Abstract:We present a technique and benchmark dataset for estimating the relative 3D orientation between a pair of Internet images captured in an extreme setting, where the images have limited or non-overlapping field of views. Prior work targeting extreme rotation estimation assume constrained 3D environments and emulate perspective images by cropping regions from panoramic views. However, real images captured in the wild are highly diverse, exhibiting variation in both appearance and camera intrinsics. In this work, we propose a Transformer-based method for estimating relative rotations in extreme real-world settings, and contribute the ExtremeLandmarkPairs dataset, assembled from scene-level Internet photo collections. Our evaluation demonstrates that our approach succeeds in estimating the relative rotations in a wide variety of extreme-view Internet image pairs, outperforming various baselines, including dedicated rotation estimation techniques and contemporary 3D reconstruction methods.
Abstract:Scene-level novel view synthesis (NVS) is fundamental to many vision and graphics applications. Recently, pose-conditioned diffusion models have led to significant progress by extracting 3D information from 2D foundation models, but these methods are limited by the lack of scene-level training data. Common dataset choices either consist of isolated objects (Objaverse), or of object-centric scenes with limited pose distributions (DTU, CO3D). In this paper, we create a large-scale scene-level dataset from Internet photo collections, called MegaScenes, which contains over 100K structure from motion (SfM) reconstructions from around the world. Internet photos represent a scalable data source but come with challenges such as lighting and transient objects. We address these issues to further create a subset suitable for the task of NVS. Additionally, we analyze failure cases of state-of-the-art NVS methods and significantly improve generation consistency. Through extensive experiments, we validate the effectiveness of both our dataset and method on generating in-the-wild scenes. For details on the dataset and code, see our project page at https://megascenes.github.io .
Abstract:We consider the visual disambiguation task of determining whether a pair of visually similar images depict the same or distinct 3D surfaces (e.g., the same or opposite sides of a symmetric building). Illusory image matches, where two images observe distinct but visually similar 3D surfaces, can be challenging for humans to differentiate, and can also lead 3D reconstruction algorithms to produce erroneous results. We propose a learning-based approach to visual disambiguation, formulating it as a binary classification task on image pairs. To that end, we introduce a new dataset for this problem, Doppelgangers, which includes image pairs of similar structures with ground truth labels. We also design a network architecture that takes the spatial distribution of local keypoints and matches as input, allowing for better reasoning about both local and global cues. Our evaluation shows that our method can distinguish illusory matches in difficult cases, and can be integrated into SfM pipelines to produce correct, disambiguated 3D reconstructions. See our project page for our code, datasets, and more results: http://doppelgangers-3d.github.io/.
Abstract:In this work, we aim to reconstruct a time-varying 3D model, capable of rendering photo-realistic renderings with independent control of viewpoint, illumination, and time, from Internet photos of large-scale landmarks. The core challenges are twofold. First, different types of temporal changes, such as illumination and changes to the underlying scene itself (such as replacing one graffiti artwork with another) are entangled together in the imagery. Second, scene-level temporal changes are often discrete and sporadic over time, rather than continuous. To tackle these problems, we propose a new scene representation equipped with a novel temporal step function encoding method that can model discrete scene-level content changes as piece-wise constant functions over time. Specifically, we represent the scene as a space-time radiance field with a per-image illumination embedding, where temporally-varying scene changes are encoded using a set of learned step functions. To facilitate our task of chronology reconstruction from Internet imagery, we also collect a new dataset of four scenes that exhibit various changes over time. We demonstrate that our method exhibits state-of-the-art view synthesis results on this dataset, while achieving independent control of viewpoint, time, and illumination.
Abstract:We present a new test-time optimization method for estimating dense and long-range motion from a video sequence. Prior optical flow or particle video tracking algorithms typically operate within limited temporal windows, struggling to track through occlusions and maintain global consistency of estimated motion trajectories. We propose a complete and globally consistent motion representation, dubbed OmniMotion, that allows for accurate, full-length motion estimation of every pixel in a video. OmniMotion represents a video using a quasi-3D canonical volume and performs pixel-wise tracking via bijections between local and canonical space. This representation allows us to ensure global consistency, track through occlusions, and model any combination of camera and object motion. Extensive evaluations on the TAP-Vid benchmark and real-world footage show that our approach outperforms prior state-of-the-art methods by a large margin both quantitatively and qualitatively. See our project page for more results: http://omnimotion.github.io/
Abstract:We present a technique for estimating the relative 3D rotation of an RGB image pair in an extreme setting, where the images have little or no overlap. We observe that, even when images do not overlap, there may be rich hidden cues as to their geometric relationship, such as light source directions, vanishing points, and symmetries present in the scene. We propose a network design that can automatically learn such implicit cues by comparing all pairs of points between the two input images. Our method therefore constructs dense feature correlation volumes and processes these to predict relative 3D rotations. Our predictions are formed over a fine-grained discretization of rotations, bypassing difficulties associated with regressing 3D rotations. We demonstrate our approach on a large variety of extreme RGB image pairs, including indoor and outdoor images captured under different lighting conditions and geographic locations. Our evaluation shows that our model can successfully estimate relative rotations among non-overlapping images without compromising performance over overlapping image pairs.
Abstract:Reusing features in deep networks through dense connectivity is an effective way to achieve high computational efficiency. The recent proposed CondenseNet has shown that this mechanism can be further improved if redundant features are removed. In this paper, we propose an alternative approach named sparse feature reactivation (SFR), aiming at actively increasing the utility of features for reusing. In the proposed network, named CondenseNetV2, each layer can simultaneously learn to 1) selectively reuse a set of most important features from preceding layers; and 2) actively update a set of preceding features to increase their utility for later layers. Our experiments show that the proposed models achieve promising performance on image classification (ImageNet and CIFAR) and object detection (MS COCO) in terms of both theoretical efficiency and practical speed.
Abstract:In this work, we propose a novel technique to generate shapes from point cloud data. A point cloud can be viewed as samples from a distribution of 3D points whose density is concentrated near the surface of the shape. Point cloud generation thus amounts to moving randomly sampled points to high-density areas. We generate point clouds by performing stochastic gradient ascent on an unnormalized probability density, thereby moving sampled points toward the high-likelihood regions. Our model directly predicts the gradient of the log density field and can be trained with a simple objective adapted from score-based generative models. We show that our method can reach state-of-the-art performance for point cloud auto-encoding and generation, while also allowing for extraction of a high-quality implicit surface. Code is available at https://github.com/RuojinCai/ShapeGF.