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SubscribeImproving visual image reconstruction from human brain activity using latent diffusion models via multiple decoded inputs
The integration of deep learning and neuroscience has been advancing rapidly, which has led to improvements in the analysis of brain activity and the understanding of deep learning models from a neuroscientific perspective. The reconstruction of visual experience from human brain activity is an area that has particularly benefited: the use of deep learning models trained on large amounts of natural images has greatly improved its quality, and approaches that combine the diverse information contained in visual experiences have proliferated rapidly in recent years. In this technical paper, by taking advantage of the simple and generic framework that we proposed (Takagi and Nishimoto, CVPR 2023), we examine the extent to which various additional decoding techniques affect the performance of visual experience reconstruction. Specifically, we combined our earlier work with the following three techniques: using decoded text from brain activity, nonlinear optimization for structural image reconstruction, and using decoded depth information from brain activity. We confirmed that these techniques contributed to improving accuracy over the baseline. We also discuss what researchers should consider when performing visual reconstruction using deep generative models trained on large datasets. Please check our webpage at https://sites.google.com/view/stablediffusion-with-brain/. Code is also available at https://github.com/yu-takagi/StableDiffusionReconstruction.
Robust Training Using Natural Transformation
Previous robustness approaches for deep learning models such as data augmentation techniques via data transformation or adversarial training cannot capture real-world variations that preserve the semantics of the input, such as a change in lighting conditions. To bridge this gap, we present NaTra, an adversarial training scheme that is designed to improve the robustness of image classification algorithms. We target attributes of the input images that are independent of the class identification, and manipulate those attributes to mimic real-world natural transformations (NaTra) of the inputs, which are then used to augment the training dataset of the image classifier. Specifically, we apply Batch Inverse Encoding and Shifting to map a batch of given images to corresponding disentangled latent codes of well-trained generative models. Latent Codes Expansion is used to boost image reconstruction quality through the incorporation of extended feature maps. Unsupervised Attribute Directing and Manipulation enables identification of the latent directions that correspond to specific attribute changes, and then produce interpretable manipulations of those attributes, thereby generating natural transformations to the input data. We demonstrate the efficacy of our scheme by utilizing the disentangled latent representations derived from well-trained GANs to mimic transformations of an image that are similar to real-world natural variations (such as lighting conditions or hairstyle), and train models to be invariant to these natural transformations. Extensive experiments show that our method improves generalization of classification models and increases its robustness to various real-world distortions
One-2-3-45: Any Single Image to 3D Mesh in 45 Seconds without Per-Shape Optimization
Single image 3D reconstruction is an important but challenging task that requires extensive knowledge of our natural world. Many existing methods solve this problem by optimizing a neural radiance field under the guidance of 2D diffusion models but suffer from lengthy optimization time, 3D inconsistency results, and poor geometry. In this work, we propose a novel method that takes a single image of any object as input and generates a full 360-degree 3D textured mesh in a single feed-forward pass. Given a single image, we first use a view-conditioned 2D diffusion model, Zero123, to generate multi-view images for the input view, and then aim to lift them up to 3D space. Since traditional reconstruction methods struggle with inconsistent multi-view predictions, we build our 3D reconstruction module upon an SDF-based generalizable neural surface reconstruction method and propose several critical training strategies to enable the reconstruction of 360-degree meshes. Without costly optimizations, our method reconstructs 3D shapes in significantly less time than existing methods. Moreover, our method favors better geometry, generates more 3D consistent results, and adheres more closely to the input image. We evaluate our approach on both synthetic data and in-the-wild images and demonstrate its superiority in terms of both mesh quality and runtime. In addition, our approach can seamlessly support the text-to-3D task by integrating with off-the-shelf text-to-image diffusion models.
GeneMAN: Generalizable Single-Image 3D Human Reconstruction from Multi-Source Human Data
Given a single in-the-wild human photo, it remains a challenging task to reconstruct a high-fidelity 3D human model. Existing methods face difficulties including a) the varying body proportions captured by in-the-wild human images; b) diverse personal belongings within the shot; and c) ambiguities in human postures and inconsistency in human textures. In addition, the scarcity of high-quality human data intensifies the challenge. To address these problems, we propose a Generalizable image-to-3D huMAN reconstruction framework, dubbed GeneMAN, building upon a comprehensive multi-source collection of high-quality human data, including 3D scans, multi-view videos, single photos, and our generated synthetic human data. GeneMAN encompasses three key modules. 1) Without relying on parametric human models (e.g., SMPL), GeneMAN first trains a human-specific text-to-image diffusion model and a view-conditioned diffusion model, serving as GeneMAN 2D human prior and 3D human prior for reconstruction, respectively. 2) With the help of the pretrained human prior models, the Geometry Initialization-&-Sculpting pipeline is leveraged to recover high-quality 3D human geometry given a single image. 3) To achieve high-fidelity 3D human textures, GeneMAN employs the Multi-Space Texture Refinement pipeline, consecutively refining textures in the latent and the pixel spaces. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that GeneMAN could generate high-quality 3D human models from a single image input, outperforming prior state-of-the-art methods. Notably, GeneMAN could reveal much better generalizability in dealing with in-the-wild images, often yielding high-quality 3D human models in natural poses with common items, regardless of the body proportions in the input images.
Natural scene reconstruction from fMRI signals using generative latent diffusion
In neural decoding research, one of the most intriguing topics is the reconstruction of perceived natural images based on fMRI signals. Previous studies have succeeded in re-creating different aspects of the visuals, such as low-level properties (shape, texture, layout) or high-level features (category of objects, descriptive semantics of scenes) but have typically failed to reconstruct these properties together for complex scene images. Generative AI has recently made a leap forward with latent diffusion models capable of generating high-complexity images. Here, we investigate how to take advantage of this innovative technology for brain decoding. We present a two-stage scene reconstruction framework called ``Brain-Diffuser''. In the first stage, starting from fMRI signals, we reconstruct images that capture low-level properties and overall layout using a VDVAE (Very Deep Variational Autoencoder) model. In the second stage, we use the image-to-image framework of a latent diffusion model (Versatile Diffusion) conditioned on predicted multimodal (text and visual) features, to generate final reconstructed images. On the publicly available Natural Scenes Dataset benchmark, our method outperforms previous models both qualitatively and quantitatively. When applied to synthetic fMRI patterns generated from individual ROI (region-of-interest) masks, our trained model creates compelling ``ROI-optimal'' scenes consistent with neuroscientific knowledge. Thus, the proposed methodology can have an impact on both applied (e.g. brain-computer interface) and fundamental neuroscience.
Describe, Don't Dictate: Semantic Image Editing with Natural Language Intent
Despite the progress in text-to-image generation, semantic image editing remains a challenge. Inversion-based algorithms unavoidably introduce reconstruction errors, while instruction-based models mainly suffer from limited dataset quality and scale. To address these problems, we propose a descriptive-prompt-based editing framework, named DescriptiveEdit. The core idea is to re-frame `instruction-based image editing' as `reference-image-based text-to-image generation', which preserves the generative power of well-trained Text-to-Image models without architectural modifications or inversion. Specifically, taking the reference image and a prompt as input, we introduce a Cross-Attentive UNet, which newly adds attention bridges to inject reference image features into the prompt-to-edit-image generation process. Owing to its text-to-image nature, DescriptiveEdit overcomes limitations in instruction dataset quality, integrates seamlessly with ControlNet, IP-Adapter, and other extensions, and is more scalable. Experiments on the Emu Edit benchmark show it improves editing accuracy and consistency.
Perceptual Fairness in Image Restoration
Fairness in image restoration tasks is the desire to treat different sub-groups of images equally well. Existing definitions of fairness in image restoration are highly restrictive. They consider a reconstruction to be a correct outcome for a group (e.g., women) only if it falls within the group's set of ground truth images (e.g., natural images of women); otherwise, it is considered entirely incorrect. Consequently, such definitions are prone to controversy, as errors in image restoration can manifest in various ways. In this work we offer an alternative approach towards fairness in image restoration, by considering the Group Perceptual Index (GPI), which we define as the statistical distance between the distribution of the group's ground truth images and the distribution of their reconstructions. We assess the fairness of an algorithm by comparing the GPI of different groups, and say that it achieves perfect Perceptual Fairness (PF) if the GPIs of all groups are identical. We motivate and theoretically study our new notion of fairness, draw its connection to previous ones, and demonstrate its utility on state-of-the-art face image super-resolution algorithms.
Recovering Realistic Texture in Image Super-resolution by Deep Spatial Feature Transform
Despite that convolutional neural networks (CNN) have recently demonstrated high-quality reconstruction for single-image super-resolution (SR), recovering natural and realistic texture remains a challenging problem. In this paper, we show that it is possible to recover textures faithful to semantic classes. In particular, we only need to modulate features of a few intermediate layers in a single network conditioned on semantic segmentation probability maps. This is made possible through a novel Spatial Feature Transform (SFT) layer that generates affine transformation parameters for spatial-wise feature modulation. SFT layers can be trained end-to-end together with the SR network using the same loss function. During testing, it accepts an input image of arbitrary size and generates a high-resolution image with just a single forward pass conditioned on the categorical priors. Our final results show that an SR network equipped with SFT can generate more realistic and visually pleasing textures in comparison to state-of-the-art SRGAN and EnhanceNet.
Gaussian Splatting on the Move: Blur and Rolling Shutter Compensation for Natural Camera Motion
High-quality scene reconstruction and novel view synthesis based on Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) typically require steady, high-quality photographs, often impractical to capture with handheld cameras. We present a method that adapts to camera motion and allows high-quality scene reconstruction with handheld video data suffering from motion blur and rolling shutter distortion. Our approach is based on detailed modelling of the physical image formation process and utilizes velocities estimated using visual-inertial odometry (VIO). Camera poses are considered non-static during the exposure time of a single image frame and camera poses are further optimized in the reconstruction process. We formulate a differentiable rendering pipeline that leverages screen space approximation to efficiently incorporate rolling-shutter and motion blur effects into the 3DGS framework. Our results with both synthetic and real data demonstrate superior performance in mitigating camera motion over existing methods, thereby advancing 3DGS in naturalistic settings.
OCD: Learning to Overfit with Conditional Diffusion Models
We present a dynamic model in which the weights are conditioned on an input sample x and are learned to match those that would be obtained by finetuning a base model on x and its label y. This mapping between an input sample and network weights is approximated by a denoising diffusion model. The diffusion model we employ focuses on modifying a single layer of the base model and is conditioned on the input, activations, and output of this layer. Since the diffusion model is stochastic in nature, multiple initializations generate different networks, forming an ensemble, which leads to further improvements. Our experiments demonstrate the wide applicability of the method for image classification, 3D reconstruction, tabular data, speech separation, and natural language processing. Our code is available at https://github.com/ShaharLutatiPersonal/OCD
Pruning-based Topology Refinement of 3D Mesh using a 2D Alpha Mask
Image-based 3D reconstruction has increasingly stunning results over the past few years with the latest improvements in computer vision and graphics. Geometry and topology are two fundamental concepts when dealing with 3D mesh structures. But the latest often remains a side issue in the 3D mesh-based reconstruction literature. Indeed, performing per-vertex elementary displacements over a 3D sphere mesh only impacts its geometry and leaves the topological structure unchanged and fixed. Whereas few attempts propose to update the geometry and the topology, all need to lean on costly 3D ground-truth to determine the faces/edges to prune. We present in this work a method that aims to refine the topology of any 3D mesh through a face-pruning strategy that extensively relies upon 2D alpha masks and camera pose information. Our solution leverages a differentiable renderer that renders each face as a 2D soft map. Its pixel intensity reflects the probability of being covered during the rendering process by such a face. Based on the 2D soft-masks available, our method is thus able to quickly highlight all the incorrectly rendered faces for a given viewpoint. Because our module is agnostic to the network that produces the 3D mesh, it can be easily plugged into any self-supervised image-based (either synthetic or natural) 3D reconstruction pipeline to get complex meshes with a non-spherical topology.
Real3D-Portrait: One-shot Realistic 3D Talking Portrait Synthesis
One-shot 3D talking portrait generation aims to reconstruct a 3D avatar from an unseen image, and then animate it with a reference video or audio to generate a talking portrait video. The existing methods fail to simultaneously achieve the goals of accurate 3D avatar reconstruction and stable talking face animation. Besides, while the existing works mainly focus on synthesizing the head part, it is also vital to generate natural torso and background segments to obtain a realistic talking portrait video. To address these limitations, we present Real3D-Potrait, a framework that (1) improves the one-shot 3D reconstruction power with a large image-to-plane model that distills 3D prior knowledge from a 3D face generative model; (2) facilitates accurate motion-conditioned animation with an efficient motion adapter; (3) synthesizes realistic video with natural torso movement and switchable background using a head-torso-background super-resolution model; and (4) supports one-shot audio-driven talking face generation with a generalizable audio-to-motion model. Extensive experiments show that Real3D-Portrait generalizes well to unseen identities and generates more realistic talking portrait videos compared to previous methods. Video samples and source code are available at https://real3dportrait.github.io .
Learning Efficient Coding of Natural Images with Maximum Manifold Capacity Representations
The efficient coding hypothesis proposes that the response properties of sensory systems are adapted to the statistics of their inputs such that they capture maximal information about the environment, subject to biological constraints. While elegant, information theoretic properties are notoriously difficult to measure in practical settings or to employ as objective functions in optimization. This difficulty has necessitated that computational models designed to test the hypothesis employ several different information metrics ranging from approximations and lower bounds to proxy measures like reconstruction error. Recent theoretical advances have characterized a novel and ecologically relevant efficiency metric, the manifold capacity, which is the number of object categories that may be represented in a linearly separable fashion. However, calculating manifold capacity is a computationally intensive iterative procedure that until now has precluded its use as an objective. Here we outline the simplifying assumptions that allow manifold capacity to be optimized directly, yielding Maximum Manifold Capacity Representations (MMCR). The resulting method is closely related to and inspired by advances in the field of self supervised learning (SSL), and we demonstrate that MMCRs are competitive with state of the art results on standard SSL benchmarks. Empirical analyses reveal differences between MMCRs and representations learned by other SSL frameworks, and suggest a mechanism by which manifold compression gives rise to class separability. Finally we evaluate a set of SSL methods on a suite of neural predictivity benchmarks, and find MMCRs are higly competitive as models of the ventral stream.
Kernel Heterogeneity Improves Sparseness of Natural Images Representations
Both biological and artificial neural networks inherently balance their performance with their operational cost, which balances their computational abilities. Typically, an efficient neuromorphic neural network is one that learns representations that reduce the redundancies and dimensionality of its input. This is for instance achieved in sparse coding, and sparse representations derived from natural images yield representations that are heterogeneous, both in their sampling of input features and in the variance of those features. Here, we investigated the connection between natural images' structure, particularly oriented features, and their corresponding sparse codes. We showed that representations of input features scattered across multiple levels of variance substantially improve the sparseness and resilience of sparse codes, at the cost of reconstruction performance. This echoes the structure of the model's input, allowing to account for the heterogeneously aleatoric structures of natural images. We demonstrate that learning kernel from natural images produces heterogeneity by balancing between approximate and dense representations, which improves all reconstruction metrics. Using a parametrized control of the kernels' heterogeneity used by a convolutional sparse coding algorithm, we show that heterogeneity emphasizes sparseness, while homogeneity improves representation granularity. In a broader context, these encoding strategy can serve as inputs to deep convolutional neural networks. We prove that such variance-encoded sparse image datasets enhance computational efficiency, emphasizing the benefits of kernel heterogeneity to leverage naturalistic and variant input structures and possible applications to improve the throughput of neuromorphic hardware.
