NeuralFusion: Neural Volumetric Rendering under Human-object Interactions

4D modeling of human-object interactions is critical for numerous applications. However, efficient volumetric capture and rendering of complex interaction scenarios, especially from sparse inputs, remain challenging. In this paper, we propose NeuralFusion, a neural approach for volumetric human-object capture and rendering using sparse consumer RGBD sensors. It marries traditional non-rigid fusion with recent neural implicit modeling and blending advances, where the captured humans and objects are layerwise disentangled. For geometry modeling, we propose a neural implicit inference scheme with non-rigid key-volume fusion, as well as a template-aid robust object tracking pipeline. Our scheme enables detailed and complete geometry generation under complex interactions and occlusions. Moreover, we introduce a layer-wise human-object texture rendering scheme, which combines volumetric and image-based rendering in both spatial and temporal domains to obtain photo-realistic results. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach in synthesizing photo-realistic free-view results under complex human-object interactions.

Fourier PlenOctrees for Dynamic Radiance Field Rendering in Real-time

Implicit neural representations such as Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) have focused mainly on modeling static objects captured under multi-view settings where real-time rendering can be achieved with smart data structures, e.g., PlenOctree. In this paper, we present a novel Fourier PlenOctree (FPO) technique to tackle efficient neural modeling and real-time rendering of dynamic scenes captured under the free-view video (FVV) setting. The key idea in our FPO is a novel combination of generalized NeRF, PlenOctree representation, volumetric fusion and Fourier transform. To accelerate FPO construction, we present a novel coarse-to-fine fusion scheme that leverages the generalizable NeRF technique to generate the tree via spatial blending. To tackle dynamic scenes, we tailor the implicit network to model the Fourier coefficients of timevarying density and color attributes. Finally, we construct the FPO and train the Fourier coefficients directly on the leaves of a union PlenOctree structure of the dynamic sequence. We show that the resulting FPO enables compact memory overload to handle dynamic objects and supports efficient fine-tuning. Extensive experiments show that the proposed method is 3000 times faster than the original NeRF and achieves over an order of magnitude acceleration over SOTA while preserving high visual quality for the free-viewpoint rendering of unseen dynamic scenes.

iButter: Neural Interactive Bullet Time Generator for Human Free-viewpoint Rendering

Generating ``bullet-time'' effects of human free-viewpoint videos is critical for immersive visual effects and VR/AR experience. Recent neural advances still lack the controllable and interactive bullet-time design ability for human free-viewpoint rendering, especially under the real-time, dynamic and general setting for our trajectory-aware task. To fill this gap, in this paper we propose a neural interactive bullet-time generator (iButter) for photo-realistic human free-viewpoint rendering from dense RGB streams, which enables flexible and interactive design for human bullet-time visual effects. Our iButter approach consists of a real-time preview and design stage as well as a trajectory-aware refinement stage. During preview, we propose an interactive bullet-time design approach by extending the NeRF rendering to a real-time and dynamic setting and getting rid of the tedious per-scene training. To this end, our bullet-time design stage utilizes a hybrid training set, light-weight network design and an efficient silhouette-based sampling strategy. During refinement, we introduce an efficient trajectory-aware scheme within 20 minutes, which jointly encodes the spatial, temporal consistency and semantic cues along the designed trajectory, achieving photo-realistic bullet-time viewing experience of human activities. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach for convenient interactive bullet-time design and photo-realistic human free-viewpoint video generation.

Relightable Neural Video Portrait

Photo-realistic facial video portrait reenactment benefits virtual production and numerous VR/AR experiences. The task remains challenging as the portrait should maintain high realism and consistency with the target environment. In this paper, we present a relightable neural video portrait, a simultaneous relighting and reenactment scheme that transfers the head pose and facial expressions from a source actor to a portrait video of a target actor with arbitrary new backgrounds and lighting conditions. Our approach combines 4D reflectance field learning, model-based facial performance capture and target-aware neural rendering. Specifically, we adopt a rendering-to-video translation network to first synthesize high-quality OLAT imagesets and alpha mattes from hybrid facial performance capture results. We then design a semantic-aware facial normalization scheme to enable reliable explicit control as well as a multi-frame multi-task learning strategy to encode content, segmentation and temporal information simultaneously for high-quality reflectance field inference. After training, our approach further enables photo-realistic and controllable video portrait editing of the target performer. Reliable face poses and expression editing is obtained by applying the same hybrid facial capture and normalization scheme to the source video input, while our explicit alpha and OLAT output enable high-quality relit and background editing. With the ability to achieve simultaneous relighting and reenactment, we are able to improve the realism in a variety of virtual production and video rewrite applications.

Few-shot Neural Human Performance Rendering from Sparse RGBD Videos

Recent neural rendering approaches for human activities achieve remarkable view synthesis results, but still rely on dense input views or dense training with all the capture frames, leading to deployment difficulty and inefficient training overload. However, existing advances will be ill-posed if the input is both spatially and temporally sparse. To fill this gap, in this paper we propose a few-shot neural human rendering approach (FNHR) from only sparse RGBD inputs, which exploits the temporal and spatial redundancy to generate photo-realistic free-view output of human activities. Our FNHR is trained only on the key-frames which expand the motion manifold in the input sequences. We introduce a two-branch neural blending to combine the neural point render and classical graphics texturing pipeline, which integrates reliable observations over sparse key-frames. Furthermore, we adopt a patch-based adversarial training process to make use of the local redundancy and avoids over-fitting to the key-frames, which generates fine-detailed rendering results. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach to generate high-quality free view-point results for challenging human performances under the sparse setting.

