MLICv2: Enhanced Multi-Reference Entropy Modeling for Learned Image Compression

Recent advancements in learned image compression (LIC) have yielded impressive performance gains. Notably, the learned image compression models with multi-reference entropy models (MLIC series) have significantly outperformed existing traditional image codecs such as the Versatile Video Coding (VVC) Intra. In this paper, we present MLICv2 and MLICv2$^+$, enhanced versions of the MLIC series, featuring improved transform techniques, entropy modeling, and instance adaptability. For better transform, we introduce a simple token mixing transform block inspired by the meta transformer architecture, addressing the performance degradation at high bit-rates observed in previous MLIC series while maintaining computational efficiency. To enhance entropy modeling, we propose a hyperprior-guided global correlation prediction, enabling the capture of global contexts in the initial slice of the latent representation. We also develop a channel reweighting module to dynamically prioritize important channels within each context. Additionally, advanced positional embedding for context modeling and selective compression with guided optimization are investigated. To boost instance adaptability, we employ stochastic Gumbel annealing to iteratively refine the latent representation according to the rate-distortion optimization of a specific input image. This approach further enhances performance without impacting decoding speed. Experimental results demonstrate that our MLICv2 and MLICv2$^+$ achieve state-of-the-art performance, reducing Bjontegaard-Delta rate (BD-rate) by 16.54%, 21.61%, 16.05% and 20.46%, 24.35%, 19.14% respectively, compared to VTM-17.0 Intra on the Kodak, Tecnick, CLIC Pro Val dataset, respectively.

L-LBVC: Long-Term Motion Estimation and Prediction for Learned Bi-Directional Video Compression

Recently, learned video compression (LVC) has shown superior performance under low-delay configuration. However, the performance of learned bi-directional video compression (LBVC) still lags behind traditional bi-directional coding. The performance gap mainly arises from inaccurate long-term motion estimation and prediction of distant frames, especially in large motion scenes. To solve these two critical problems, this paper proposes a novel LBVC framework, namely L-LBVC. Firstly, we propose an adaptive motion estimation module that can handle both short-term and long-term motions. Specifically, we directly estimate the optical flows for adjacent frames and non-adjacent frames with small motions. For non-adjacent frames with large motions, we recursively accumulate local flows between adjacent frames to estimate long-term flows. Secondly, we propose an adaptive motion prediction module that can largely reduce the bit cost for motion coding. To improve the accuracy of long-term motion prediction, we adaptively downsample reference frames during testing to match the motion ranges observed during training. Experiments show that our L-LBVC significantly outperforms previous state-of-the-art LVC methods and even surpasses VVC (VTM) on some test datasets under random access configuration.

Enhancing 3D Gaussian Splatting Compression via Spatial Condition-based Prediction

Recently, 3D Gaussian Spatting (3DGS) has gained widespread attention in Novel View Synthesis (NVS) due to the remarkable real-time rendering performance. However, the substantial cost of storage and transmission of vanilla 3DGS hinders its further application (hundreds of megabytes or even gigabytes for a single scene). Motivated by the achievements of prediction in video compression, we introduce the prediction technique into the anchor-based Gaussian representation to effectively reduce the bit rate. Specifically, we propose a spatial condition-based prediction module to utilize the grid-captured scene information for prediction, with a residual compensation strategy designed to learn the missing fine-grained information. Besides, to further compress the residual, we propose an instance-aware hyper prior, developing a structure-aware and instance-aware entropy model. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our prediction-based compression framework and each technical component. Even compared with SOTA compression method, our framework still achieves a bit rate savings of 24.42 percent. Code is to be released!