PAniC-3D: Stylized Single-view 3D Reconstruction from Portraits of Anime Characters
We propose PAniC-3D, a system to reconstruct stylized 3D character heads directly from illustrated (p)ortraits of (ani)me (c)haracters. Our anime-style domain poses unique challenges to single-view reconstruction; compared to natural images of human heads, character portrait illustrations have hair and accessories with more complex and diverse geometry, and are shaded with non-photorealistic contour lines. In addition, there is a lack of both 3D model and portrait illustration data suitable to train and evaluate this ambiguous stylized reconstruction task. Facing these challenges, our proposed PAniC-3D architecture crosses the illustration-to-3D domain gap with a line-filling model, and represents sophisticated geometries with a volumetric radiance field. We train our system with two large new datasets (11.2k Vroid 3D models, 1k Vtuber portrait illustrations), and evaluate on a novel AnimeRecon benchmark of illustration-to-3D pairs. PAniC-3D significantly outperforms baseline methods, and provides data to establish the task of stylized reconstruction from portrait illustrations.
Keep It Real: Challenges in Attacking Compression-Based Adversarial Purification
Previous work has suggested that preprocessing images through lossy compression can defend against adversarial perturbations, but comprehensive attack evaluations have been lacking. In this paper, we construct strong white-box and adaptive attacks against various compression models and identify a critical challenge for attackers: high realism in reconstructed images significantly increases attack difficulty. Through rigorous evaluation across multiple attack scenarios, we demonstrate that compression models capable of producing realistic, high-fidelity reconstructions are substantially more resistant to our attacks. In contrast, low-realism compression models can be broken. Our analysis reveals that this is not due to gradient masking. Rather, realistic reconstructions maintaining distributional alignment with natural images seem to offer inherent robustness. This work highlights a significant obstacle for future adversarial attacks and suggests that developing more effective techniques to overcome realism represents an essential challenge for comprehensive security evaluation.
Puzzle Similarity: A Perceptually-guided No-Reference Metric for Artifact Detection in 3D Scene Reconstructions
Modern reconstruction techniques can effectively model complex 3D scenes from sparse 2D views. However, automatically assessing the quality of novel views and identifying artifacts is challenging due to the lack of ground truth images and the limitations of no-reference image metrics in predicting detailed artifact maps. The absence of such quality metrics hinders accurate predictions of the quality of generated views and limits the adoption of post-processing techniques, such as inpainting, to enhance reconstruction quality. In this work, we propose a new no-reference metric, Puzzle Similarity, which is designed to localize artifacts in novel views. Our approach utilizes image patch statistics from the input views to establish a scene-specific distribution that is later used to identify poorly reconstructed regions in the novel views. We test and evaluate our method in the context of 3D reconstruction; to this end, we collected a novel dataset of human quality assessment in unseen reconstructed views. Through this dataset, we demonstrate that our method can not only successfully localize artifacts in novel views, correlating with human assessment, but do so without direct references. Surprisingly, our metric outperforms both no-reference metrics and popular full-reference image metrics. We can leverage our new metric to enhance applications like automatic image restoration, guided acquisition, or 3D reconstruction from sparse inputs.
Maintaining Natural Image Statistics with the Contextual Loss
Maintaining natural image statistics is a crucial factor in restoration and generation of realistic looking images. When training CNNs, photorealism is usually attempted by adversarial training (GAN), that pushes the output images to lie on the manifold of natural images. GANs are very powerful, but not perfect. They are hard to train and the results still often suffer from artifacts. In this paper we propose a complementary approach, that could be applied with or without GAN, whose goal is to train a feed-forward CNN to maintain natural internal statistics. We look explicitly at the distribution of features in an image and train the network to generate images with natural feature distributions. Our approach reduces by orders of magnitude the number of images required for training and achieves state-of-the-art results on both single-image super-resolution, and high-resolution surface normal estimation.
Perceive, Understand and Restore: Real-World Image Super-Resolution with Autoregressive Multimodal Generative Models
By leveraging the generative priors from pre-trained text-to-image diffusion models, significant progress has been made in real-world image super-resolution (Real-ISR). However, these methods tend to generate inaccurate and unnatural reconstructions in complex and/or heavily degraded scenes, primarily due to their limited perception and understanding capability of the input low-quality image. To address these limitations, we propose, for the first time to our knowledge, to adapt the pre-trained autoregressive multimodal model such as Lumina-mGPT into a robust Real-ISR model, namely PURE, which Perceives and Understands the input low-quality image, then REstores its high-quality counterpart. Specifically, we implement instruction tuning on Lumina-mGPT to perceive the image degradation level and the relationships between previously generated image tokens and the next token, understand the image content by generating image semantic descriptions, and consequently restore the image by generating high-quality image tokens autoregressively with the collected information. In addition, we reveal that the image token entropy reflects the image structure and present a entropy-based Top-k sampling strategy to optimize the local structure of the image during inference. Experimental results demonstrate that PURE preserves image content while generating realistic details, especially in complex scenes with multiple objects, showcasing the potential of autoregressive multimodal generative models for robust Real-ISR. The model and code will be available at https://github.com/nonwhy/PURE.
ReconFusion: 3D Reconstruction with Diffusion Priors
3D reconstruction methods such as Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) excel at rendering photorealistic novel views of complex scenes. However, recovering a high-quality NeRF typically requires tens to hundreds of input images, resulting in a time-consuming capture process. We present ReconFusion to reconstruct real-world scenes using only a few photos. Our approach leverages a diffusion prior for novel view synthesis, trained on synthetic and multiview datasets, which regularizes a NeRF-based 3D reconstruction pipeline at novel camera poses beyond those captured by the set of input images. Our method synthesizes realistic geometry and texture in underconstrained regions while preserving the appearance of observed regions. We perform an extensive evaluation across various real-world datasets, including forward-facing and 360-degree scenes, demonstrating significant performance improvements over previous few-view NeRF reconstruction approaches.
RealFusion: 360° Reconstruction of Any Object from a Single Image
We consider the problem of reconstructing a full 360{\deg} photographic model of an object from a single image of it. We do so by fitting a neural radiance field to the image, but find this problem to be severely ill-posed. We thus take an off-the-self conditional image generator based on diffusion and engineer a prompt that encourages it to "dream up" novel views of the object. Using an approach inspired by DreamFields and DreamFusion, we fuse the given input view, the conditional prior, and other regularizers in a final, consistent reconstruction. We demonstrate state-of-the-art reconstruction results on benchmark images when compared to prior methods for monocular 3D reconstruction of objects. Qualitatively, our reconstructions provide a faithful match of the input view and a plausible extrapolation of its appearance and 3D shape, including to the side of the object not visible in the image.
Tell Me What You See: Text-Guided Real-World Image Denoising
Image reconstruction in low-light conditions is a challenging problem. Many solutions have been proposed for it, where the main approach is trying to learn a good prior of natural images along with modeling the true statistics of the noise in the scene. In the presence of very low lighting conditions, such approaches are usually not enough, and additional information is required, e.g., in the form of using multiple captures. In this work, we suggest as an alternative to add a description of the scene as prior, which can be easily done by the photographer who is capturing the scene. Using a text-conditioned diffusion model, we show that adding image caption information improves significantly the image reconstruction in low-light conditions on both synthetic and real-world images.
RIC: Rotate-Inpaint-Complete for Generalizable Scene Reconstruction
General scene reconstruction refers to the task of estimating the full 3D geometry and texture of a scene containing previously unseen objects. In many practical applications such as AR/VR, autonomous navigation, and robotics, only a single view of the scene may be available, making the scene reconstruction task challenging. In this paper, we present a method for scene reconstruction by structurally breaking the problem into two steps: rendering novel views via inpainting and 2D to 3D scene lifting. Specifically, we leverage the generalization capability of large visual language models (Dalle-2) to inpaint the missing areas of scene color images rendered from different views. Next, we lift these inpainted images to 3D by predicting normals of the inpainted image and solving for the missing depth values. By predicting for normals instead of depth directly, our method allows for robustness to changes in depth distributions and scale. With rigorous quantitative evaluation, we show that our method outperforms multiple baselines while providing generalization to novel objects and scenes.
Model-Based Image Signal Processors via Learnable Dictionaries
Digital cameras transform sensor RAW readings into RGB images by means of their Image Signal Processor (ISP). Computational photography tasks such as image denoising and colour constancy are commonly performed in the RAW domain, in part due to the inherent hardware design, but also due to the appealing simplicity of noise statistics that result from the direct sensor readings. Despite this, the availability of RAW images is limited in comparison with the abundance and diversity of available RGB data. Recent approaches have attempted to bridge this gap by estimating the RGB to RAW mapping: handcrafted model-based methods that are interpretable and controllable usually require manual parameter fine-tuning, while end-to-end learnable neural networks require large amounts of training data, at times with complex training procedures, and generally lack interpretability and parametric control. Towards addressing these existing limitations, we present a novel hybrid model-based and data-driven ISP that builds on canonical ISP operations and is both learnable and interpretable. Our proposed invertible model, capable of bidirectional mapping between RAW and RGB domains, employs end-to-end learning of rich parameter representations, i.e. dictionaries, that are free from direct parametric supervision and additionally enable simple and plausible data augmentation. We evidence the value of our data generation process by extensive experiments under both RAW image reconstruction and RAW image denoising tasks, obtaining state-of-the-art performance in both. Additionally, we show that our ISP can learn meaningful mappings from few data samples, and that denoising models trained with our dictionary-based data augmentation are competitive despite having only few or zero ground-truth labels.
Image Reconstruction using Enhanced Vision Transformer
Removing noise from images is a challenging and fundamental problem in the field of computer vision. Images captured by modern cameras are inevitably degraded by noise which limits the accuracy of any quantitative measurements on those images. In this project, we propose a novel image reconstruction framework which can be used for tasks such as image denoising, deblurring or inpainting. The model proposed in this project is based on Vision Transformer (ViT) that takes 2D images as input and outputs embeddings which can be used for reconstructing denoised images. We incorporate four additional optimization techniques in the framework to improve the model reconstruction capability, namely Locality Sensitive Attention (LSA), Shifted Patch Tokenization (SPT), Rotary Position Embeddings (RoPE) and adversarial loss function inspired from Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). LSA, SPT and RoPE enable the transformer to learn from the dataset more efficiently, while the adversarial loss function enhances the resolution of the reconstructed images. Based on our experiments, the proposed architecture outperforms the benchmark U-Net model by more than 3.5\% structural similarity (SSIM) for the reconstruction tasks of image denoising and inpainting. The proposed enhancements further show an improvement of \textasciitilde5\% SSIM over the benchmark for both tasks.
Denoising Diffusion via Image-Based Rendering
Generating 3D scenes is a challenging open problem, which requires synthesizing plausible content that is fully consistent in 3D space. While recent methods such as neural radiance fields excel at view synthesis and 3D reconstruction, they cannot synthesize plausible details in unobserved regions since they lack a generative capability. Conversely, existing generative methods are typically not capable of reconstructing detailed, large-scale scenes in the wild, as they use limited-capacity 3D scene representations, require aligned camera poses, or rely on additional regularizers. In this work, we introduce the first diffusion model able to perform fast, detailed reconstruction and generation of real-world 3D scenes. To achieve this, we make three contributions. First, we introduce a new neural scene representation, IB-planes, that can efficiently and accurately represent large 3D scenes, dynamically allocating more capacity as needed to capture details visible in each image. Second, we propose a denoising-diffusion framework to learn a prior over this novel 3D scene representation, using only 2D images without the need for any additional supervision signal such as masks or depths. This supports 3D reconstruction and generation in a unified architecture. Third, we develop a principled approach to avoid trivial 3D solutions when integrating the image-based rendering with the diffusion model, by dropping out representations of some images. We evaluate the model on several challenging datasets of real and synthetic images, and demonstrate superior results on generation, novel view synthesis and 3D reconstruction.
Progressively Optimized Local Radiance Fields for Robust View Synthesis
We present an algorithm for reconstructing the radiance field of a large-scale scene from a single casually captured video. The task poses two core challenges. First, most existing radiance field reconstruction approaches rely on accurate pre-estimated camera poses from Structure-from-Motion algorithms, which frequently fail on in-the-wild videos. Second, using a single, global radiance field with finite representational capacity does not scale to longer trajectories in an unbounded scene. For handling unknown poses, we jointly estimate the camera poses with radiance field in a progressive manner. We show that progressive optimization significantly improves the robustness of the reconstruction. For handling large unbounded scenes, we dynamically allocate new local radiance fields trained with frames within a temporal window. This further improves robustness (e.g., performs well even under moderate pose drifts) and allows us to scale to large scenes. Our extensive evaluation on the Tanks and Temples dataset and our collected outdoor dataset, Static Hikes, show that our approach compares favorably with the state-of-the-art.
From Posterior Sampling to Meaningful Diversity in Image Restoration
Image restoration problems are typically ill-posed in the sense that each degraded image can be restored in infinitely many valid ways. To accommodate this, many works generate a diverse set of outputs by attempting to randomly sample from the posterior distribution of natural images given the degraded input. Here we argue that this strategy is commonly of limited practical value because of the heavy tail of the posterior distribution. Consider for example inpainting a missing region of the sky in an image. Since there is a high probability that the missing region contains no object but clouds, any set of samples from the posterior would be entirely dominated by (practically identical) completions of sky. However, arguably, presenting users with only one clear sky completion, along with several alternative solutions such as airships, birds, and balloons, would better outline the set of possibilities. In this paper, we initiate the study of meaningfully diverse image restoration. We explore several post-processing approaches that can be combined with any diverse image restoration method to yield semantically meaningful diversity. Moreover, we propose a practical approach for allowing diffusion based image restoration methods to generate meaningfully diverse outputs, while incurring only negligent computational overhead. We conduct extensive user studies to analyze the proposed techniques, and find the strategy of reducing similarity between outputs to be significantly favorable over posterior sampling. Code and examples are available at https://noa-cohen.github.io/MeaningfulDiversityInIR.
Reconstruct Anything Model: a lightweight foundation model for computational imaging
Most existing learning-based methods for solving imaging inverse problems can be roughly divided into two classes: iterative algorithms, such as plug-and-play and diffusion methods, that leverage pretrained denoisers, and unrolled architectures that are trained end-to-end for specific imaging problems. Iterative methods in the first class are computationally costly and often provide suboptimal reconstruction performance, whereas unrolled architectures are generally specific to a single inverse problem and require expensive training. In this work, we propose a novel non-iterative, lightweight architecture that incorporates knowledge about the forward operator (acquisition physics and noise parameters) without relying on unrolling. Our model is trained to solve a wide range of inverse problems beyond denoising, including deblurring, magnetic resonance imaging, computed tomography, inpainting, and super-resolution. The proposed model can be easily adapted to unseen inverse problems or datasets with a few fine-tuning steps (up to a few images) in a self-supervised way, without ground-truth references. Throughout a series of experiments, we demonstrate state-of-the-art performance from medical imaging to low-photon imaging and microscopy.
