Analytic-Splatting: Anti-Aliased 3D Gaussian Splatting via Analytic Integration

The 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) gained its popularity recently by combining the advantages of both primitive-based and volumetric 3D representations, resulting in improved quality and efficiency for 3D scene rendering. However, 3DGS is not alias-free, and its rendering at varying resolutions could produce severe blurring or jaggies. This is because 3DGS treats each pixel as an isolated, single point rather than as an area, causing insensitivity to changes in the footprints of pixels. Consequently, this discrete sampling scheme inevitably results in aliasing, owing to the restricted sampling bandwidth. In this paper, we derive an analytical solution to address this issue. More specifically, we use a conditioned logistic function as the analytic approximation of the cumulative distribution function (CDF) in a one-dimensional Gaussian signal and calculate the Gaussian integral by subtracting the CDFs. We then introduce this approximation in the two-dimensional pixel shading, and present Analytic-Splatting, which analytically approximates the Gaussian integral within the 2D-pixel window area to better capture the intensity response of each pixel. Moreover, we use the approximated response of the pixel window integral area to participate in the transmittance calculation of volume rendering, making Analytic-Splatting sensitive to the changes in pixel footprint at different resolutions. Experiments on various datasets validate that our approach has better anti-aliasing capability that gives more details and better fidelity.

Advances in 3D Generation: A Survey

Generating 3D models lies at the core of computer graphics and has been the focus of decades of research. With the emergence of advanced neural representations and generative models, the field of 3D content generation is developing rapidly, enabling the creation of increasingly high-quality and diverse 3D models. The rapid growth of this field makes it difficult to stay abreast of all recent developments. In this survey, we aim to introduce the fundamental methodologies of 3D generation methods and establish a structured roadmap, encompassing 3D representation, generation methods, datasets, and corresponding applications. Specifically, we introduce the 3D representations that serve as the backbone for 3D generation. Furthermore, we provide a comprehensive overview of the rapidly growing literature on generation methods, categorized by the type of algorithmic paradigms, including feedforward generation, optimization-based generation, procedural generation, and generative novel view synthesis. Lastly, we discuss available datasets, applications, and open challenges. We hope this survey will help readers explore this exciting topic and foster further advancements in the field of 3D content generation.

Sur2f: A Hybrid Representation for High-Quality and Efficient Surface Reconstruction from Multi-view Images

Multi-view surface reconstruction is an ill-posed, inverse problem in 3D vision research. It involves modeling the geometry and appearance with appropriate surface representations. Most of the existing methods rely either on explicit meshes, using surface rendering of meshes for reconstruction, or on implicit field functions, using volume rendering of the fields for reconstruction. The two types of representations in fact have their respective merits. In this work, we propose a new hybrid representation, termed Sur2f, aiming to better benefit from both representations in a complementary manner. Technically, we learn two parallel streams of an implicit signed distance field and an explicit surrogate surface Sur2f mesh, and unify volume rendering of the implicit signed distance function (SDF) and surface rendering of the surrogate mesh with a shared, neural shader; the unified shading promotes their convergence to the same, underlying surface. We synchronize learning of the surrogate mesh by driving its deformation with functions induced from the implicit SDF. In addition, the synchronized surrogate mesh enables surface-guided volume sampling, which greatly improves the sampling efficiency per ray in volume rendering. We conduct thorough experiments showing that Sur$^2$f outperforms existing reconstruction methods and surface representations, including hybrid ones, in terms of both recovery quality and recovery efficiency.

GS-IR: 3D Gaussian Splatting for Inverse Rendering

We propose GS-IR, a novel inverse rendering approach based on 3D Gaussian Splatting (GS) that leverages forward mapping volume rendering to achieve photorealistic novel view synthesis and relighting results. Unlike previous works that use implicit neural representations and volume rendering (e.g. NeRF), which suffer from low expressive power and high computational complexity, we extend GS, a top-performance representation for novel view synthesis, to estimate scene geometry, surface material, and environment illumination from multi-view images captured under unknown lighting conditions. There are two main problems when introducing GS to inverse rendering: 1) GS does not support producing plausible normal natively; 2) forward mapping (e.g. rasterization and splatting) cannot trace the occlusion like backward mapping (e.g. ray tracing). To address these challenges, our GS-IR proposes an efficient optimization scheme that incorporates a depth-derivation-based regularization for normal estimation and a baking-based occlusion to model indirect lighting. The flexible and expressive GS representation allows us to achieve fast and compact geometry reconstruction, photorealistic novel view synthesis, and effective physically-based rendering. We demonstrate the superiority of our method over baseline methods through qualitative and quantitative evaluations on various challenging scenes.