Swift4D:Adaptive divide-and-conquer Gaussian Splatting for compact and efficient reconstruction of dynamic scene

Novel view synthesis has long been a practical but challenging task, although the introduction of numerous methods to solve this problem, even combining advanced representations like 3D Gaussian Splatting, they still struggle to recover high-quality results and often consume too much storage memory and training time. In this paper we propose Swift4D, a divide-and-conquer 3D Gaussian Splatting method that can handle static and dynamic primitives separately, achieving a good trade-off between rendering quality and efficiency, motivated by the fact that most of the scene is the static primitive and does not require additional dynamic properties. Concretely, we focus on modeling dynamic transformations only for the dynamic primitives which benefits both efficiency and quality. We first employ a learnable decomposition strategy to separate the primitives, which relies on an additional parameter to classify primitives as static or dynamic. For the dynamic primitives, we employ a compact multi-resolution 4D Hash mapper to transform these primitives from canonical space into deformation space at each timestamp, and then mix the static and dynamic primitives to produce the final output. This divide-and-conquer method facilitates efficient training and reduces storage redundancy. Our method not only achieves state-of-the-art rendering quality while being 20X faster in training than previous SOTA methods with a minimum storage requirement of only 30MB on real-world datasets. Code is available at https://github.com/WuJH2001/swift4d.

CL-MVSNet: Unsupervised Multi-view Stereo with Dual-level Contrastive Learning

Unsupervised Multi-View Stereo (MVS) methods have achieved promising progress recently. However, previous methods primarily depend on the photometric consistency assumption, which may suffer from two limitations: indistinguishable regions and view-dependent effects, e.g., low-textured areas and reflections. To address these issues, in this paper, we propose a new dual-level contrastive learning approach, named CL-MVSNet. Specifically, our model integrates two contrastive branches into an unsupervised MVS framework to construct additional supervisory signals. On the one hand, we present an image-level contrastive branch to guide the model to acquire more context awareness, thus leading to more complete depth estimation in indistinguishable regions. On the other hand, we exploit a scene-level contrastive branch to boost the representation ability, improving robustness to view-dependent effects. Moreover, to recover more accurate 3D geometry, we introduce an L0.5 photometric consistency loss, which encourages the model to focus more on accurate points while mitigating the gradient penalty of undesirable ones. Extensive experiments on DTU and Tanks&Temples benchmarks demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance among all end-to-end unsupervised MVS frameworks and outperforms its supervised counterpart by a considerable margin without fine-tuning.

MVD-HuGaS: Human Gaussians from a Single Image via 3D Human Multi-view Diffusion Prior

3D human reconstruction from a single image is a challenging problem and has been exclusively studied in the literature. Recently, some methods have resorted to diffusion models for guidance, optimizing a 3D representation via Score Distillation Sampling(SDS) or generating one back-view image for facilitating reconstruction. However, these methods tend to produce unsatisfactory artifacts (\textit{e.g.} flattened human structure or over-smoothing results caused by inconsistent priors from multiple views) and struggle with real-world generalization in the wild. In this work, we present \emph{MVD-HuGaS}, enabling free-view 3D human rendering from a single image via a multi-view human diffusion model. We first generate multi-view images from the single reference image with an enhanced multi-view diffusion model, which is well fine-tuned on high-quality 3D human datasets to incorporate 3D geometry priors and human structure priors. To infer accurate camera poses from the sparse generated multi-view images for reconstruction, an alignment module is introduced to facilitate joint optimization of 3D Gaussians and camera poses. Furthermore, we propose a depth-based Facial Distortion Mitigation module to refine the generated facial regions, thereby improving the overall fidelity of the reconstruction.Finally, leveraging the refined multi-view images, along with their accurate camera poses, MVD-HuGaS optimizes the 3D Gaussians of the target human for high-fidelity free-view renderings. Extensive experiments on Thuman2.0 and 2K2K datasets show that the proposed MVD-HuGaS achieves state-of-the-art performance on single-view 3D human rendering.

SecureGS: Boosting the Security and Fidelity of 3D Gaussian Splatting Steganography

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has emerged as a premier method for 3D representation due to its real-time rendering and high-quality outputs, underscoring the critical need to protect the privacy of 3D assets. Traditional NeRF steganography methods fail to address the explicit nature of 3DGS since its point cloud files are publicly accessible. Existing GS steganography solutions mitigate some issues but still struggle with reduced rendering fidelity, increased computational demands, and security flaws, especially in the security of the geometric structure of the visualized point cloud. To address these demands, we propose a SecureGS, a secure and efficient 3DGS steganography framework inspired by Scaffold-GS's anchor point design and neural decoding. SecureGS uses a hybrid decoupled Gaussian encryption mechanism to embed offsets, scales, rotations, and RGB attributes of the hidden 3D Gaussian points in anchor point features, retrievable only by authorized users through privacy-preserving neural networks. To further enhance security, we propose a density region-aware anchor growing and pruning strategy that adaptively locates optimal hiding regions without exposing hidden information. Extensive experiments show that SecureGS significantly surpasses existing GS steganography methods in rendering fidelity, speed, and security.