Nerfies: Deformable Neural Radiance Fields
We present the first method capable of photorealistically reconstructing deformable scenes using photos/videos captured casually from mobile phones. Our approach augments neural radiance fields (NeRF) by optimizing an additional continuous volumetric deformation field that warps each observed point into a canonical 5D NeRF. We observe that these NeRF-like deformation fields are prone to local minima, and propose a coarse-to-fine optimization method for coordinate-based models that allows for more robust optimization. By adapting principles from geometry processing and physical simulation to NeRF-like models, we propose an elastic regularization of the deformation field that further improves robustness. We show that our method can turn casually captured selfie photos/videos into deformable NeRF models that allow for photorealistic renderings of the subject from arbitrary viewpoints, which we dub "nerfies." We evaluate our method by collecting time-synchronized data using a rig with two mobile phones, yielding train/validation images of the same pose at different viewpoints. We show that our method faithfully reconstructs non-rigidly deforming scenes and reproduces unseen views with high fidelity.
Generalizable 3D Scene Reconstruction via Divide and Conquer from a Single View
Single-view 3D reconstruction is currently approached from two dominant perspectives: reconstruction of scenes with limited diversity using 3D data supervision or reconstruction of diverse singular objects using large image priors. However, real-world scenarios are far more complex and exceed the capabilities of these methods. We therefore propose a hybrid method following a divide-and-conquer strategy. We first process the scene holistically, extracting depth and semantic information, and then leverage a single-shot object-level method for the detailed reconstruction of individual components. By following a compositional processing approach, the overall framework achieves full reconstruction of complex 3D scenes from a single image. We purposely design our pipeline to be highly modular by carefully integrating specific procedures for each processing step, without requiring an end-to-end training of the whole system. This enables the pipeline to naturally improve as future methods can replace the individual modules. We demonstrate the reconstruction performance of our approach on both synthetic and real-world scenes, comparing favorable against prior works. Project page: https://andreeadogaru.github.io/Gen3DSR.
Consistent Video Depth Estimation
We present an algorithm for reconstructing dense, geometrically consistent depth for all pixels in a monocular video. We leverage a conventional structure-from-motion reconstruction to establish geometric constraints on pixels in the video. Unlike the ad-hoc priors in classical reconstruction, we use a learning-based prior, i.e., a convolutional neural network trained for single-image depth estimation. At test time, we fine-tune this network to satisfy the geometric constraints of a particular input video, while retaining its ability to synthesize plausible depth details in parts of the video that are less constrained. We show through quantitative validation that our method achieves higher accuracy and a higher degree of geometric consistency than previous monocular reconstruction methods. Visually, our results appear more stable. Our algorithm is able to handle challenging hand-held captured input videos with a moderate degree of dynamic motion. The improved quality of the reconstruction enables several applications, such as scene reconstruction and advanced video-based visual effects.
NAVI: Category-Agnostic Image Collections with High-Quality 3D Shape and Pose Annotations
Recent advances in neural reconstruction enable high-quality 3D object reconstruction from casually captured image collections. Current techniques mostly analyze their progress on relatively simple image collections where Structure-from-Motion (SfM) techniques can provide ground-truth (GT) camera poses. We note that SfM techniques tend to fail on in-the-wild image collections such as image search results with varying backgrounds and illuminations. To enable systematic research progress on 3D reconstruction from casual image captures, we propose NAVI: a new dataset of category-agnostic image collections of objects with high-quality 3D scans along with per-image 2D-3D alignments providing near-perfect GT camera parameters. These 2D-3D alignments allow us to extract accurate derivative annotations such as dense pixel correspondences, depth and segmentation maps. We demonstrate the use of NAVI image collections on different problem settings and show that NAVI enables more thorough evaluations that were not possible with existing datasets. We believe NAVI is beneficial for systematic research progress on 3D reconstruction and correspondence estimation. Project page: https://navidataset.github.io
DifuzCam: Replacing Camera Lens with a Mask and a Diffusion Model
The flat lensless camera design reduces the camera size and weight significantly. In this design, the camera lens is replaced by another optical element that interferes with the incoming light. The image is recovered from the raw sensor measurements using a reconstruction algorithm. Yet, the quality of the reconstructed images is not satisfactory. To mitigate this, we propose utilizing a pre-trained diffusion model with a control network and a learned separable transformation for reconstruction. This allows us to build a prototype flat camera with high-quality imaging, presenting state-of-the-art results in both terms of quality and perceptuality. We demonstrate its ability to leverage also textual descriptions of the captured scene to further enhance reconstruction. Our reconstruction method which leverages the strong capabilities of a pre-trained diffusion model can be used in other imaging systems for improved reconstruction results.
EvaSurf: Efficient View-Aware Implicit Textured Surface Reconstruction on Mobile Devices
Reconstructing real-world 3D objects has numerous applications in computer vision, such as virtual reality, video games, and animations. Ideally, 3D reconstruction methods should generate high-fidelity results with 3D consistency in real-time. Traditional methods match pixels between images using photo-consistency constraints or learned features, while differentiable rendering methods like Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) use differentiable volume rendering or surface-based representation to generate high-fidelity scenes. However, these methods require excessive runtime for rendering, making them impractical for daily applications. To address these challenges, we present EvaSurf, an Efficient View-Aware implicit textured Surface reconstruction method on mobile devices. In our method, we first employ an efficient surface-based model with a multi-view supervision module to ensure accurate mesh reconstruction. To enable high-fidelity rendering, we learn an implicit texture embedded with a set of Gaussian lobes to capture view-dependent information. Furthermore, with the explicit geometry and the implicit texture, we can employ a lightweight neural shader to reduce the expense of computation and further support real-time rendering on common mobile devices. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method can reconstruct high-quality appearance and accurate mesh on both synthetic and real-world datasets. Moreover, our method can be trained in just 1-2 hours using a single GPU and run on mobile devices at over 40 FPS (Frames Per Second), with a final package required for rendering taking up only 40-50 MB.
Image Reconstruction as a Tool for Feature Analysis
Vision encoders are increasingly used in modern applications, from vision-only models to multimodal systems such as vision-language models. Despite their remarkable success, it remains unclear how these architectures represent features internally. Here, we propose a novel approach for interpreting vision features via image reconstruction. We compare two related model families, SigLIP and SigLIP2, which differ only in their training objective, and show that encoders pre-trained on image-based tasks retain significantly more image information than those trained on non-image tasks such as contrastive learning. We further apply our method to a range of vision encoders, ranking them by the informativeness of their feature representations. Finally, we demonstrate that manipulating the feature space yields predictable changes in reconstructed images, revealing that orthogonal rotations (rather than spatial transformations) control color encoding. Our approach can be applied to any vision encoder, shedding light on the inner structure of its feature space. The code and model weights to reproduce the experiments are available in GitHub.
Real3D: Scaling Up Large Reconstruction Models with Real-World Images
The default strategy for training single-view Large Reconstruction Models (LRMs) follows the fully supervised route using large-scale datasets of synthetic 3D assets or multi-view captures. Although these resources simplify the training procedure, they are hard to scale up beyond the existing datasets and they are not necessarily representative of the real distribution of object shapes. To address these limitations, in this paper, we introduce Real3D, the first LRM system that can be trained using single-view real-world images. Real3D introduces a novel self-training framework that can benefit from both the existing synthetic data and diverse single-view real images. We propose two unsupervised losses that allow us to supervise LRMs at the pixel- and semantic-level, even for training examples without ground-truth 3D or novel views. To further improve performance and scale up the image data, we develop an automatic data curation approach to collect high-quality examples from in-the-wild images. Our experiments show that Real3D consistently outperforms prior work in four diverse evaluation settings that include real and synthetic data, as well as both in-domain and out-of-domain shapes. Code and model can be found here: https://hwjiang1510.github.io/Real3D/
Learning Enriched Features for Real Image Restoration and Enhancement
With the goal of recovering high-quality image content from its degraded version, image restoration enjoys numerous applications, such as in surveillance, computational photography, medical imaging, and remote sensing. Recently, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have achieved dramatic improvements over conventional approaches for image restoration task. Existing CNN-based methods typically operate either on full-resolution or on progressively low-resolution representations. In the former case, spatially precise but contextually less robust results are achieved, while in the latter case, semantically reliable but spatially less accurate outputs are generated. In this paper, we present a novel architecture with the collective goals of maintaining spatially-precise high-resolution representations through the entire network and receiving strong contextual information from the low-resolution representations. The core of our approach is a multi-scale residual block containing several key elements: (a) parallel multi-resolution convolution streams for extracting multi-scale features, (b) information exchange across the multi-resolution streams, (c) spatial and channel attention mechanisms for capturing contextual information, and (d) attention based multi-scale feature aggregation. In a nutshell, our approach learns an enriched set of features that combines contextual information from multiple scales, while simultaneously preserving the high-resolution spatial details. Extensive experiments on five real image benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method, named as MIRNet, achieves state-of-the-art results for a variety of image processing tasks, including image denoising, super-resolution, and image enhancement. The source code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/swz30/MIRNet.
Native-Resolution Image Synthesis
We introduce native-resolution image synthesis, a novel generative modeling paradigm that enables the synthesis of images at arbitrary resolutions and aspect ratios. This approach overcomes the limitations of conventional fixed-resolution, square-image methods by natively handling variable-length visual tokens, a core challenge for traditional techniques. To this end, we introduce the Native-resolution diffusion Transformer (NiT), an architecture designed to explicitly model varying resolutions and aspect ratios within its denoising process. Free from the constraints of fixed formats, NiT learns intrinsic visual distributions from images spanning a broad range of resolutions and aspect ratios. Notably, a single NiT model simultaneously achieves the state-of-the-art performance on both ImageNet-256x256 and 512x512 benchmarks. Surprisingly, akin to the robust zero-shot capabilities seen in advanced large language models, NiT, trained solely on ImageNet, demonstrates excellent zero-shot generalization performance. It successfully generates high-fidelity images at previously unseen high resolutions (e.g., 1536 x 1536) and diverse aspect ratios (e.g., 16:9, 3:1, 4:3), as shown in Figure 1. These findings indicate the significant potential of native-resolution modeling as a bridge between visual generative modeling and advanced LLM methodologies.
Blind Inpainting with Object-aware Discrimination for Artificial Marker Removal
Medical images often contain artificial markers added by doctors, which can negatively affect the accuracy of AI-based diagnosis. To address this issue and recover the missing visual contents, inpainting techniques are highly needed. However, existing inpainting methods require manual mask input, limiting their application scenarios. In this paper, we introduce a novel blind inpainting method that automatically completes visual contents without specifying masks for target areas in an image. Our proposed model includes a mask-free reconstruction network and an object-aware discriminator. The reconstruction network consists of two branches that predict the corrupted regions with artificial markers and simultaneously recover the missing visual contents. The object-aware discriminator relies on the powerful recognition capabilities of the dense object detector to ensure that the markers of reconstructed images cannot be detected in any local regions. As a result, the reconstructed image can be close to the clean one as much as possible. Our proposed method is evaluated on different medical image datasets, covering multiple imaging modalities such as ultrasound (US), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and electron microscopy (EM), demonstrating that our method is effective and robust against various unknown missing region patterns.
Image Processing Using Multi-Code GAN Prior
Despite the success of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) in image synthesis, applying trained GAN models to real image processing remains challenging. Previous methods typically invert a target image back to the latent space either by back-propagation or by learning an additional encoder. However, the reconstructions from both of the methods are far from ideal. In this work, we propose a novel approach, called mGANprior, to incorporate the well-trained GANs as effective prior to a variety of image processing tasks. In particular, we employ multiple latent codes to generate multiple feature maps at some intermediate layer of the generator, then compose them with adaptive channel importance to recover the input image. Such an over-parameterization of the latent space significantly improves the image reconstruction quality, outperforming existing competitors. The resulting high-fidelity image reconstruction enables the trained GAN models as prior to many real-world applications, such as image colorization, super-resolution, image inpainting, and semantic manipulation. We further analyze the properties of the layer-wise representation learned by GAN models and shed light on what knowledge each layer is capable of representing.
Fast and Uncertainty-Aware SVBRDF Recovery from Multi-View Capture using Frequency Domain Analysis
Relightable object acquisition is a key challenge in simplifying digital asset creation. Complete reconstruction of an object typically requires capturing hundreds to thousands of photographs under controlled illumination, with specialized equipment. The recent progress in differentiable rendering improved the quality and accessibility of inverse rendering optimization. Nevertheless, under uncontrolled illumination and unstructured viewpoints, there is no guarantee that the observations contain enough information to reconstruct the appearance properties of the captured object. We thus propose to consider the acquisition process from a signal-processing perspective. Given an object's geometry and a lighting environment, we estimate the properties of the materials on the object's surface in seconds. We do so by leveraging frequency domain analysis, considering the recovery of material properties as a deconvolution, enabling fast error estimation. We then quantify the uncertainty of the estimation, based on the available data, highlighting the areas for which priors or additional samples would be required for improved acquisition quality. We compare our approach to previous work and quantitatively evaluate our results, showing similar quality as previous work in a fraction of the time, and providing key information about the certainty of the results.
Unsupervised CNN for Single View Depth Estimation: Geometry to the Rescue
A significant weakness of most current deep Convolutional Neural Networks is the need to train them using vast amounts of manu- ally labelled data. In this work we propose a unsupervised framework to learn a deep convolutional neural network for single view depth predic- tion, without requiring a pre-training stage or annotated ground truth depths. We achieve this by training the network in a manner analogous to an autoencoder. At training time we consider a pair of images, source and target, with small, known camera motion between the two such as a stereo pair. We train the convolutional encoder for the task of predicting the depth map for the source image. To do so, we explicitly generate an inverse warp of the target image using the predicted depth and known inter-view displacement, to reconstruct the source image; the photomet- ric error in the reconstruction is the reconstruction loss for the encoder. The acquisition of this training data is considerably simpler than for equivalent systems, requiring no manual annotation, nor calibration of depth sensor to camera. We show that our network trained on less than half of the KITTI dataset (without any further augmentation) gives com- parable performance to that of the state of art supervised methods for single view depth estimation.
UniSDF: Unifying Neural Representations for High-Fidelity 3D Reconstruction of Complex Scenes with Reflections
Neural 3D scene representations have shown great potential for 3D reconstruction from 2D images. However, reconstructing real-world captures of complex scenes still remains a challenge. Existing generic 3D reconstruction methods often struggle to represent fine geometric details and do not adequately model reflective surfaces of large-scale scenes. Techniques that explicitly focus on reflective surfaces can model complex and detailed reflections by exploiting better reflection parameterizations. However, we observe that these methods are often not robust in real unbounded scenarios where non-reflective as well as reflective components are present. In this work, we propose UniSDF, a general purpose 3D reconstruction method that can reconstruct large complex scenes with reflections. We investigate both view-based as well as reflection-based color prediction parameterization techniques and find that explicitly blending these representations in 3D space enables reconstruction of surfaces that are more geometrically accurate, especially for reflective surfaces. We further combine this representation with a multi-resolution grid backbone that is trained in a coarse-to-fine manner, enabling faster reconstructions than prior methods. Extensive experiments on object-level datasets DTU, Shiny Blender as well as unbounded datasets Mip-NeRF 360 and Ref-NeRF real demonstrate that our method is able to robustly reconstruct complex large-scale scenes with fine details and reflective surfaces. Please see our project page at https://fangjinhuawang.github.io/UniSDF.
