Generative Image Dynamics

We present an approach to modeling an image-space prior on scene dynamics. Our prior is learned from a collection of motion trajectories extracted from real video sequences containing natural, oscillating motion such as trees, flowers, candles, and clothes blowing in the wind. Given a single image, our trained model uses a frequency-coordinated diffusion sampling process to predict a per-pixel long-term motion representation in the Fourier domain, which we call a neural stochastic motion texture. This representation can be converted into dense motion trajectories that span an entire video. Along with an image-based rendering module, these trajectories can be used for a number of downstream applications, such as turning still images into seamlessly looping dynamic videos, or allowing users to realistically interact with objects in real pictures.

Tracking Everything Everywhere All at Once

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/

Persistent Nature: A Generative Model of Unbounded 3D Worlds

Despite increasingly realistic image quality, recent 3D image generative models often operate on 3D volumes of fixed extent with limited camera motions. We investigate the task of unconditionally synthesizing unbounded nature scenes, enabling arbitrarily large camera motion while maintaining a persistent 3D world model. Our scene representation consists of an extendable, planar scene layout grid, which can be rendered from arbitrary camera poses via a 3D decoder and volume rendering, and a panoramic skydome. Based on this representation, we learn a generative world model solely from single-view internet photos. Our method enables simulating long flights through 3D landscapes, while maintaining global scene consistency--for instance, returning to the starting point yields the same view of the scene. Our approach enables scene extrapolation beyond the fixed bounds of current 3D generative models, while also supporting a persistent, camera-independent world representation that stands in contrast to auto-regressive 3D prediction models. Our project page: https://chail.github.io/persistent-nature/.

DynIBaR: Neural Dynamic Image-Based Rendering

We address the problem of synthesizing novel views from a monocular video depicting a complex dynamic scene. State-of-the-art methods based on temporally varying Neural Radiance Fields (aka dynamic NeRFs) have shown impressive results on this task. However, for long videos with complex object motions and uncontrolled camera trajectories, these methods can produce blurry or inaccurate renderings, hampering their use in real-world applications. Instead of encoding the entire dynamic scene within the weights of an MLP, we present a new approach that addresses these limitations by adopting a volumetric image-based rendering framework that synthesizes new viewpoints by aggregating features from nearby views in a scene-motion-aware manner. Our system retains the advantages of prior methods in its ability to model complex scenes and view-dependent effects, but also enables synthesizing photo-realistic novel views from long videos featuring complex scene dynamics with unconstrained camera trajectories. We demonstrate significant improvements over state-of-the-art methods on dynamic scene datasets, and also apply our approach to in-the-wild videos with challenging camera and object motion, where prior methods fail to produce high-quality renderings. Our project webpage is at dynibar.github.io.

InfiniteNature-Zero: Learning Perpetual View Generation of Natural Scenes from Single Images

We present a method for learning to generate unbounded flythrough videos of natural scenes starting from a single view, where this capability is learned from a collection of single photographs, without requiring camera poses or even multiple views of each scene. To achieve this, we propose a novel self-supervised view generation training paradigm, where we sample and rendering virtual camera trajectories, including cyclic ones, allowing our model to learn stable view generation from a collection of single views. At test time, despite never seeing a video during training, our approach can take a single image and generate long camera trajectories comprised of hundreds of new views with realistic and diverse content. We compare our approach with recent state-of-the-art supervised view generation methods that require posed multi-view videos and demonstrate superior performance and synthesis quality.

Neural 3D Reconstruction in the Wild

We are witnessing an explosion of neural implicit representations in computer vision and graphics. Their applicability has recently expanded beyond tasks such as shape generation and image-based rendering to the fundamental problem of image-based 3D reconstruction. However, existing methods typically assume constrained 3D environments with constant illumination captured by a small set of roughly uniformly distributed cameras. We introduce a new method that enables efficient and accurate surface reconstruction from Internet photo collections in the presence of varying illumination. To achieve this, we propose a hybrid voxel- and surface-guided sampling technique that allows for more efficient ray sampling around surfaces and leads to significant improvements in reconstruction quality. Further, we present a new benchmark and protocol for evaluating reconstruction performance on such in-the-wild scenes. We perform extensive experiments, demonstrating that our approach surpasses both classical and neural reconstruction methods on a wide variety of metrics.

3D Moments from Near-Duplicate Photos

We introduce 3D Moments, a new computational photography effect. As input we take a pair of near-duplicate photos, i.e., photos of moving subjects from similar viewpoints, common in people's photo collections. As output, we produce a video that smoothly interpolates the scene motion from the first photo to the second, while also producing camera motion with parallax that gives a heightened sense of 3D. To achieve this effect, we represent the scene as a pair of feature-based layered depth images augmented with scene flow. This representation enables motion interpolation along with independent control of the camera viewpoint. Our system produces photorealistic space-time videos with motion parallax and scene dynamics, while plausibly recovering regions occluded in the original views. We conduct extensive experiments demonstrating superior performance over baselines on public datasets and in-the-wild photos. Project page: https://3d-moments.github.io/

Deformable Sprites for Unsupervised Video Decomposition

We describe a method to extract persistent elements of a dynamic scene from an input video. We represent each scene element as a \emph{Deformable Sprite} consisting of three components: 1) a 2D texture image for the entire video, 2) per-frame masks for the element, and 3) non-rigid deformations that map the texture image into each video frame. The resulting decomposition allows for applications such as consistent video editing. Deformable Sprites are a type of video auto-encoder model that is optimized on individual videos, and does not require training on a large dataset, nor does it rely on pre-trained models. Moreover, our method does not require object masks or other user input, and discovers moving objects of a wider variety than previous work. We evaluate our approach on standard video datasets and show qualitative results on a diverse array of Internet videos. Code and video results can be found at https://deformable-sprites.github.io

IRON: Inverse Rendering by Optimizing Neural SDFs and Materials from Photometric Images

We propose a neural inverse rendering pipeline called IRON that operates on photometric images and outputs high-quality 3D content in the format of triangle meshes and material textures readily deployable in existing graphics pipelines. Our method adopts neural representations for geometry as signed distance fields (SDFs) and materials during optimization to enjoy their flexibility and compactness, and features a hybrid optimization scheme for neural SDFs: first, optimize using a volumetric radiance field approach to recover correct topology, then optimize further using edgeaware physics-based surface rendering for geometry refinement and disentanglement of materials and lighting. In the second stage, we also draw inspiration from mesh-based differentiable rendering, and design a novel edge sampling algorithm for neural SDFs to further improve performance. We show that our IRON achieves significantly better inverse rendering quality compared to prior works. Our project page is here: https://kai-46.github.io/IRON-website/