Surface-SOS: Self-Supervised Object Segmentation via Neural Surface Representation

Self-supervised Object Segmentation (SOS) aims to segment objects without any annotations. Under conditions of multi-camera inputs, the structural, textural and geometrical consistency among each view can be leveraged to achieve fine-grained object segmentation. To make better use of the above information, we propose Surface representation based Self-supervised Object Segmentation (Surface-SOS), a new framework to segment objects for each view by 3D surface representation from multi-view images of a scene. To model high-quality geometry surfaces for complex scenes, we design a novel scene representation scheme, which decomposes the scene into two complementary neural representation modules respectively with a Signed Distance Function (SDF). Moreover, Surface-SOS is able to refine single-view segmentation with multi-view unlabeled images, by introducing coarse segmentation masks as additional input. To the best of our knowledge, Surface-SOS is the first self-supervised approach that leverages neural surface representation to break the dependence on large amounts of annotated data and strong constraints. These constraints typically involve observing target objects against a static background or relying on temporal supervision in videos. Extensive experiments on standard benchmarks including LLFF, CO3D, BlendedMVS, TUM and several real-world scenes show that Surface-SOS always yields finer object masks than its NeRF-based counterparts and surpasses supervised single-view baselines remarkably. Code is available at: https://github.com/zhengxyun/Surface-SOS.

4D Gaussian Splatting with Scale-aware Residual Field and Adaptive Optimization for Real-time Rendering of Temporally Complex Dynamic Scenes

Reconstructing dynamic scenes from video sequences is a highly promising task in the multimedia domain. While previous methods have made progress, they often struggle with slow rendering and managing temporal complexities such as significant motion and object appearance/disappearance. In this paper, we propose SaRO-GS as a novel dynamic scene representation capable of achieving real-time rendering while effectively handling temporal complexities in dynamic scenes. To address the issue of slow rendering speed, we adopt a Gaussian primitive-based representation and optimize the Gaussians in 4D space, which facilitates real-time rendering with the assistance of 3D Gaussian Splatting. Additionally, to handle temporally complex dynamic scenes, we introduce a Scale-aware Residual Field. This field considers the size information of each Gaussian primitive while encoding its residual feature and aligns with the self-splitting behavior of Gaussian primitives. Furthermore, we propose an Adaptive Optimization Schedule, which assigns different optimization strategies to Gaussian primitives based on their distinct temporal properties, thereby expediting the reconstruction of dynamic regions. Through evaluations on monocular and multi-view datasets, our method has demonstrated state-of-the-art performance. Please see our project page at https://yjb6.github.io/SaRO-GS.github.io.

Lightweight Multiplane Images Network for Real-Time Stereoscopic Conversion from Planar Video

With the rapid development of stereoscopic display technologies, especially glasses-free 3D screens, and virtual reality devices, stereoscopic conversion has become an important task to address the lack of high-quality stereoscopic image and video resources. Current stereoscopic conversion algorithms typically struggle to balance reconstruction performance and inference efficiency. This paper proposes a planar video real-time stereoscopic conversion network based on multi-plane images (MPI), which consists of a detail branch for generating MPI and a depth-semantic branch for perceiving depth information. Unlike models that depend on explicit depth map inputs, the proposed method employs a lightweight depth-semantic branch to extract depth-aware features implicitly. To optimize the lightweight branch, a heavy training but light inference strategy is adopted, which involves designing a coarse-to-fine auxiliary branch that is only used during the training stage. In addition, the proposed method simplifies the MPI rendering process for stereoscopic conversion scenarios to further accelerate the inference. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can achieve comparable performance to some state-of-the-art (SOTA) models and support real-time inference at 2K resolution. Compared to the SOTA TMPI algorithm, the proposed method obtains similar subjective quality while achieving over $40\times$ inference acceleration.