Deep Image Prior
Deep convolutional networks have become a popular tool for image generation and restoration. Generally, their excellent performance is imputed to their ability to learn realistic image priors from a large number of example images. In this paper, we show that, on the contrary, the structure of a generator network is sufficient to capture a great deal of low-level image statistics prior to any learning. In order to do so, we show that a randomly-initialized neural network can be used as a handcrafted prior with excellent results in standard inverse problems such as denoising, super-resolution, and inpainting. Furthermore, the same prior can be used to invert deep neural representations to diagnose them, and to restore images based on flash-no flash input pairs. Apart from its diverse applications, our approach highlights the inductive bias captured by standard generator network architectures. It also bridges the gap between two very popular families of image restoration methods: learning-based methods using deep convolutional networks and learning-free methods based on handcrafted image priors such as self-similarity. Code and supplementary material are available at https://dmitryulyanov.github.io/deep_image_prior .
Semantic Photo Manipulation with a Generative Image Prior
Despite the recent success of GANs in synthesizing images conditioned on inputs such as a user sketch, text, or semantic labels, manipulating the high-level attributes of an existing natural photograph with GANs is challenging for two reasons. First, it is hard for GANs to precisely reproduce an input image. Second, after manipulation, the newly synthesized pixels often do not fit the original image. In this paper, we address these issues by adapting the image prior learned by GANs to image statistics of an individual image. Our method can accurately reconstruct the input image and synthesize new content, consistent with the appearance of the input image. We demonstrate our interactive system on several semantic image editing tasks, including synthesizing new objects consistent with background, removing unwanted objects, and changing the appearance of an object. Quantitative and qualitative comparisons against several existing methods demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.
Towards Robust and Generalizable Lensless Imaging with Modular Learned Reconstruction
Lensless cameras disregard the conventional design that imaging should mimic the human eye. This is done by replacing the lens with a thin mask, and moving image formation to the digital post-processing. State-of-the-art lensless imaging techniques use learned approaches that combine physical modeling and neural networks. However, these approaches make simplifying modeling assumptions for ease of calibration and computation. Moreover, the generalizability of learned approaches to lensless measurements of new masks has not been studied. To this end, we utilize a modular learned reconstruction in which a key component is a pre-processor prior to image recovery. We theoretically demonstrate the pre-processor's necessity for standard image recovery techniques (Wiener filtering and iterative algorithms), and through extensive experiments show its effectiveness for multiple lensless imaging approaches and across datasets of different mask types (amplitude and phase). We also perform the first generalization benchmark across mask types to evaluate how well reconstructions trained with one system generalize to others. Our modular reconstruction enables us to use pre-trained components and transfer learning on new systems to cut down weeks of tedious measurements and training. As part of our work, we open-source four datasets, and software for measuring datasets and for training our modular reconstruction.
CAMPARI: Camera-Aware Decomposed Generative Neural Radiance Fields
Tremendous progress in deep generative models has led to photorealistic image synthesis. While achieving compelling results, most approaches operate in the two-dimensional image domain, ignoring the three-dimensional nature of our world. Several recent works therefore propose generative models which are 3D-aware, i.e., scenes are modeled in 3D and then rendered differentiably to the image plane. This leads to impressive 3D consistency, but incorporating such a bias comes at a price: the camera needs to be modeled as well. Current approaches assume fixed intrinsics and a predefined prior over camera pose ranges. As a result, parameter tuning is typically required for real-world data, and results degrade if the data distribution is not matched. Our key hypothesis is that learning a camera generator jointly with the image generator leads to a more principled approach to 3D-aware image synthesis. Further, we propose to decompose the scene into a background and foreground model, leading to more efficient and disentangled scene representations. While training from raw, unposed image collections, we learn a 3D- and camera-aware generative model which faithfully recovers not only the image but also the camera data distribution. At test time, our model generates images with explicit control over the camera as well as the shape and appearance of the scene.
Painting 3D Nature in 2D: View Synthesis of Natural Scenes from a Single Semantic Mask
We introduce a novel approach that takes a single semantic mask as input to synthesize multi-view consistent color images of natural scenes, trained with a collection of single images from the Internet. Prior works on 3D-aware image synthesis either require multi-view supervision or learning category-level prior for specific classes of objects, which can hardly work for natural scenes. Our key idea to solve this challenging problem is to use a semantic field as the intermediate representation, which is easier to reconstruct from an input semantic mask and then translate to a radiance field with the assistance of off-the-shelf semantic image synthesis models. Experiments show that our method outperforms baseline methods and produces photorealistic, multi-view consistent videos of a variety of natural scenes.
MaRINeR: Enhancing Novel Views by Matching Rendered Images with Nearby References
Rendering realistic images from 3D reconstruction is an essential task of many Computer Vision and Robotics pipelines, notably for mixed-reality applications as well as training autonomous agents in simulated environments. However, the quality of novel views heavily depends of the source reconstruction which is often imperfect due to noisy or missing geometry and appearance. Inspired by the recent success of reference-based super-resolution networks, we propose MaRINeR, a refinement method that leverages information of a nearby mapping image to improve the rendering of a target viewpoint. We first establish matches between the raw rendered image of the scene geometry from the target viewpoint and the nearby reference based on deep features, followed by hierarchical detail transfer. We show improved renderings in quantitative metrics and qualitative examples from both explicit and implicit scene representations. We further employ our method on the downstream tasks of pseudo-ground-truth validation, synthetic data enhancement and detail recovery for renderings of reduced 3D reconstructions.
Gaussian in the Wild: 3D Gaussian Splatting for Unconstrained Image Collections
Novel view synthesis from unconstrained in-the-wild images remains a meaningful but challenging task. The photometric variation and transient occluders in those unconstrained images make it difficult to reconstruct the original scene accurately. Previous approaches tackle the problem by introducing a global appearance feature in Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF). However, in the real world, the unique appearance of each tiny point in a scene is determined by its independent intrinsic material attributes and the varying environmental impacts it receives. Inspired by this fact, we propose Gaussian in the wild (GS-W), a method that uses 3D Gaussian points to reconstruct the scene and introduces separated intrinsic and dynamic appearance feature for each point, capturing the unchanged scene appearance along with dynamic variation like illumination and weather. Additionally, an adaptive sampling strategy is presented to allow each Gaussian point to focus on the local and detailed information more effectively. We also reduce the impact of transient occluders using a 2D visibility map. More experiments have demonstrated better reconstruction quality and details of GS-W compared to NeRF-based methods, with a faster rendering speed. Video results and code are available at https://eastbeanzhang.github.io/GS-W/.
LIST: Learning Implicitly from Spatial Transformers for Single-View 3D Reconstruction
Accurate reconstruction of both the geometric and topological details of a 3D object from a single 2D image embodies a fundamental challenge in computer vision. Existing explicit/implicit solutions to this problem struggle to recover self-occluded geometry and/or faithfully reconstruct topological shape structures. To resolve this dilemma, we introduce LIST, a novel neural architecture that leverages local and global image features to accurately reconstruct the geometric and topological structure of a 3D object from a single image. We utilize global 2D features to predict a coarse shape of the target object and then use it as a base for higher-resolution reconstruction. By leveraging both local 2D features from the image and 3D features from the coarse prediction, we can predict the signed distance between an arbitrary point and the target surface via an implicit predictor with great accuracy. Furthermore, our model does not require camera estimation or pixel alignment. It provides an uninfluenced reconstruction from the input-view direction. Through qualitative and quantitative analysis, we show the superiority of our model in reconstructing 3D objects from both synthetic and real-world images against the state of the art.
ReconX: Reconstruct Any Scene from Sparse Views with Video Diffusion Model
Advancements in 3D scene reconstruction have transformed 2D images from the real world into 3D models, producing realistic 3D results from hundreds of input photos. Despite great success in dense-view reconstruction scenarios, rendering a detailed scene from insufficient captured views is still an ill-posed optimization problem, often resulting in artifacts and distortions in unseen areas. In this paper, we propose ReconX, a novel 3D scene reconstruction paradigm that reframes the ambiguous reconstruction challenge as a temporal generation task. The key insight is to unleash the strong generative prior of large pre-trained video diffusion models for sparse-view reconstruction. However, 3D view consistency struggles to be accurately preserved in directly generated video frames from pre-trained models. To address this, given limited input views, the proposed ReconX first constructs a global point cloud and encodes it into a contextual space as the 3D structure condition. Guided by the condition, the video diffusion model then synthesizes video frames that are both detail-preserved and exhibit a high degree of 3D consistency, ensuring the coherence of the scene from various perspectives. Finally, we recover the 3D scene from the generated video through a confidence-aware 3D Gaussian Splatting optimization scheme. Extensive experiments on various real-world datasets show the superiority of our ReconX over state-of-the-art methods in terms of quality and generalizability.
A Unified Model for Compressed Sensing MRI Across Undersampling Patterns
Compressed Sensing MRI reconstructs images of the body's internal anatomy from undersampled measurements, thereby reducing scan time. Recently, deep learning has shown great potential for reconstructing high-fidelity images from highly undersampled measurements. However, one needs to train multiple models for different undersampling patterns and desired output image resolutions, since most networks operate on a fixed discretization. Such approaches are highly impractical in clinical settings, where undersampling patterns and image resolutions are frequently changed to accommodate different real-time imaging and diagnostic requirements. We propose a unified MRI reconstruction model robust to various measurement undersampling patterns and image resolutions. Our approach uses neural operators, a discretization-agnostic architecture applied in both image and measurement spaces, to capture local and global features. Empirically, our model improves SSIM by 11% and PSNR by 4 dB over a state-of-the-art CNN (End-to-End VarNet), with 600times faster inference than diffusion methods. The resolution-agnostic design also enables zero-shot super-resolution and extended field-of-view reconstruction, offering a versatile and efficient solution for clinical MR imaging. Our unified model offers a versatile solution for MRI, adapting seamlessly to various measurement undersampling and imaging resolutions, making it highly effective for flexible and reliable clinical imaging. Our code is available at https://armeet.ca/nomri.
NeTO:Neural Reconstruction of Transparent Objects with Self-Occlusion Aware Refraction-Tracing
We present a novel method, called NeTO, for capturing 3D geometry of solid transparent objects from 2D images via volume rendering. Reconstructing transparent objects is a very challenging task, which is ill-suited for general-purpose reconstruction techniques due to the specular light transport phenomena. Although existing refraction-tracing based methods, designed specially for this task, achieve impressive results, they still suffer from unstable optimization and loss of fine details, since the explicit surface representation they adopted is difficult to be optimized, and the self-occlusion problem is ignored for refraction-tracing. In this paper, we propose to leverage implicit Signed Distance Function (SDF) as surface representation, and optimize the SDF field via volume rendering with a self-occlusion aware refractive ray tracing. The implicit representation enables our method to be capable of reconstructing high-quality reconstruction even with a limited set of images, and the self-occlusion aware strategy makes it possible for our method to accurately reconstruct the self-occluded regions. Experiments show that our method achieves faithful reconstruction results and outperforms prior works by a large margin. Visit our project page at https://www.xxlong.site/NeTO/
CVRecon: Rethinking 3D Geometric Feature Learning For Neural Reconstruction
Recent advances in neural reconstruction using posed image sequences have made remarkable progress. However, due to the lack of depth information, existing volumetric-based techniques simply duplicate 2D image features of the object surface along the entire camera ray. We contend this duplication introduces noise in empty and occluded spaces, posing challenges for producing high-quality 3D geometry. Drawing inspiration from traditional multi-view stereo methods, we propose an end-to-end 3D neural reconstruction framework CVRecon, designed to exploit the rich geometric embedding in the cost volumes to facilitate 3D geometric feature learning. Furthermore, we present Ray-contextual Compensated Cost Volume (RCCV), a novel 3D geometric feature representation that encodes view-dependent information with improved integrity and robustness. Through comprehensive experiments, we demonstrate that our approach significantly improves the reconstruction quality in various metrics and recovers clear fine details of the 3D geometries. Our extensive ablation studies provide insights into the development of effective 3D geometric feature learning schemes. Project page: https://cvrecon.ziyue.cool/
Dream-to-Recon: Monocular 3D Reconstruction with Diffusion-Depth Distillation from Single Images
Volumetric scene reconstruction from a single image is crucial for a broad range of applications like autonomous driving and robotics. Recent volumetric reconstruction methods achieve impressive results, but generally require expensive 3D ground truth or multi-view supervision. We propose to leverage pre-trained 2D diffusion models and depth prediction models to generate synthetic scene geometry from a single image. This can then be used to distill a feed-forward scene reconstruction model. Our experiments on the challenging KITTI-360 and Waymo datasets demonstrate that our method matches or outperforms state-of-the-art baselines that use multi-view supervision, and offers unique advantages, for example regarding dynamic scenes.
AugUndo: Scaling Up Augmentations for Monocular Depth Completion and Estimation
Unsupervised depth completion and estimation methods are trained by minimizing reconstruction error. Block artifacts from resampling, intensity saturation, and occlusions are amongst the many undesirable by-products of common data augmentation schemes that affect image reconstruction quality, and thus the training signal. Hence, typical augmentations on images viewed as essential to training pipelines in other vision tasks have seen limited use beyond small image intensity changes and flipping. The sparse depth modality in depth completion have seen even less use as intensity transformations alter the scale of the 3D scene, and geometric transformations may decimate the sparse points during resampling. We propose a method that unlocks a wide range of previously-infeasible geometric augmentations for unsupervised depth completion and estimation. This is achieved by reversing, or ``undo''-ing, geometric transformations to the coordinates of the output depth, warping the depth map back to the original reference frame. This enables computing the reconstruction losses using the original images and sparse depth maps, eliminating the pitfalls of naive loss computation on the augmented inputs and allowing us to scale up augmentations to boost performance. We demonstrate our method on indoor (VOID) and outdoor (KITTI) datasets, where we consistently improve upon recent methods across both datasets as well as generalization to four other datasets. Code available at: https://github.com/alexklwong/augundo.
Unsupervised Imaging Inverse Problems with Diffusion Distribution Matching
This work addresses image restoration tasks through the lens of inverse problems using unpaired datasets. In contrast to traditional approaches -- which typically assume full knowledge of the forward model or access to paired degraded and ground-truth images -- the proposed method operates under minimal assumptions and relies only on small, unpaired datasets. This makes it particularly well-suited for real-world scenarios, where the forward model is often unknown or misspecified, and collecting paired data is costly or infeasible. The method leverages conditional flow matching to model the distribution of degraded observations, while simultaneously learning the forward model via a distribution-matching loss that arises naturally from the framework. Empirically, it outperforms both single-image blind and unsupervised approaches on deblurring and non-uniform point spread function (PSF) calibration tasks. It also matches state-of-the-art performance on blind super-resolution. We also showcase the effectiveness of our method with a proof of concept for lens calibration: a real-world application traditionally requiring time-consuming experiments and specialized equipment. In contrast, our approach achieves this with minimal data acquisition effort.
