency, we propose a progressive reconstruction network based on HVIP by pre-estimating a scene-level camera and a ground plane. To deal with a large number of persons and various human sizes, we also design an adaptive human-centric cropping scheme. Besides, we contribute a benchmark dataset, LargeCrowd, for crowd reconstruction in a large scene. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The code and datasets will be made public.

Geo-NI: Geometry-aware Neural Interpolation for Light Field Rendering

In this paper, we present a Geometry-aware Neural Interpolation (Geo-NI) framework for light field rendering. Previous learning-based approaches either rely on the capability of neural networks to perform direct interpolation, which we dubbed Neural Interpolation (NI), or explore scene geometry for novel view synthesis, also known as Depth Image-Based Rendering (DIBR). Instead, we incorporate the ideas behind these two kinds of approaches by launching the NI with a novel DIBR pipeline. Specifically, the proposed Geo-NI first performs NI using input light field sheared by a set of depth hypotheses. Then the DIBR is implemented by assigning the sheared light fields with a novel reconstruction cost volume according to the reconstruction quality under different depth hypotheses. The reconstruction cost is interpreted as a blending weight to render the final output light field by blending the reconstructed light fields along the dimension of depth hypothesis. By combining the superiorities of NI and DIBR, the proposed Geo-NI is able to render views with large disparity with the help of scene geometry while also reconstruct non-Lambertian effect when depth is prone to be ambiguous. Extensive experiments on various datasets demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed geometry-aware light field rendering framework.

A^2-FPN: Attention Aggregation based Feature Pyramid Network for Instance Segmentation

Learning pyramidal feature representations is crucial for recognizing object instances at different scales. Feature Pyramid Network (FPN) is the classic architecture to build a feature pyramid with high-level semantics throughout. However, intrinsic defects in feature extraction and fusion inhibit FPN from further aggregating more discriminative features. In this work, we propose Attention Aggregation based Feature Pyramid Network (A^2-FPN), to improve multi-scale feature learning through attention-guided feature aggregation. In feature extraction, it extracts discriminative features by collecting-distributing multi-level global context features, and mitigates the semantic information loss due to drastically reduced channels. In feature fusion, it aggregates complementary information from adjacent features to generate location-wise reassembly kernels for content-aware sampling, and employs channel-wise reweighting to enhance the semantic consistency before element-wise addition. A^2-FPN shows consistent gains on different instance segmentation frameworks. By replacing FPN with A^2-FPN in Mask R-CNN, our model boosts the performance by 2.1% and 1.6% mask AP when using ResNet-50 and ResNet-101 as backbone, respectively. Moreover, A^2-FPN achieves an improvement of 2.0% and 1.4% mask AP when integrated into the strong baselines such as Cascade Mask R-CNN and Hybrid Task Cascade.