HelixSurf: A Robust and Efficient Neural Implicit Surface Learning of Indoor Scenes with Iterative Intertwined Regularization

Recovery of an underlying scene geometry from multiview images stands as a long-time challenge in computer vision research. The recent promise leverages neural implicit surface learning and differentiable volume rendering, and achieves both the recovery of scene geometry and synthesis of novel views, where deep priors of neural models are used as an inductive smoothness bias. While promising for object-level surfaces, these methods suffer when coping with complex scene surfaces. In the meanwhile, traditional multi-view stereo can recover the geometry of scenes with rich textures, by globally optimizing the local, pixel-wise correspondences across multiple views. We are thus motivated to make use of the complementary benefits from the two strategies, and propose a method termed Helix-shaped neural implicit Surface learning or HelixSurf; HelixSurf uses the intermediate prediction from one strategy as the guidance to regularize the learning of the other one, and conducts such intertwined regularization iteratively during the learning process. We also propose an efficient scheme for differentiable volume rendering in HelixSurf. Experiments on surface reconstruction of indoor scenes show that our method compares favorably with existing methods and is orders of magnitude faster, even when some of existing methods are assisted with auxiliary training data. The source code is available at https://github.com/Gorilla-Lab-SCUT/HelixSurf.

Exploring Diversity-based Active Learning for 3D Object Detection in Autonomous Driving

3D object detection has recently received much attention due to its great potential in autonomous vehicle (AV). The success of deep learning based object detectors relies on the availability of large-scale annotated datasets, which is time-consuming and expensive to compile, especially for 3D bounding box annotation. In this work, we investigate diversity-based active learning (AL) as a potential solution to alleviate the annotation burden. Given limited annotation budget, only the most informative frames and objects are automatically selected for human to annotate. Technically, we take the advantage of the multimodal information provided in an AV dataset, and propose a novel acquisition function that enforces spatial and temporal diversity in the selected samples. We benchmark the proposed method against other AL strategies under realistic annotation cost measurement, where the realistic costs for annotating a frame and a 3D bounding box are both taken into consideration. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method on the nuScenes dataset and show that it outperforms existing AL strategies significantly.

VISTA: Boosting 3D Object Detection via Dual Cross-VIew SpaTial Attention

Detecting objects from LiDAR point clouds is of tremendous significance in autonomous driving. In spite of good progress, accurate and reliable 3D detection is yet to be achieved due to the sparsity and irregularity of LiDAR point clouds. Among existing strategies, multi-view methods have shown great promise by leveraging the more comprehensive information from both bird's eye view (BEV) and range view (RV). These multi-view methods either refine the proposals predicted from single view via fused features, or fuse the features without considering the global spatial context; their performance is limited consequently. In this paper, we propose to adaptively fuse multi-view features in a global spatial context via Dual Cross-VIew SpaTial Attention (VISTA). The proposed VISTA is a novel plug-and-play fusion module, wherein the multi-layer perceptron widely adopted in standard attention modules is replaced with a convolutional one. Thanks to the learned attention mechanism, VISTA can produce fused features of high quality for prediction of proposals. We decouple the classification and regression tasks in VISTA, and an additional constraint of attention variance is applied that enables the attention module to focus on specific targets instead of generic points. We conduct thorough experiments on the benchmarks of nuScenes and Waymo; results confirm the efficacy of our designs. At the time of submission, our method achieves 63.0% in overall mAP and 69.8% in NDS on the nuScenes benchmark, outperforming all published methods by up to 24% in safety-crucial categories such as cyclist. The source code in PyTorch is available at https://github.com/Gorilla-Lab-SCUT/VISTA

Instance Segmentation in 3D Scenes using Semantic Superpoint Tree Networks

Instance segmentation in 3D scenes is fundamental in many applications of scene understanding. It is yet challenging due to the compound factors of data irregularity and uncertainty in the numbers of instances. State-of-the-art methods largely rely on a general pipeline that first learns point-wise features discriminative at semantic and instance levels, followed by a separate step of point grouping for proposing object instances. While promising, they have the shortcomings that (1) the second step is not supervised by the main objective of instance segmentation, and (2) their point-wise feature learning and grouping are less effective to deal with data irregularities, possibly resulting in fragmented segmentations. To address these issues, we propose in this work an end-to-end solution of Semantic Superpoint Tree Network (SSTNet) for proposing object instances from scene points. Key in SSTNet is an intermediate, semantic superpoint tree (SST), which is constructed based on the learned semantic features of superpoints, and which will be traversed and split at intermediate tree nodes for proposals of object instances. We also design in SSTNet a refinement module, termed CliqueNet, to prune superpoints that may be wrongly grouped into instance proposals. Experiments on the benchmarks of ScanNet and S3DIS show the efficacy of our proposed method. At the time of submission, SSTNet ranks top on the ScanNet (V2) leaderboard, with 2% higher of mAP than the second best method. The source code in PyTorch is available at https://github.com/Gorilla-Lab-SCUT/SSTNet.

TAG : Type Auxiliary Guiding for Code Comment Generation

Existing leading code comment generation approaches with the structure-to-sequence framework ignores the type information of the interpretation of the code, e.g., operator, string, etc. However, introducing the type information into the existing framework is non-trivial due to the hierarchical dependence among the type information. In order to address the issues above, we propose a Type Auxiliary Guiding encoder-decoder framework for the code comment generation task which considers the source code as an N-ary tree with type information associated with each node. Specifically, our framework is featured with a Type-associated Encoder and a Type-restricted Decoder which enables adaptive summarization of the source code. We further propose a hierarchical reinforcement learning method to resolve the training difficulties of our proposed framework. Extensive evaluations demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of our framework with both the auto-evaluated metrics and case studies.