Neural Mesh-Based Graphics

We revisit NPBG, the popular approach to novel view synthesis that introduced the ubiquitous point feature neural rendering paradigm. We are interested in particular in data-efficient learning with fast view synthesis. We achieve this through a view-dependent mesh-based denser point descriptor rasterization, in addition to a foreground/background scene rendering split, and an improved loss. By training solely on a single scene, we outperform NPBG, which has been trained on ScanNet and then scene finetuned. We also perform competitively with respect to the state-of-the-art method SVS, which has been trained on the full dataset (DTU and Tanks and Temples) and then scene finetuned, in spite of their deeper neural renderer.

Monocular Human Shape and Pose with Dense Mesh-borne Local Image Features

We propose to improve on graph convolution based approaches for human shape and pose estimation from monocular input, using pixel-aligned local image features. Given a single input color image, existing graph convolutional network (GCN) based techniques for human shape and pose estimation use a single convolutional neural network (CNN) generated global image feature appended to all mesh vertices equally to initialize the GCN stage, which transforms a template T-posed mesh into the target pose. In contrast, we propose for the first time the idea of using local image features per vertex. These features are sampled from the CNN image feature maps by utilizing pixel-to-mesh correspondences generated with DensePose. Our quantitative and qualitative results on standard benchmarks show that using local features improves on global ones and leads to competitive performances with respect to the state-of-the-art.