ACORN: Adaptive Coordinate Networks for Neural Scene Representation

Neural representations have emerged as a new paradigm for applications in rendering, imaging, geometric modeling, and simulation. Compared to traditional representations such as meshes, point clouds, or volumes they can be flexibly incorporated into differentiable learning-based pipelines. While recent improvements to neural representations now make it possible to represent signals with fine details at moderate resolutions (e.g., for images and 3D shapes), adequately representing large-scale or complex scenes has proven a challenge. Current neural representations fail to accurately represent images at resolutions greater than a megapixel or 3D scenes with more than a few hundred thousand polygons. Here, we introduce a new hybrid implicit-explicit network architecture and training strategy that adaptively allocates resources during training and inference based on the local complexity of a signal of interest. Our approach uses a multiscale block-coordinate decomposition, similar to a quadtree or octree, that is optimized during training. The network architecture operates in two stages: using the bulk of the network parameters, a coordinate encoder generates a feature grid in a single forward pass. Then, hundreds or thousands of samples within each block can be efficiently evaluated using a lightweight feature decoder. With this hybrid implicit-explicit network architecture, we demonstrate the first experiments that fit gigapixel images to nearly 40 dB peak signal-to-noise ratio. Notably this represents an increase in scale of over 1000x compared to the resolution of previously demonstrated image-fitting experiments. Moreover, our approach is able to represent 3D shapes significantly faster and better than previous techniques; it reduces training times from days to hours or minutes and memory requirements by over an order of magnitude.

pi-GAN: Periodic Implicit Generative Adversarial Networks for 3D-Aware Image Synthesis

We have witnessed rapid progress on 3D-aware image synthesis, leveraging recent advances in generative visual models and neural rendering. Existing approaches however fall short in two ways: first, they may lack an underlying 3D representation or rely on view-inconsistent rendering, hence synthesizing images that are not multi-view consistent; second, they often depend upon representation network architectures that are not expressive enough, and their results thus lack in image quality. We propose a novel generative model, named Periodic Implicit Generative Adversarial Networks ($\pi$-GAN or pi-GAN), for high-quality 3D-aware image synthesis. $\pi$-GAN leverages neural representations with periodic activation functions and volumetric rendering to represent scenes as view-consistent 3D representations with fine detail. The proposed approach obtains state-of-the-art results for 3D-aware image synthesis with multiple real and synthetic datasets.