Self-supervised Neural Articulated Shape and Appearance Models

Learning geometry, motion, and appearance priors of object classes is important for the solution of a large variety of computer vision problems. While the majority of approaches has focused on static objects, dynamic objects, especially with controllable articulation, are less explored. We propose a novel approach for learning a representation of the geometry, appearance, and motion of a class of articulated objects given only a set of color images as input. In a self-supervised manner, our novel representation learns shape, appearance, and articulation codes that enable independent control of these semantic dimensions. Our model is trained end-to-end without requiring any articulation annotations. Experiments show that our approach performs well for different joint types, such as revolute and prismatic joints, as well as different combinations of these joints. Compared to state of the art that uses direct 3D supervision and does not output appearance, we recover more faithful geometry and appearance from 2D observations only. In addition, our representation enables a large variety of applications, such as few-shot reconstruction, the generation of novel articulations, and novel view-synthesis.

Neural 3D Video Synthesis

We propose a novel approach for 3D video synthesis that is able to represent multi-view video recordings of a dynamic real-world scene in a compact, yet expressive representation that enables high-quality view synthesis and motion interpolation. Our approach takes the high quality and compactness of static neural radiance fields in a new direction: to a model-free, dynamic setting. At the core of our approach is a novel time-conditioned neural radiance fields that represents scene dynamics using a set of compact latent codes. To exploit the fact that changes between adjacent frames of a video are typically small and locally consistent, we propose two novel strategies for efficient training of our neural network: 1) An efficient hierarchical training scheme, and 2) an importance sampling strategy that selects the next rays for training based on the temporal variation of the input videos. In combination, these two strategies significantly boost the training speed, lead to fast convergence of the training process, and enable high quality results. Our learned representation is highly compact and able to represent a 10 second 30 FPS multi-view video recording by 18 cameras with a model size of just 28MB. We demonstrate that our method can render high-fidelity wide-angle novel views at over 1K resolution, even for highly complex and dynamic scenes. We perform an extensive qualitative and quantitative evaluation that shows that our approach outperforms the current state of the art. We include additional video and information at: https://neural-3d-video.github.io/