PIANO: A Parametric Hand Bone Model from Magnetic Resonance Imaging

Hand modeling is critical for immersive VR/AR, action understanding, or human healthcare. Existing parametric models account only for hand shape, pose, or texture, without modeling the anatomical attributes like bone, which is essential for realistic hand biomechanics analysis. In this paper, we present PIANO, the first parametric bone model of human hands from MRI data. Our PIANO model is biologically correct, simple to animate, and differentiable, achieving more anatomically precise modeling of the inner hand kinematic structure in a data-driven manner than the traditional hand models based on the outer surface only. Furthermore, our PIANO model can be applied in neural network layers to enable training with a fine-grained semantic loss, which opens up the new task of data-driven fine-grained hand bone anatomic and semantic understanding from MRI or even RGB images. We make our model publicly available.

Editable Free-viewpoint Video Using a Layered Neural Representation

Generating free-viewpoint videos is critical for immersive VR/AR experience but recent neural advances still lack the editing ability to manipulate the visual perception for large dynamic scenes. To fill this gap, in this paper we propose the first approach for editable photo-realistic free-viewpoint video generation for large-scale dynamic scenes using only sparse 16 cameras. The core of our approach is a new layered neural representation, where each dynamic entity including the environment itself is formulated into a space-time coherent neural layered radiance representation called ST-NeRF. Such layered representation supports fully perception and realistic manipulation of the dynamic scene whilst still supporting a free viewing experience in a wide range. In our ST-NeRF, the dynamic entity/layer is represented as continuous functions, which achieves the disentanglement of location, deformation as well as the appearance of the dynamic entity in a continuous and self-supervised manner. We propose a scene parsing 4D label map tracking to disentangle the spatial information explicitly, and a continuous deform module to disentangle the temporal motion implicitly. An object-aware volume rendering scheme is further introduced for the re-assembling of all the neural layers. We adopt a novel layered loss and motion-aware ray sampling strategy to enable efficient training for a large dynamic scene with multiple performers, Our framework further enables a variety of editing functions, i.e., manipulating the scale and location, duplicating or retiming individual neural layers to create numerous visual effects while preserving high realism. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach to achieve high-quality, photo-realistic, and editable free-viewpoint video generation for dynamic scenes.

MirrorNeRF: One-shot Neural Portrait RadianceField from Multi-mirror Catadioptric Imaging

Photo-realistic neural reconstruction and rendering of the human portrait are critical for numerous VR/AR applications. Still, existing solutions inherently rely on multi-view capture settings, and the one-shot solution to get rid of the tedious multi-view synchronization and calibration remains extremely challenging. In this paper, we propose MirrorNeRF - a one-shot neural portrait free-viewpoint rendering approach using a catadioptric imaging system with multiple sphere mirrors and a single high-resolution digital camera, which is the first to combine neural radiance field with catadioptric imaging so as to enable one-shot photo-realistic human portrait reconstruction and rendering, in a low-cost and casual capture setting. More specifically, we propose a light-weight catadioptric system design with a sphere mirror array to enable diverse ray sampling in the continuous 3D space as well as an effective online calibration for the camera and the mirror array. Our catadioptric imaging system can be easily deployed with a low budget and the casual capture ability for convenient daily usages. We introduce a novel neural warping radiance field representation to learn a continuous displacement field that implicitly compensates for the misalignment due to our flexible system setting. We further propose a density regularization scheme to leverage the inherent geometry information from the catadioptric data in a self-supervision manner, which not only improves the training efficiency but also provides more effective density supervision for higher rendering quality. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our scheme to achieve one-shot photo-realistic and high-quality appearance free-viewpoint rendering for human portrait scenes.

Convolutional Neural Opacity Radiance Fields

Photo-realistic modeling and rendering of fuzzy objects with complex opacity are critical for numerous immersive VR/AR applications, but it suffers from strong view-dependent brightness, color. In this paper, we propose a novel scheme to generate opacity radiance fields with a convolutional neural renderer for fuzzy objects, which is the first to combine both explicit opacity supervision and convolutional mechanism into the neural radiance field framework so as to enable high-quality appearance and global consistent alpha mattes generation in arbitrary novel views. More specifically, we propose an efficient sampling strategy along with both the camera rays and image plane, which enables efficient radiance field sampling and learning in a patch-wise manner, as well as a novel volumetric feature integration scheme that generates per-patch hybrid feature embeddings to reconstruct the view-consistent fine-detailed appearance and opacity output. We further adopt a patch-wise adversarial training scheme to preserve both high-frequency appearance and opacity details in a self-supervised framework. We also introduce an effective multi-view image capture system to capture high-quality color and alpha maps for challenging fuzzy objects. Extensive experiments on existing and our new challenging fuzzy object dataset demonstrate that our method achieves photo-realistic, globally consistent, and fined detailed appearance and opacity free-viewpoint rendering for various fuzzy objects.