Neural-PBIR Reconstruction of Shape, Material, and Illumination
Reconstructing the shape and spatially varying surface appearances of a physical-world object as well as its surrounding illumination based on 2D images (e.g., photographs) of the object has been a long-standing problem in computer vision and graphics. In this paper, we introduce an accurate and highly efficient object reconstruction pipeline combining neural based object reconstruction and physics-based inverse rendering (PBIR). Our pipeline firstly leverages a neural SDF based shape reconstruction to produce high-quality but potentially imperfect object shape. Then, we introduce a neural material and lighting distillation stage to achieve high-quality predictions for material and illumination. In the last stage, initialized by the neural predictions, we perform PBIR to refine the initial results and obtain the final high-quality reconstruction of object shape, material, and illumination. Experimental results demonstrate our pipeline significantly outperforms existing methods quality-wise and performance-wise.
LM-Gaussian: Boost Sparse-view 3D Gaussian Splatting with Large Model Priors
We aim to address sparse-view reconstruction of a 3D scene by leveraging priors from large-scale vision models. While recent advancements such as 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) have demonstrated remarkable successes in 3D reconstruction, these methods typically necessitate hundreds of input images that densely capture the underlying scene, making them time-consuming and impractical for real-world applications. However, sparse-view reconstruction is inherently ill-posed and under-constrained, often resulting in inferior and incomplete outcomes. This is due to issues such as failed initialization, overfitting on input images, and a lack of details. To mitigate these challenges, we introduce LM-Gaussian, a method capable of generating high-quality reconstructions from a limited number of images. Specifically, we propose a robust initialization module that leverages stereo priors to aid in the recovery of camera poses and the reliable point clouds. Additionally, a diffusion-based refinement is iteratively applied to incorporate image diffusion priors into the Gaussian optimization process to preserve intricate scene details. Finally, we utilize video diffusion priors to further enhance the rendered images for realistic visual effects. Overall, our approach significantly reduces the data acquisition requirements compared to previous 3DGS methods. We validate the effectiveness of our framework through experiments on various public datasets, demonstrating its potential for high-quality 360-degree scene reconstruction. Visual results are on our website.
Gaussian Scenes: Pose-Free Sparse-View Scene Reconstruction using Depth-Enhanced Diffusion Priors
In this work, we introduce a generative approach for pose-free reconstruction of 360^{circ} scenes from a limited number of uncalibrated 2D images. Pose-free scene reconstruction from incomplete, unposed observations is usually regularized with depth estimation or 3D foundational priors. While recent advances have enabled sparse-view reconstruction of unbounded scenes with known camera poses using diffusion priors, these methods rely on explicit camera embeddings for extrapolating unobserved regions. This reliance limits their application in pose-free settings, where view-specific data is only implicitly available. To address this, we propose an instruction-following RGBD diffusion model designed to inpaint missing details and remove artifacts in novel view renders and depth maps of a 3D scene. We also propose a novel confidence measure for Gaussian representations to allow for better detection of these artifacts. By progressively integrating these novel views in a Gaussian-SLAM-inspired process, we achieve a multi-view-consistent Gaussian representation. Evaluations on the MipNeRF360 dataset demonstrate that our method surpasses existing pose-free techniques and performs competitively with state-of-the-art posed reconstruction methods in complex 360^{circ} scenes.
BirdNeRF: Fast Neural Reconstruction of Large-Scale Scenes From Aerial Imagery
In this study, we introduce BirdNeRF, an adaptation of Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) designed specifically for reconstructing large-scale scenes using aerial imagery. Unlike previous research focused on small-scale and object-centric NeRF reconstruction, our approach addresses multiple challenges, including (1) Addressing the issue of slow training and rendering associated with large models. (2) Meeting the computational demands necessitated by modeling a substantial number of images, requiring extensive resources such as high-performance GPUs. (3) Overcoming significant artifacts and low visual fidelity commonly observed in large-scale reconstruction tasks due to limited model capacity. Specifically, we present a novel bird-view pose-based spatial decomposition algorithm that decomposes a large aerial image set into multiple small sets with appropriately sized overlaps, allowing us to train individual NeRFs of sub-scene. This decomposition approach not only decouples rendering time from the scene size but also enables rendering to scale seamlessly to arbitrarily large environments. Moreover, it allows for per-block updates of the environment, enhancing the flexibility and adaptability of the reconstruction process. Additionally, we propose a projection-guided novel view re-rendering strategy, which aids in effectively utilizing the independently trained sub-scenes to generate superior rendering results. We evaluate our approach on existing datasets as well as against our own drone footage, improving reconstruction speed by 10x over classical photogrammetry software and 50x over state-of-the-art large-scale NeRF solution, on a single GPU with similar rendering quality.
LiftRefine: Progressively Refined View Synthesis from 3D Lifting with Volume-Triplane Representations
We propose a new view synthesis method via synthesizing a 3D neural field from both single or few-view input images. To address the ill-posed nature of the image-to-3D generation problem, we devise a two-stage method that involves a reconstruction model and a diffusion model for view synthesis. Our reconstruction model first lifts one or more input images to the 3D space from a volume as the coarse-scale 3D representation followed by a tri-plane as the fine-scale 3D representation. To mitigate the ambiguity in occluded regions, our diffusion model then hallucinates missing details in the rendered images from tri-planes. We then introduce a new progressive refinement technique that iteratively applies the reconstruction and diffusion model to gradually synthesize novel views, boosting the overall quality of the 3D representations and their rendering. Empirical evaluation demonstrates the superiority of our method over state-of-the-art methods on the synthetic SRN-Car dataset, the in-the-wild CO3D dataset, and large-scale Objaverse dataset while achieving both sampling efficacy and multi-view consistency.
UniRes: Universal Image Restoration for Complex Degradations
Real-world image restoration is hampered by diverse degradations stemming from varying capture conditions, capture devices and post-processing pipelines. Existing works make improvements through simulating those degradations and leveraging image generative priors, however generalization to in-the-wild data remains an unresolved problem. In this paper, we focus on complex degradations, i.e., arbitrary mixtures of multiple types of known degradations, which is frequently seen in the wild. A simple yet flexible diffusionbased framework, named UniRes, is proposed to address such degradations in an end-to-end manner. It combines several specialized models during the diffusion sampling steps, hence transferring the knowledge from several well-isolated restoration tasks to the restoration of complex in-the-wild degradations. This only requires well-isolated training data for several degradation types. The framework is flexible as extensions can be added through a unified formulation, and the fidelity-quality trade-off can be adjusted through a new paradigm. Our proposed method is evaluated on both complex-degradation and single-degradation image restoration datasets. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experimental results show consistent performance gain especially for images with complex degradations.
AerialMegaDepth: Learning Aerial-Ground Reconstruction and View Synthesis
We explore the task of geometric reconstruction of images captured from a mixture of ground and aerial views. Current state-of-the-art learning-based approaches fail to handle the extreme viewpoint variation between aerial-ground image pairs. Our hypothesis is that the lack of high-quality, co-registered aerial-ground datasets for training is a key reason for this failure. Such data is difficult to assemble precisely because it is difficult to reconstruct in a scalable way. To overcome this challenge, we propose a scalable framework combining pseudo-synthetic renderings from 3D city-wide meshes (e.g., Google Earth) with real, ground-level crowd-sourced images (e.g., MegaDepth). The pseudo-synthetic data simulates a wide range of aerial viewpoints, while the real, crowd-sourced images help improve visual fidelity for ground-level images where mesh-based renderings lack sufficient detail, effectively bridging the domain gap between real images and pseudo-synthetic renderings. Using this hybrid dataset, we fine-tune several state-of-the-art algorithms and achieve significant improvements on real-world, zero-shot aerial-ground tasks. For example, we observe that baseline DUSt3R localizes fewer than 5% of aerial-ground pairs within 5 degrees of camera rotation error, while fine-tuning with our data raises accuracy to nearly 56%, addressing a major failure point in handling large viewpoint changes. Beyond camera estimation and scene reconstruction, our dataset also improves performance on downstream tasks like novel-view synthesis in challenging aerial-ground scenarios, demonstrating the practical value of our approach in real-world applications.
EndoPBR: Material and Lighting Estimation for Photorealistic Surgical Simulations via Physically-based Rendering
The lack of labeled datasets in 3D vision for surgical scenes inhibits the development of robust 3D reconstruction algorithms in the medical domain. Despite the popularity of Neural Radiance Fields and 3D Gaussian Splatting in the general computer vision community, these systems have yet to find consistent success in surgical scenes due to challenges such as non-stationary lighting and non-Lambertian surfaces. As a result, the need for labeled surgical datasets continues to grow. In this work, we introduce a differentiable rendering framework for material and lighting estimation from endoscopic images and known geometry. Compared to previous approaches that model lighting and material jointly as radiance, we explicitly disentangle these scene properties for robust and photorealistic novel view synthesis. To disambiguate the training process, we formulate domain-specific properties inherent in surgical scenes. Specifically, we model the scene lighting as a simple spotlight and material properties as a bidirectional reflectance distribution function, parameterized by a neural network. By grounding color predictions in the rendering equation, we can generate photorealistic images at arbitrary camera poses. We evaluate our method with various sequences from the Colonoscopy 3D Video Dataset and show that our method produces competitive novel view synthesis results compared with other approaches. Furthermore, we demonstrate that synthetic data can be used to develop 3D vision algorithms by finetuning a depth estimation model with our rendered outputs. Overall, we see that the depth estimation performance is on par with fine-tuning with the original real images.
ClaraVid: A Holistic Scene Reconstruction Benchmark From Aerial Perspective With Delentropy-Based Complexity Profiling
The development of aerial holistic scene understanding algorithms is hindered by the scarcity of comprehensive datasets that enable both semantic and geometric reconstruction. While synthetic datasets offer an alternative, existing options exhibit task-specific limitations, unrealistic scene compositions, and rendering artifacts that compromise real-world applicability. We introduce ClaraVid, a synthetic aerial dataset specifically designed to overcome these limitations. Comprising 16,917 high-resolution images captured at 4032x3024 from multiple viewpoints across diverse landscapes, ClaraVid provides dense depth maps, panoptic segmentation, sparse point clouds, and dynamic object masks, while mitigating common rendering artifacts. To further advance neural reconstruction, we introduce the Delentropic Scene Profile (DSP), a novel complexity metric derived from differential entropy analysis, designed to quantitatively assess scene difficulty and inform reconstruction tasks. Utilizing DSP, we systematically benchmark neural reconstruction methods, uncovering a consistent, measurable correlation between scene complexity and reconstruction accuracy. Empirical results indicate that higher delentropy strongly correlates with increased reconstruction errors, validating DSP as a reliable complexity prior. Currently under review, upon acceptance the data and code will be available at https://rdbch.github.io/claravid{rdbch.github.io/ClaraVid}.
INFWIDE: Image and Feature Space Wiener Deconvolution Network for Non-blind Image Deblurring in Low-Light Conditions
Under low-light environment, handheld photography suffers from severe camera shake under long exposure settings. Although existing deblurring algorithms have shown promising performance on well-exposed blurry images, they still cannot cope with low-light snapshots. Sophisticated noise and saturation regions are two dominating challenges in practical low-light deblurring. In this work, we propose a novel non-blind deblurring method dubbed image and feature space Wiener deconvolution network (INFWIDE) to tackle these problems systematically. In terms of algorithm design, INFWIDE proposes a two-branch architecture, which explicitly removes noise and hallucinates saturated regions in the image space and suppresses ringing artifacts in the feature space, and integrates the two complementary outputs with a subtle multi-scale fusion network for high quality night photograph deblurring. For effective network training, we design a set of loss functions integrating a forward imaging model and backward reconstruction to form a close-loop regularization to secure good convergence of the deep neural network. Further, to optimize INFWIDE's applicability in real low-light conditions, a physical-process-based low-light noise model is employed to synthesize realistic noisy night photographs for model training. Taking advantage of the traditional Wiener deconvolution algorithm's physically driven characteristics and arisen deep neural network's representation ability, INFWIDE can recover fine details while suppressing the unpleasant artifacts during deblurring. Extensive experiments on synthetic data and real data demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed approach.
Real-ESRGAN: Training Real-World Blind Super-Resolution with Pure Synthetic Data
Though many attempts have been made in blind super-resolution to restore low-resolution images with unknown and complex degradations, they are still far from addressing general real-world degraded images. In this work, we extend the powerful ESRGAN to a practical restoration application (namely, Real-ESRGAN), which is trained with pure synthetic data. Specifically, a high-order degradation modeling process is introduced to better simulate complex real-world degradations. We also consider the common ringing and overshoot artifacts in the synthesis process. In addition, we employ a U-Net discriminator with spectral normalization to increase discriminator capability and stabilize the training dynamics. Extensive comparisons have shown its superior visual performance than prior works on various real datasets. We also provide efficient implementations to synthesize training pairs on the fly.
AnyCalib: On-Manifold Learning for Model-Agnostic Single-View Camera Calibration
We present AnyCalib, a method for calibrating the intrinsic parameters of a camera from a single in-the-wild image, that is agnostic to the camera model. Current methods are predominantly tailored to specific camera models and/or require extrinsic cues, such as the direction of gravity, to be visible in the image. In contrast, we argue that the perspective and distortion cues inherent in images are sufficient for model-agnostic camera calibration. To demonstrate this, we frame the calibration process as the regression of the rays corresponding to each pixel. We show, for the first time, that this intermediate representation allows for a closed-form recovery of the intrinsics for a wide range of camera models, including but not limited to: pinhole, Brown-Conrady and Kannala-Brandt. Our approach also applies to edited -- cropped and stretched -- images. Experimentally, we demonstrate that AnyCalib consistently outperforms alternative methods, including 3D foundation models, despite being trained on orders of magnitude less data. Code is available at https://github.com/javrtg/AnyCalib.
Negative-prompt Inversion: Fast Image Inversion for Editing with Text-guided Diffusion Models
In image editing employing diffusion models, it is crucial to preserve the reconstruction quality of the original image while changing its style. Although existing methods ensure reconstruction quality through optimization, a drawback of these is the significant amount of time required for optimization. In this paper, we propose negative-prompt inversion, a method capable of achieving equivalent reconstruction solely through forward propagation without optimization, thereby enabling much faster editing processes. We experimentally demonstrate that the reconstruction quality of our method is comparable to that of existing methods, allowing for inversion at a resolution of 512 pixels and with 50 sampling steps within approximately 5 seconds, which is more than 30 times faster than null-text inversion. Reduction of the computation time by the proposed method further allows us to use a larger number of sampling steps in diffusion models to improve the reconstruction quality with a moderate increase in computation time.
