Virtual Occlusions Through Implicit Depth

For augmented reality (AR), it is important that virtual assets appear to `sit among' real world objects. The virtual element should variously occlude and be occluded by real matter, based on a plausible depth ordering. This occlusion should be consistent over time as the viewer's camera moves. Unfortunately, small mistakes in the estimated scene depth can ruin the downstream occlusion mask, and thereby the AR illusion. Especially in real-time settings, depths inferred near boundaries or across time can be inconsistent. In this paper, we challenge the need for depth-regression as an intermediate step. We instead propose an implicit model for depth and use that to predict the occlusion mask directly. The inputs to our network are one or more color images, plus the known depths of any virtual geometry. We show how our occlusion predictions are more accurate and more temporally stable than predictions derived from traditional depth-estimation models. We obtain state-of-the-art occlusion results on the challenging ScanNetv2 dataset and superior qualitative results on real scenes.

Removing Objects From Neural Radiance Fields

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) are emerging as a ubiquitous scene representation that allows for novel view synthesis. Increasingly, NeRFs will be shareable with other people. Before sharing a NeRF, though, it might be desirable to remove personal information or unsightly objects. Such removal is not easily achieved with the current NeRF editing frameworks. We propose a framework to remove objects from a NeRF representation created from an RGB-D sequence. Our NeRF inpainting method leverages recent work in 2D image inpainting and is guided by a user-provided mask. Our algorithm is underpinned by a confidence based view selection procedure. It chooses which of the individual 2D inpainted images to use in the creation of the NeRF, so that the resulting inpainted NeRF is 3D consistent. We show that our method for NeRF editing is effective for synthesizing plausible inpaintings in a multi-view coherent manner. We validate our approach using a new and still-challenging dataset for the task of NeRF inpainting.

Map-free Visual Relocalization: Metric Pose Relative to a Single Image

Can we relocalize in a scene represented by a single reference image? Standard visual relocalization requires hundreds of images and scale calibration to build a scene-specific 3D map. In contrast, we propose Map-free Relocalization, i.e., using only one photo of a scene to enable instant, metric scaled relocalization. Existing datasets are not suitable to benchmark map-free relocalization, due to their focus on large scenes or their limited variability. Thus, we have constructed a new dataset of 655 small places of interest, such as sculptures, murals and fountains, collected worldwide. Each place comes with a reference image to serve as a relocalization anchor, and dozens of query images with known, metric camera poses. The dataset features changing conditions, stark viewpoint changes, high variability across places, and queries with low to no visual overlap with the reference image. We identify two viable families of existing methods to provide baseline results: relative pose regression, and feature matching combined with single-image depth prediction. While these methods show reasonable performance on some favorable scenes in our dataset, map-free relocalization proves to be a challenge that requires new, innovative solutions.

Learning Structured Gaussians to Approximate Deep Ensembles

This paper proposes using a sparse-structured multivariate Gaussian to provide a closed-form approximator for the output of probabilistic ensemble models used for dense image prediction tasks. This is achieved through a convolutional neural network that predicts the mean and covariance of the distribution, where the inverse covariance is parameterised by a sparsely structured Cholesky matrix. Similarly to distillation approaches, our single network is trained to maximise the probability of samples from pre-trained probabilistic models, in this work we use a fixed ensemble of networks. Once trained, our compact representation can be used to efficiently draw spatially correlated samples from the approximated output distribution. Importantly, this approach captures the uncertainty and structured correlations in the predictions explicitly in a formal distribution, rather than implicitly through sampling alone. This allows direct introspection of the model, enabling visualisation of the learned structure. Moreover, this formulation provides two further benefits: estimation of a sample probability, and the introduction of arbitrary spatial conditioning at test time. We demonstrate the merits of our approach on monocular depth estimation and show that the advantages of our approach are obtained with comparable quantitative performance.

The GAN that Warped: Semantic Attribute Editing with Unpaired Data

Deep neural networks have recently been used to edit images with great success. However, they are often limited by only being able to work at a restricted range of resolutions. They are also so flexible that semantic face edits can often result in an unwanted loss of identity. This work proposes a model that learns how to perform semantic image edits through the application of smooth warp fields. This warp field can be efficiently predicted at a reasonably low resolution and then resampled and applied at arbitrary resolutions. Previous approaches that attempted to use warping for semantic edits required paired data, that is example images of the same object with different semantic characteristics. In contrast, we employ recent advances in Generative Adversarial Networks that allow our model to be effectively trained with unpaired data. We demonstrate the efficacy of our method for editing face images at very high resolutions (4k images) with an efficient single forward pass of a deep network at a lower resolution. We illustrate how the extent of our edits can be trivially reduced or exaggerated by scaling the predicted warp field, and we also show that our edits are substantially better at maintaining the subject's identity.

Training VAEs Under Structured Residuals

Variational auto-encoders (VAEs) are a popular and powerful deep generative model. Previous works on VAEs have assumed a factorized likelihood model, whereby the output uncertainty of each pixel is assumed to be independent. This approximation is clearly limited as demonstrated by observing a residual image from a VAE reconstruction, which often possess a high level of structure. This paper demonstrates a novel scheme to incorporate a structured Gaussian likelihood prediction network within the VAE that allows the residual correlations to be modeled. Our novel architecture, with minimal increase in complexity, incorporates the covariance matrix prediction within the VAE. We also propose a new mechanism for allowing structured uncertainty on color images. Furthermore, we provide a scheme for effectively training this model, and include some suggestions for improving performance in terms of efficiency or modeling longer range correlations.

Structured Uncertainty Prediction Networks

This paper is the first work to propose a network to predict a structured uncertainty distribution for a synthesized image. Previous approaches have been mostly limited to predicting diagonal covariance matrices. Our novel model learns to predict a full Gaussian covariance matrix for each reconstruction, which permits efficient sampling and likelihood evaluation. We demonstrate that our model can accurately reconstruct ground truth correlated residual distributions for synthetic datasets and generate plausible high frequency samples for real face images. We also illustrate the use of these predicted covariances for structure preserving image denoising.

Lifting Object Detection Datasets into 3D

While data has certainly taken the center stage in computer vision in recent years, it can still be difficult to obtain in certain scenarios. In particular, acquiring ground truth 3D shapes of objects pictured in 2D images remains a challenging feat and this has hampered progress in recognition-based object reconstruction from a single image. Here we propose to bypass previous solutions such as 3D scanning or manual design, that scale poorly, and instead populate object category detection datasets semi-automatically with dense, per-object 3D reconstructions, bootstrapped from:(i) class labels, (ii) ground truth figure-ground segmentations and (iii) a small set of keypoint annotations. Our proposed algorithm first estimates camera viewpoint using rigid structure-from-motion and then reconstructs object shapes by optimizing over visual hull proposals guided by loose within-class shape similarity assumptions. The visual hull sampling process attempts to intersect an object's projection cone with the cones of minimal subsets of other similar objects among those pictured from certain vantage points. We show that our method is able to produce convincing per-object 3D reconstructions and to accurately estimate cameras viewpoints on one of the most challenging existing object-category detection datasets, PASCAL VOC. We hope that our results will re-stimulate interest on joint object recognition and 3D reconstruction from a single image.