HORT: Monocular Hand-held Objects Reconstruction with Transformers
Reconstructing hand-held objects in 3D from monocular images remains a significant challenge in computer vision. Most existing approaches rely on implicit 3D representations, which produce overly smooth reconstructions and are time-consuming to generate explicit 3D shapes. While more recent methods directly reconstruct point clouds with diffusion models, the multi-step denoising makes high-resolution reconstruction inefficient. To address these limitations, we propose a transformer-based model to efficiently reconstruct dense 3D point clouds of hand-held objects. Our method follows a coarse-to-fine strategy, first generating a sparse point cloud from the image and progressively refining it into a dense representation using pixel-aligned image features. To enhance reconstruction accuracy, we integrate image features with 3D hand geometry to jointly predict the object point cloud and its pose relative to the hand. Our model is trained end-to-end for optimal performance. Experimental results on both synthetic and real datasets demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art accuracy with much faster inference speed, while generalizing well to in-the-wild images.
GRM: Large Gaussian Reconstruction Model for Efficient 3D Reconstruction and Generation
We introduce GRM, a large-scale reconstructor capable of recovering a 3D asset from sparse-view images in around 0.1s. GRM is a feed-forward transformer-based model that efficiently incorporates multi-view information to translate the input pixels into pixel-aligned Gaussians, which are unprojected to create a set of densely distributed 3D Gaussians representing a scene. Together, our transformer architecture and the use of 3D Gaussians unlock a scalable and efficient reconstruction framework. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our method over alternatives regarding both reconstruction quality and efficiency. We also showcase the potential of GRM in generative tasks, i.e., text-to-3D and image-to-3D, by integrating it with existing multi-view diffusion models. Our project website is at: https://justimyhxu.github.io/projects/grm/.
Navigating Image Restoration with VAR's Distribution Alignment Prior
Generative models trained on extensive high-quality datasets effectively capture the structural and statistical properties of clean images, rendering them powerful priors for transforming degraded features into clean ones in image restoration. VAR, a novel image generative paradigm, surpasses diffusion models in generation quality by applying a next-scale prediction approach. It progressively captures both global structures and fine-grained details through the autoregressive process, consistent with the multi-scale restoration principle widely acknowledged in the restoration community. Furthermore, we observe that during the image reconstruction process utilizing VAR, scale predictions automatically modulate the input, facilitating the alignment of representations at subsequent scales with the distribution of clean images. To harness VAR's adaptive distribution alignment capability in image restoration tasks, we formulate the multi-scale latent representations within VAR as the restoration prior, thus advancing our delicately designed VarFormer framework. The strategic application of these priors enables our VarFormer to achieve remarkable generalization on unseen tasks while also reducing training computational costs. Extensive experiments underscores that our VarFormer outperforms existing multi-task image restoration methods across various restoration tasks.
NeuS: Learning Neural Implicit Surfaces by Volume Rendering for Multi-view Reconstruction
We present a novel neural surface reconstruction method, called NeuS, for reconstructing objects and scenes with high fidelity from 2D image inputs. Existing neural surface reconstruction approaches, such as DVR and IDR, require foreground mask as supervision, easily get trapped in local minima, and therefore struggle with the reconstruction of objects with severe self-occlusion or thin structures. Meanwhile, recent neural methods for novel view synthesis, such as NeRF and its variants, use volume rendering to produce a neural scene representation with robustness of optimization, even for highly complex objects. However, extracting high-quality surfaces from this learned implicit representation is difficult because there are not sufficient surface constraints in the representation. In NeuS, we propose to represent a surface as the zero-level set of a signed distance function (SDF) and develop a new volume rendering method to train a neural SDF representation. We observe that the conventional volume rendering method causes inherent geometric errors (i.e. bias) for surface reconstruction, and therefore propose a new formulation that is free of bias in the first order of approximation, thus leading to more accurate surface reconstruction even without the mask supervision. Experiments on the DTU dataset and the BlendedMVS dataset show that NeuS outperforms the state-of-the-arts in high-quality surface reconstruction, especially for objects and scenes with complex structures and self-occlusion.
Self-Calibrating Gaussian Splatting for Large Field of View Reconstruction
In this paper, we present a self-calibrating framework that jointly optimizes camera parameters, lens distortion and 3D Gaussian representations, enabling accurate and efficient scene reconstruction. In particular, our technique enables high-quality scene reconstruction from Large field-of-view (FOV) imagery taken with wide-angle lenses, allowing the scene to be modeled from a smaller number of images. Our approach introduces a novel method for modeling complex lens distortions using a hybrid network that combines invertible residual networks with explicit grids. This design effectively regularizes the optimization process, achieving greater accuracy than conventional camera models. Additionally, we propose a cubemap-based resampling strategy to support large FOV images without sacrificing resolution or introducing distortion artifacts. Our method is compatible with the fast rasterization of Gaussian Splatting, adaptable to a wide variety of camera lens distortion, and demonstrates state-of-the-art performance on both synthetic and real-world datasets.
Multi-Branch Generative Models for Multichannel Imaging with an Application to PET/CT Joint Reconstruction
This paper presents a proof-of-concept approach for learned synergistic reconstruction of medical images using multi-branch generative models. Leveraging variational autoencoders (VAEs) and generative adversarial networks (GANs), our models learn from pairs of images simultaneously, enabling effective denoising and reconstruction. Synergistic image reconstruction is achieved by incorporating the trained models in a regularizer that evaluates the distance between the images and the model, in a similar fashion to multichannel dictionary learning (DiL). We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach on both Modified National Institute of Standards and Technology (MNIST) and positron emission tomography (PET)/computed tomography (CT) datasets, showcasing improved image quality and information sharing between modalities. Despite challenges such as patch decomposition and model limitations, our results underscore the potential of generative models for enhancing medical imaging reconstruction.
Patch-based 3D Natural Scene Generation from a Single Example
We target a 3D generative model for general natural scenes that are typically unique and intricate. Lacking the necessary volumes of training data, along with the difficulties of having ad hoc designs in presence of varying scene characteristics, renders existing setups intractable. Inspired by classical patch-based image models, we advocate for synthesizing 3D scenes at the patch level, given a single example. At the core of this work lies important algorithmic designs w.r.t the scene representation and generative patch nearest-neighbor module, that address unique challenges arising from lifting classical 2D patch-based framework to 3D generation. These design choices, on a collective level, contribute to a robust, effective, and efficient model that can generate high-quality general natural scenes with both realistic geometric structure and visual appearance, in large quantities and varieties, as demonstrated upon a variety of exemplar scenes.
LLNet: A Deep Autoencoder Approach to Natural Low-light Image Enhancement
In surveillance, monitoring and tactical reconnaissance, gathering the right visual information from a dynamic environment and accurately processing such data are essential ingredients to making informed decisions which determines the success of an operation. Camera sensors are often cost-limited in ability to clearly capture objects without defects from images or videos taken in a poorly-lit environment. The goal in many applications is to enhance the brightness, contrast and reduce noise content of such images in an on-board real-time manner. We propose a deep autoencoder-based approach to identify signal features from low-light images handcrafting and adaptively brighten images without over-amplifying the lighter parts in images (i.e., without saturation of image pixels) in high dynamic range. We show that a variant of the recently proposed stacked-sparse denoising autoencoder can learn to adaptively enhance and denoise from synthetically darkened and noisy training examples. The network can then be successfully applied to naturally low-light environment and/or hardware degraded images. Results show significant credibility of deep learning based approaches both visually and by quantitative comparison with various popular enhancing, state-of-the-art denoising and hybrid enhancing-denoising techniques.
Generative Diffusion Prior for Unified Image Restoration and Enhancement
Existing image restoration methods mostly leverage the posterior distribution of natural images. However, they often assume known degradation and also require supervised training, which restricts their adaptation to complex real applications. In this work, we propose the Generative Diffusion Prior (GDP) to effectively model the posterior distributions in an unsupervised sampling manner. GDP utilizes a pre-train denoising diffusion generative model (DDPM) for solving linear inverse, non-linear, or blind problems. Specifically, GDP systematically explores a protocol of conditional guidance, which is verified more practical than the commonly used guidance way. Furthermore, GDP is strength at optimizing the parameters of degradation model during the denoising process, achieving blind image restoration. Besides, we devise hierarchical guidance and patch-based methods, enabling the GDP to generate images of arbitrary resolutions. Experimentally, we demonstrate GDP's versatility on several image datasets for linear problems, such as super-resolution, deblurring, inpainting, and colorization, as well as non-linear and blind issues, such as low-light enhancement and HDR image recovery. GDP outperforms the current leading unsupervised methods on the diverse benchmarks in reconstruction quality and perceptual quality. Moreover, GDP also generalizes well for natural images or synthesized images with arbitrary sizes from various tasks out of the distribution of the ImageNet training set.
A Restoration Network as an Implicit Prior
Image denoisers have been shown to be powerful priors for solving inverse problems in imaging. In this work, we introduce a generalization of these methods that allows any image restoration network to be used as an implicit prior. The proposed method uses priors specified by deep neural networks pre-trained as general restoration operators. The method provides a principled approach for adapting state-of-the-art restoration models for other inverse problems. Our theoretical result analyzes its convergence to a stationary point of a global functional associated with the restoration operator. Numerical results show that the method using a super-resolution prior achieves state-of-the-art performance both quantitatively and qualitatively. Overall, this work offers a step forward for solving inverse problems by enabling the use of powerful pre-trained restoration models as priors.
SceneRF: Self-Supervised Monocular 3D Scene Reconstruction with Radiance Fields
3D reconstruction from a single 2D image was extensively covered in the literature but relies on depth supervision at training time, which limits its applicability. To relax the dependence to depth we propose SceneRF, a self-supervised monocular scene reconstruction method using only posed image sequences for training. Fueled by the recent progress in neural radiance fields (NeRF) we optimize a radiance field though with explicit depth optimization and a novel probabilistic sampling strategy to efficiently handle large scenes. At inference, a single input image suffices to hallucinate novel depth views which are fused together to obtain 3D scene reconstruction. Thorough experiments demonstrate that we outperform all baselines for novel depth views synthesis and scene reconstruction, on indoor BundleFusion and outdoor SemanticKITTI. Code is available at https://astra-vision.github.io/SceneRF .
Unlimited-Size Diffusion Restoration
Recently, using diffusion models for zero-shot image restoration (IR) has become a new hot paradigm. This type of method only needs to use the pre-trained off-the-shelf diffusion models, without any finetuning, and can directly handle various IR tasks. The upper limit of the restoration performance depends on the pre-trained diffusion models, which are in rapid evolution. However, current methods only discuss how to deal with fixed-size images, but dealing with images of arbitrary sizes is very important for practical applications. This paper focuses on how to use those diffusion-based zero-shot IR methods to deal with any size while maintaining the excellent characteristics of zero-shot. A simple way to solve arbitrary size is to divide it into fixed-size patches and solve each patch independently. But this may yield significant artifacts since it neither considers the global semantics of all patches nor the local information of adjacent patches. Inspired by the Range-Null space Decomposition, we propose the Mask-Shift Restoration to address local incoherence and propose the Hierarchical Restoration to alleviate out-of-domain issues. Our simple, parameter-free approaches can be used not only for image restoration but also for image generation of unlimited sizes, with the potential to be a general tool for diffusion models. Code: https://github.com/wyhuai/DDNM/tree/main/hq_demo
MTFusion: Reconstructing Any 3D Object from Single Image Using Multi-word Textual Inversion
Reconstructing 3D models from single-view images is a long-standing problem in computer vision. The latest advances for single-image 3D reconstruction extract a textual description from the input image and further utilize it to synthesize 3D models. However, existing methods focus on capturing a single key attribute of the image (e.g., object type, artistic style) and fail to consider the multi-perspective information required for accurate 3D reconstruction, such as object shape and material properties. Besides, the reliance on Neural Radiance Fields hinders their ability to reconstruct intricate surfaces and texture details. In this work, we propose MTFusion, which leverages both image data and textual descriptions for high-fidelity 3D reconstruction. Our approach consists of two stages. First, we adopt a novel multi-word textual inversion technique to extract a detailed text description capturing the image's characteristics. Then, we use this description and the image to generate a 3D model with FlexiCubes. Additionally, MTFusion enhances FlexiCubes by employing a special decoder network for Signed Distance Functions, leading to faster training and finer surface representation. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that our MTFusion surpasses existing image-to-3D methods on a wide range of synthetic and real-world images. Furthermore, the ablation study proves the effectiveness of our network designs.
Neural Parametric Gaussians for Monocular Non-Rigid Object Reconstruction
Reconstructing dynamic objects from monocular videos is a severely underconstrained and challenging problem, and recent work has approached it in various directions. However, owing to the ill-posed nature of this problem, there has been no solution that can provide consistent, high-quality novel views from camera positions that are significantly different from the training views. In this work, we introduce Neural Parametric Gaussians (NPGs) to take on this challenge by imposing a two-stage approach: first, we fit a low-rank neural deformation model, which then is used as regularization for non-rigid reconstruction in the second stage. The first stage learns the object's deformations such that it preserves consistency in novel views. The second stage obtains high reconstruction quality by optimizing 3D Gaussians that are driven by the coarse model. To this end, we introduce a local 3D Gaussian representation, where temporally shared Gaussians are anchored in and deformed by local oriented volumes. The resulting combined model can be rendered as radiance fields, resulting in high-quality photo-realistic reconstructions of the non-rigidly deforming objects, maintaining 3D consistency across novel views. We demonstrate that NPGs achieve superior results compared to previous works, especially in challenging scenarios with few multi-view cues.
RawHDR: High Dynamic Range Image Reconstruction from a Single Raw Image
High dynamic range (HDR) images capture much more intensity levels than standard ones. Current methods predominantly generate HDR images from 8-bit low dynamic range (LDR) sRGB images that have been degraded by the camera processing pipeline. However, it becomes a formidable task to retrieve extremely high dynamic range scenes from such limited bit-depth data. Unlike existing methods, the core idea of this work is to incorporate more informative Raw sensor data to generate HDR images, aiming to recover scene information in hard regions (the darkest and brightest areas of an HDR scene). To this end, we propose a model tailor-made for Raw images, harnessing the unique features of Raw data to facilitate the Raw-to-HDR mapping. Specifically, we learn exposure masks to separate the hard and easy regions of a high dynamic scene. Then, we introduce two important guidances, dual intensity guidance, which guides less informative channels with more informative ones, and global spatial guidance, which extrapolates scene specifics over an extended spatial domain. To verify our Raw-to-HDR approach, we collect a large Raw/HDR paired dataset for both training and testing. Our empirical evaluations validate the superiority of the proposed Raw-to-HDR reconstruction model, as well as our newly captured dataset in the experiments.
Zero-1-to-3: Zero-shot One Image to 3D Object
We introduce Zero-1-to-3, a framework for changing the camera viewpoint of an object given just a single RGB image. To perform novel view synthesis in this under-constrained setting, we capitalize on the geometric priors that large-scale diffusion models learn about natural images. Our conditional diffusion model uses a synthetic dataset to learn controls of the relative camera viewpoint, which allow new images to be generated of the same object under a specified camera transformation. Even though it is trained on a synthetic dataset, our model retains a strong zero-shot generalization ability to out-of-distribution datasets as well as in-the-wild images, including impressionist paintings. Our viewpoint-conditioned diffusion approach can further be used for the task of 3D reconstruction from a single image. Qualitative and quantitative experiments show that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art single-view 3D reconstruction and novel view synthesis models by leveraging Internet-scale pre-training.
Single-Step Latent Diffusion for Underwater Image Restoration
Underwater image restoration algorithms seek to restore the color, contrast, and appearance of a scene that is imaged underwater. They are a critical tool in applications ranging from marine ecology and aquaculture to underwater construction and archaeology. While existing pixel-domain diffusion-based image restoration approaches are effective at restoring simple scenes with limited depth variation, they are computationally intensive and often generate unrealistic artifacts when applied to scenes with complex geometry and significant depth variation. In this work we overcome these limitations by combining a novel network architecture (SLURPP) with an accurate synthetic data generation pipeline. SLURPP combines pretrained latent diffusion models -- which encode strong priors on the geometry and depth of scenes -- with an explicit scene decomposition -- which allows one to model and account for the effects of light attenuation and backscattering. To train SLURPP we design a physics-based underwater image synthesis pipeline that applies varied and realistic underwater degradation effects to existing terrestrial image datasets. This approach enables the generation of diverse training data with dense medium/degradation annotations. We evaluate our method extensively on both synthetic and real-world benchmarks and demonstrate state-of-the-art performance. Notably, SLURPP is over 200X faster than existing diffusion-based methods while offering ~ 3 dB improvement in PSNR on synthetic benchmarks. It also offers compelling qualitative improvements on real-world data. Project website https://tianfwang.github.io/slurpp/.
NeRF: Representing Scenes as Neural Radiance Fields for View Synthesis
We present a method that achieves state-of-the-art results for synthesizing novel views of complex scenes by optimizing an underlying continuous volumetric scene function using a sparse set of input views. Our algorithm represents a scene using a fully-connected (non-convolutional) deep network, whose input is a single continuous 5D coordinate (spatial location (x,y,z) and viewing direction (theta, phi)) and whose output is the volume density and view-dependent emitted radiance at that spatial location. We synthesize views by querying 5D coordinates along camera rays and use classic volume rendering techniques to project the output colors and densities into an image. Because volume rendering is naturally differentiable, the only input required to optimize our representation is a set of images with known camera poses. We describe how to effectively optimize neural radiance fields to render photorealistic novel views of scenes with complicated geometry and appearance, and demonstrate results that outperform prior work on neural rendering and view synthesis. View synthesis results are best viewed as videos, so we urge readers to view our supplementary video for convincing comparisons.
Controlling the Latent Diffusion Model for Generative Image Shadow Removal via Residual Generation
Large-scale generative models have achieved remarkable advancements in various visual tasks, yet their application to shadow removal in images remains challenging. These models often generate diverse, realistic details without adequate focus on fidelity, failing to meet the crucial requirements of shadow removal, which necessitates precise preservation of image content. In contrast to prior approaches that aimed to regenerate shadow-free images from scratch, this paper utilizes diffusion models to generate and refine image residuals. This strategy fully uses the inherent detailed information within shadowed images, resulting in a more efficient and faithful reconstruction of shadow-free content. Additionally, to revent the accumulation of errors during the generation process, a crosstimestep self-enhancement training strategy is proposed. This strategy leverages the network itself to augment the training data, not only increasing the volume of data but also enabling the network to dynamically correct its generation trajectory, ensuring a more accurate and robust output. In addition, to address the loss of original details in the process of image encoding and decoding of large generative models, a content-preserved encoder-decoder structure is designed with a control mechanism and multi-scale skip connections to achieve high-fidelity shadow-free image reconstruction. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can reproduce high-quality results based on a large latent diffusion prior and faithfully preserve the original contents in shadow regions.
CAP4D: Creating Animatable 4D Portrait Avatars with Morphable Multi-View Diffusion Models
Reconstructing photorealistic and dynamic portrait avatars from images is essential to many applications including advertising, visual effects, and virtual reality. Depending on the application, avatar reconstruction involves different capture setups and constraints - for example, visual effects studios use camera arrays to capture hundreds of reference images, while content creators may seek to animate a single portrait image downloaded from the internet. As such, there is a large and heterogeneous ecosystem of methods for avatar reconstruction. Techniques based on multi-view stereo or neural rendering achieve the highest quality results, but require hundreds of reference images. Recent generative models produce convincing avatars from a single reference image, but visual fidelity yet lags behind multi-view techniques. Here, we present CAP4D: an approach that uses a morphable multi-view diffusion model to reconstruct photoreal 4D (dynamic 3D) portrait avatars from any number of reference images (i.e., one to 100) and animate and render them in real time. Our approach demonstrates state-of-the-art performance for single-, few-, and multi-image 4D portrait avatar reconstruction, and takes steps to bridge the gap in visual fidelity between single-image and multi-view reconstruction techniques.
Pruning Overparameterized Multi-Task Networks for Degraded Web Image Restoration
Image quality is a critical factor in delivering visually appealing content on web platforms. However, images often suffer from degradation due to lossy operations applied by online social networks (OSNs), negatively affecting user experience. Image restoration is the process of recovering a clean high-quality image from a given degraded input. Recently, multi-task (all-in-one) image restoration models have gained significant attention, due to their ability to simultaneously handle different types of image degradations. However, these models often come with an excessively high number of trainable parameters, making them computationally inefficient. In this paper, we propose a strategy for compressing multi-task image restoration models. We aim to discover highly sparse subnetworks within overparameterized deep models that can match or even surpass the performance of their dense counterparts. The proposed model, namely MIR-L, utilizes an iterative pruning strategy that removes low-magnitude weights across multiple rounds, while resetting the remaining weights to their original initialization. This iterative process is important for the multi-task image restoration model's optimization, effectively uncovering "winning tickets" that maintain or exceed state-of-the-art performance at high sparsity levels. Experimental evaluation on benchmark datasets for the deraining, dehazing, and denoising tasks shows that MIR-L retains only 10% of the trainable parameters while maintaining high image restoration performance. Our code, datasets and pre-trained models are made publicly available at https://github.com/Thomkat/MIR-L.
Multi-view Surface Reconstruction Using Normal and Reflectance Cues
Achieving high-fidelity 3D surface reconstruction while preserving fine details remains challenging, especially in the presence of materials with complex reflectance properties and without a dense-view setup. In this paper, we introduce a versatile framework that incorporates multi-view normal and optionally reflectance maps into radiance-based surface reconstruction. Our approach employs a pixel-wise joint re-parametrization of reflectance and surface normals, representing them as a vector of radiances under simulated, varying illumination. This formulation enables seamless incorporation into standard surface reconstruction pipelines, such as traditional multi-view stereo (MVS) frameworks or modern neural volume rendering (NVR) ones. Combined with the latter, our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on multi-view photometric stereo (MVPS) benchmark datasets, including DiLiGenT-MV, LUCES-MV and Skoltech3D. In particular, our method excels in reconstructing fine-grained details and handling challenging visibility conditions. The present paper is an extended version of the earlier conference paper by Brument et al. (in Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2024), featuring an accelerated and more robust algorithm as well as a broader empirical evaluation. The code and data relative to this article is available at https://github.com/RobinBruneau/RNb-NeuS2.
GNeRF: GAN-based Neural Radiance Field without Posed Camera
We introduce GNeRF, a framework to marry Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) with Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) reconstruction for the complex scenarios with unknown and even randomly initialized camera poses. Recent NeRF-based advances have gained popularity for remarkable realistic novel view synthesis. However, most of them heavily rely on accurate camera poses estimation, while few recent methods can only optimize the unknown camera poses in roughly forward-facing scenes with relatively short camera trajectories and require rough camera poses initialization. Differently, our GNeRF only utilizes randomly initialized poses for complex outside-in scenarios. We propose a novel two-phases end-to-end framework. The first phase takes the use of GANs into the new realm for optimizing coarse camera poses and radiance fields jointly, while the second phase refines them with additional photometric loss. We overcome local minima using a hybrid and iterative optimization scheme. Extensive experiments on a variety of synthetic and natural scenes demonstrate the effectiveness of GNeRF. More impressively, our approach outperforms the baselines favorably in those scenes with repeated patterns or even low textures that are regarded as extremely challenging before.
Relightable and Animatable Neural Avatar from Sparse-View Video
This paper tackles the challenge of creating relightable and animatable neural avatars from sparse-view (or even monocular) videos of dynamic humans under unknown illumination. Compared to studio environments, this setting is more practical and accessible but poses an extremely challenging ill-posed problem. Previous neural human reconstruction methods are able to reconstruct animatable avatars from sparse views using deformed Signed Distance Fields (SDF) but cannot recover material parameters for relighting. While differentiable inverse rendering-based methods have succeeded in material recovery of static objects, it is not straightforward to extend them to dynamic humans as it is computationally intensive to compute pixel-surface intersection and light visibility on deformed SDFs for inverse rendering. To solve this challenge, we propose a Hierarchical Distance Query (HDQ) algorithm to approximate the world space distances under arbitrary human poses. Specifically, we estimate coarse distances based on a parametric human model and compute fine distances by exploiting the local deformation invariance of SDF. Based on the HDQ algorithm, we leverage sphere tracing to efficiently estimate the surface intersection and light visibility. This allows us to develop the first system to recover animatable and relightable neural avatars from sparse view (or monocular) inputs. Experiments demonstrate that our approach is able to produce superior results compared to state-of-the-art methods. Our code will be released for reproducibility.
StyleRes: Transforming the Residuals for Real Image Editing with StyleGAN
We present a novel image inversion framework and a training pipeline to achieve high-fidelity image inversion with high-quality attribute editing. Inverting real images into StyleGAN's latent space is an extensively studied problem, yet the trade-off between the image reconstruction fidelity and image editing quality remains an open challenge. The low-rate latent spaces are limited in their expressiveness power for high-fidelity reconstruction. On the other hand, high-rate latent spaces result in degradation in editing quality. In this work, to achieve high-fidelity inversion, we learn residual features in higher latent codes that lower latent codes were not able to encode. This enables preserving image details in reconstruction. To achieve high-quality editing, we learn how to transform the residual features for adapting to manipulations in latent codes. We train the framework to extract residual features and transform them via a novel architecture pipeline and cycle consistency losses. We run extensive experiments and compare our method with state-of-the-art inversion methods. Qualitative metrics and visual comparisons show significant improvements. Code: https://github.com/hamzapehlivan/StyleRes
High-Perceptual Quality JPEG Decoding via Posterior Sampling
JPEG is arguably the most popular image coding format, achieving high compression ratios via lossy quantization that may create visual artifacts degradation. Numerous attempts to remove these artifacts were conceived over the years, and common to most of these is the use of deterministic post-processing algorithms that optimize some distortion measure (e.g., PSNR, SSIM). In this paper we propose a different paradigm for JPEG artifact correction: Our method is stochastic, and the objective we target is high perceptual quality -- striving to obtain sharp, detailed and visually pleasing reconstructed images, while being consistent with the compressed input. These goals are achieved by training a stochastic conditional generator (conditioned on the compressed input), accompanied by a theoretically well-founded loss term, resulting in a sampler from the posterior distribution. Our solution offers a diverse set of plausible and fast reconstructions for a given input with perfect consistency. We demonstrate our scheme's unique properties and its superiority to a variety of alternative methods on the FFHQ and ImageNet datasets.
Shakes on a Plane: Unsupervised Depth Estimation from Unstabilized Photography
Modern mobile burst photography pipelines capture and merge a short sequence of frames to recover an enhanced image, but often disregard the 3D nature of the scene they capture, treating pixel motion between images as a 2D aggregation problem. We show that in a ''long-burst'', forty-two 12-megapixel RAW frames captured in a two-second sequence, there is enough parallax information from natural hand tremor alone to recover high-quality scene depth. To this end, we devise a test-time optimization approach that fits a neural RGB-D representation to long-burst data and simultaneously estimates scene depth and camera motion. Our plane plus depth model is trained end-to-end, and performs coarse-to-fine refinement by controlling which multi-resolution volume features the network has access to at what time during training. We validate the method experimentally, and demonstrate geometrically accurate depth reconstructions with no additional hardware or separate data pre-processing and pose-estimation steps.
Uniform Attention Maps: Boosting Image Fidelity in Reconstruction and Editing
Text-guided image generation and editing using diffusion models have achieved remarkable advancements. Among these, tuning-free methods have gained attention for their ability to perform edits without extensive model adjustments, offering simplicity and efficiency. However, existing tuning-free approaches often struggle with balancing fidelity and editing precision. Reconstruction errors in DDIM Inversion are partly attributed to the cross-attention mechanism in U-Net, which introduces misalignments during the inversion and reconstruction process. To address this, we analyze reconstruction from a structural perspective and propose a novel approach that replaces traditional cross-attention with uniform attention maps, significantly enhancing image reconstruction fidelity. Our method effectively minimizes distortions caused by varying text conditions during noise prediction. To complement this improvement, we introduce an adaptive mask-guided editing technique that integrates seamlessly with our reconstruction approach, ensuring consistency and accuracy in editing tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach not only excels in achieving high-fidelity image reconstruction but also performs robustly in real image composition and editing scenarios. This study underscores the potential of uniform attention maps to enhance the fidelity and versatility of diffusion-based image processing methods. Code is available at https://github.com/Mowenyii/Uniform-Attention-Maps.
SceNeRFlow: Time-Consistent Reconstruction of General Dynamic Scenes
Existing methods for the 4D reconstruction of general, non-rigidly deforming objects focus on novel-view synthesis and neglect correspondences. However, time consistency enables advanced downstream tasks like 3D editing, motion analysis, or virtual-asset creation. We propose SceNeRFlow to reconstruct a general, non-rigid scene in a time-consistent manner. Our dynamic-NeRF method takes multi-view RGB videos and background images from static cameras with known camera parameters as input. It then reconstructs the deformations of an estimated canonical model of the geometry and appearance in an online fashion. Since this canonical model is time-invariant, we obtain correspondences even for long-term, long-range motions. We employ neural scene representations to parametrize the components of our method. Like prior dynamic-NeRF methods, we use a backwards deformation model. We find non-trivial adaptations of this model necessary to handle larger motions: We decompose the deformations into a strongly regularized coarse component and a weakly regularized fine component, where the coarse component also extends the deformation field into the space surrounding the object, which enables tracking over time. We show experimentally that, unlike prior work that only handles small motion, our method enables the reconstruction of studio-scale motions.
Learning Image-Adaptive Codebooks for Class-Agnostic Image Restoration
Recent work on discrete generative priors, in the form of codebooks, has shown exciting performance for image reconstruction and restoration, as the discrete prior space spanned by the codebooks increases the robustness against diverse image degradations. Nevertheless, these methods require separate training of codebooks for different image categories, which limits their use to specific image categories only (e.g. face, architecture, etc.), and fail to handle arbitrary natural images. In this paper, we propose AdaCode for learning image-adaptive codebooks for class-agnostic image restoration. Instead of learning a single codebook for each image category, we learn a set of basis codebooks. For a given input image, AdaCode learns a weight map with which we compute a weighted combination of these basis codebooks for adaptive image restoration. Intuitively, AdaCode is a more flexible and expressive discrete generative prior than previous work. Experimental results demonstrate that AdaCode achieves state-of-the-art performance on image reconstruction and restoration tasks, including image super-resolution and inpainting.
Neural Kernel Surface Reconstruction
We present a novel method for reconstructing a 3D implicit surface from a large-scale, sparse, and noisy point cloud. Our approach builds upon the recently introduced Neural Kernel Fields (NKF) representation. It enjoys similar generalization capabilities to NKF, while simultaneously addressing its main limitations: (a) We can scale to large scenes through compactly supported kernel functions, which enable the use of memory-efficient sparse linear solvers. (b) We are robust to noise, through a gradient fitting solve. (c) We minimize training requirements, enabling us to learn from any dataset of dense oriented points, and even mix training data consisting of objects and scenes at different scales. Our method is capable of reconstructing millions of points in a few seconds, and handling very large scenes in an out-of-core fashion. We achieve state-of-the-art results on reconstruction benchmarks consisting of single objects, indoor scenes, and outdoor scenes.
UNISURF: Unifying Neural Implicit Surfaces and Radiance Fields for Multi-View Reconstruction
Neural implicit 3D representations have emerged as a powerful paradigm for reconstructing surfaces from multi-view images and synthesizing novel views. Unfortunately, existing methods such as DVR or IDR require accurate per-pixel object masks as supervision. At the same time, neural radiance fields have revolutionized novel view synthesis. However, NeRF's estimated volume density does not admit accurate surface reconstruction. Our key insight is that implicit surface models and radiance fields can be formulated in a unified way, enabling both surface and volume rendering using the same model. This unified perspective enables novel, more efficient sampling procedures and the ability to reconstruct accurate surfaces without input masks. We compare our method on the DTU, BlendedMVS, and a synthetic indoor dataset. Our experiments demonstrate that we outperform NeRF in terms of reconstruction quality while performing on par with IDR without requiring masks.
Density Modeling of Images using a Generalized Normalization Transformation
We introduce a parametric nonlinear transformation that is well-suited for Gaussianizing data from natural images. The data are linearly transformed, and each component is then normalized by a pooled activity measure, computed by exponentiating a weighted sum of rectified and exponentiated components and a constant. We optimize the parameters of the full transformation (linear transform, exponents, weights, constant) over a database of natural images, directly minimizing the negentropy of the responses. The optimized transformation substantially Gaussianizes the data, achieving a significantly smaller mutual information between transformed components than alternative methods including ICA and radial Gaussianization. The transformation is differentiable and can be efficiently inverted, and thus induces a density model on images. We show that samples of this model are visually similar to samples of natural image patches. We demonstrate the use of the model as a prior probability density that can be used to remove additive noise. Finally, we show that the transformation can be cascaded, with each layer optimized using the same Gaussianization objective, thus offering an unsupervised method of optimizing a deep network architecture.
CLNeRF: Continual Learning Meets NeRF
Novel view synthesis aims to render unseen views given a set of calibrated images. In practical applications, the coverage, appearance or geometry of the scene may change over time, with new images continuously being captured. Efficiently incorporating such continuous change is an open challenge. Standard NeRF benchmarks only involve scene coverage expansion. To study other practical scene changes, we propose a new dataset, World Across Time (WAT), consisting of scenes that change in appearance and geometry over time. We also propose a simple yet effective method, CLNeRF, which introduces continual learning (CL) to Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs). CLNeRF combines generative replay and the Instant Neural Graphics Primitives (NGP) architecture to effectively prevent catastrophic forgetting and efficiently update the model when new data arrives. We also add trainable appearance and geometry embeddings to NGP, allowing a single compact model to handle complex scene changes. Without the need to store historical images, CLNeRF trained sequentially over multiple scans of a changing scene performs on-par with the upper bound model trained on all scans at once. Compared to other CL baselines CLNeRF performs much better across standard benchmarks and WAT. The source code, and the WAT dataset are available at https://github.com/IntelLabs/CLNeRF. Video presentation is available at: https://youtu.be/nLRt6OoDGq0?si=8yD6k-8MMBJInQPs
AIM 2024 Sparse Neural Rendering Challenge: Dataset and Benchmark
Recent developments in differentiable and neural rendering have made impressive breakthroughs in a variety of 2D and 3D tasks, e.g. novel view synthesis, 3D reconstruction. Typically, differentiable rendering relies on a dense viewpoint coverage of the scene, such that the geometry can be disambiguated from appearance observations alone. Several challenges arise when only a few input views are available, often referred to as sparse or few-shot neural rendering. As this is an underconstrained problem, most existing approaches introduce the use of regularisation, together with a diversity of learnt and hand-crafted priors. A recurring problem in sparse rendering literature is the lack of an homogeneous, up-to-date, dataset and evaluation protocol. While high-resolution datasets are standard in dense reconstruction literature, sparse rendering methods often evaluate with low-resolution images. Additionally, data splits are inconsistent across different manuscripts, and testing ground-truth images are often publicly available, which may lead to over-fitting. In this work, we propose the Sparse Rendering (SpaRe) dataset and benchmark. We introduce a new dataset that follows the setup of the DTU MVS dataset. The dataset is composed of 97 new scenes based on synthetic, high-quality assets. Each scene has up to 64 camera views and 7 lighting configurations, rendered at 1600x1200 resolution. We release a training split of 82 scenes to foster generalizable approaches, and provide an online evaluation platform for the validation and test sets, whose ground-truth images remain hidden. We propose two different sparse configurations (3 and 9 input images respectively). This provides a powerful and convenient tool for reproducible evaluation, and enable researchers easy access to a public leaderboard with the state-of-the-art performance scores. Available at: https://sparebenchmark.github.io/
G4Splat: Geometry-Guided Gaussian Splatting with Generative Prior
Despite recent advances in leveraging generative prior from pre-trained diffusion models for 3D scene reconstruction, existing methods still face two critical limitations. First, due to the lack of reliable geometric supervision, they struggle to produce high-quality reconstructions even in observed regions, let alone in unobserved areas. Second, they lack effective mechanisms to mitigate multi-view inconsistencies in the generated images, leading to severe shape-appearance ambiguities and degraded scene geometry. In this paper, we identify accurate geometry as the fundamental prerequisite for effectively exploiting generative models to enhance 3D scene reconstruction. We first propose to leverage the prevalence of planar structures to derive accurate metric-scale depth maps, providing reliable supervision in both observed and unobserved regions. Furthermore, we incorporate this geometry guidance throughout the generative pipeline to improve visibility mask estimation, guide novel view selection, and enhance multi-view consistency when inpainting with video diffusion models, resulting in accurate and consistent scene completion. Extensive experiments on Replica, ScanNet++, and DeepBlending show that our method consistently outperforms existing baselines in both geometry and appearance reconstruction, particularly for unobserved regions. Moreover, our method naturally supports single-view inputs and unposed videos, with strong generalizability in both indoor and outdoor scenarios with practical real-world applicability. The project page is available at https://dali-jack.github.io/g4splat-web/.
NeRF-US: Removing Ultrasound Imaging Artifacts from Neural Radiance Fields in the Wild
Current methods for performing 3D reconstruction and novel view synthesis (NVS) in ultrasound imaging data often face severe artifacts when training NeRF-based approaches. The artifacts produced by current approaches differ from NeRF floaters in general scenes because of the unique nature of ultrasound capture. Furthermore, existing models fail to produce reasonable 3D reconstructions when ultrasound data is captured or obtained casually in uncontrolled environments, which is common in clinical settings. Consequently, existing reconstruction and NVS methods struggle to handle ultrasound motion, fail to capture intricate details, and cannot model transparent and reflective surfaces. In this work, we introduced NeRF-US, which incorporates 3D-geometry guidance for border probability and scattering density into NeRF training, while also utilizing ultrasound-specific rendering over traditional volume rendering. These 3D priors are learned through a diffusion model. Through experiments conducted on our new "Ultrasound in the Wild" dataset, we observed accurate, clinically plausible, artifact-free reconstructions.
Sparse3D: Distilling Multiview-Consistent Diffusion for Object Reconstruction from Sparse Views
Reconstructing 3D objects from extremely sparse views is a long-standing and challenging problem. While recent techniques employ image diffusion models for generating plausible images at novel viewpoints or for distilling pre-trained diffusion priors into 3D representations using score distillation sampling (SDS), these methods often struggle to simultaneously achieve high-quality, consistent, and detailed results for both novel-view synthesis (NVS) and geometry. In this work, we present Sparse3D, a novel 3D reconstruction method tailored for sparse view inputs. Our approach distills robust priors from a multiview-consistent diffusion model to refine a neural radiance field. Specifically, we employ a controller that harnesses epipolar features from input views, guiding a pre-trained diffusion model, such as Stable Diffusion, to produce novel-view images that maintain 3D consistency with the input. By tapping into 2D priors from powerful image diffusion models, our integrated model consistently delivers high-quality results, even when faced with open-world objects. To address the blurriness introduced by conventional SDS, we introduce the category-score distillation sampling (C-SDS) to enhance detail. We conduct experiments on CO3DV2 which is a multi-view dataset of real-world objects. Both quantitative and qualitative evaluations demonstrate that our approach outperforms previous state-of-the-art works on the metrics regarding NVS and geometry reconstruction.
BAD-Gaussians: Bundle Adjusted Deblur Gaussian Splatting
While neural rendering has demonstrated impressive capabilities in 3D scene reconstruction and novel view synthesis, it heavily relies on high-quality sharp images and accurate camera poses. Numerous approaches have been proposed to train Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) with motion-blurred images, commonly encountered in real-world scenarios such as low-light or long-exposure conditions. However, the implicit representation of NeRF struggles to accurately recover intricate details from severely motion-blurred images and cannot achieve real-time rendering. In contrast, recent advancements in 3D Gaussian Splatting achieve high-quality 3D scene reconstruction and real-time rendering by explicitly optimizing point clouds as Gaussian spheres. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach, named BAD-Gaussians (Bundle Adjusted Deblur Gaussian Splatting), which leverages explicit Gaussian representation and handles severe motion-blurred images with inaccurate camera poses to achieve high-quality scene reconstruction. Our method models the physical image formation process of motion-blurred images and jointly learns the parameters of Gaussians while recovering camera motion trajectories during exposure time. In our experiments, we demonstrate that BAD-Gaussians not only achieves superior rendering quality compared to previous state-of-the-art deblur neural rendering methods on both synthetic and real datasets but also enables real-time rendering capabilities. Our project page and source code is available at https://lingzhezhao.github.io/BAD-Gaussians/
AutoRecon: Automated 3D Object Discovery and Reconstruction
A fully automated object reconstruction pipeline is crucial for digital content creation. While the area of 3D reconstruction has witnessed profound developments, the removal of background to obtain a clean object model still relies on different forms of manual labor, such as bounding box labeling, mask annotations, and mesh manipulations. In this paper, we propose a novel framework named AutoRecon for the automated discovery and reconstruction of an object from multi-view images. We demonstrate that foreground objects can be robustly located and segmented from SfM point clouds by leveraging self-supervised 2D vision transformer features. Then, we reconstruct decomposed neural scene representations with dense supervision provided by the decomposed point clouds, resulting in accurate object reconstruction and segmentation. Experiments on the DTU, BlendedMVS and CO3D-V2 datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of AutoRecon.
Single-view 3D Scene Reconstruction with High-fidelity Shape and Texture
Reconstructing detailed 3D scenes from single-view images remains a challenging task due to limitations in existing approaches, which primarily focus on geometric shape recovery, overlooking object appearances and fine shape details. To address these challenges, we propose a novel framework for simultaneous high-fidelity recovery of object shapes and textures from single-view images. Our approach utilizes the proposed Single-view neural implicit Shape and Radiance field (SSR) representations to leverage both explicit 3D shape supervision and volume rendering of color, depth, and surface normal images. To overcome shape-appearance ambiguity under partial observations, we introduce a two-stage learning curriculum incorporating both 3D and 2D supervisions. A distinctive feature of our framework is its ability to generate fine-grained textured meshes while seamlessly integrating rendering capabilities into the single-view 3D reconstruction model. This integration enables not only improved textured 3D object reconstruction by 27.7% and 11.6% on the 3D-FRONT and Pix3D datasets, respectively, but also supports the rendering of images from novel viewpoints. Beyond individual objects, our approach facilitates composing object-level representations into flexible scene representations, thereby enabling applications such as holistic scene understanding and 3D scene editing. We conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.
DepthFM: Fast Monocular Depth Estimation with Flow Matching
Monocular depth estimation is crucial for numerous downstream vision tasks and applications. Current discriminative approaches to this problem are limited due to blurry artifacts, while state-of-the-art generative methods suffer from slow sampling due to their SDE nature. Rather than starting from noise, we seek a direct mapping from input image to depth map. We observe that this can be effectively framed using flow matching, since its straight trajectories through solution space offer efficiency and high quality. Our study demonstrates that a pre-trained image diffusion model can serve as an adequate prior for a flow matching depth model, allowing efficient training on only synthetic data to generalize to real images. We find that an auxiliary surface normals loss further improves the depth estimates. Due to the generative nature of our approach, our model reliably predicts the confidence of its depth estimates. On standard benchmarks of complex natural scenes, our lightweight approach exhibits state-of-the-art performance at favorable low computational cost despite only being trained on little synthetic data.
PanoDreamer: 3D Panorama Synthesis from a Single Image
In this paper, we present PanoDreamer, a novel method for producing a coherent 360^circ 3D scene from a single input image. Unlike existing methods that generate the scene sequentially, we frame the problem as single-image panorama and depth estimation. Once the coherent panoramic image and its corresponding depth are obtained, the scene can be reconstructed by inpainting the small occluded regions and projecting them into 3D space. Our key contribution is formulating single-image panorama and depth estimation as two optimization tasks and introducing alternating minimization strategies to effectively solve their objectives. We demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing techniques in single-image 360^circ scene reconstruction in terms of consistency and overall quality.
RETHINED: A New Benchmark and Baseline for Real-Time High-Resolution Image Inpainting On Edge Devices
Existing image inpainting methods have shown impressive completion results for low-resolution images. However, most of these algorithms fail at high resolutions and require powerful hardware, limiting their deployment on edge devices. Motivated by this, we propose the first baseline for REal-Time High-resolution image INpainting on Edge Devices (RETHINED) that is able to inpaint at ultra-high-resolution and can run in real-time (leq 30ms) in a wide variety of mobile devices. A simple, yet effective novel method formed by a lightweight Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to recover structure, followed by a resolution-agnostic patch replacement mechanism to provide detailed texture. Specially our pipeline leverages the structural capacity of CNN and the high-level detail of patch-based methods, which is a key component for high-resolution image inpainting. To demonstrate the real application of our method, we conduct an extensive analysis on various mobile-friendly devices and demonstrate similar inpainting performance while being 100 times faster than existing state-of-the-art methods. Furthemore, we realease DF8K-Inpainting, the first free-form mask UHD inpainting dataset.
Learning Continuous Exposure Value Representations for Single-Image HDR Reconstruction
Deep learning is commonly used to reconstruct HDR images from LDR images. LDR stack-based methods are used for single-image HDR reconstruction, generating an HDR image from a deep learning-generated LDR stack. However, current methods generate the stack with predetermined exposure values (EVs), which may limit the quality of HDR reconstruction. To address this, we propose the continuous exposure value representation (CEVR), which uses an implicit function to generate LDR images with arbitrary EVs, including those unseen during training. Our approach generates a continuous stack with more images containing diverse EVs, significantly improving HDR reconstruction. We use a cycle training strategy to supervise the model in generating continuous EV LDR images without corresponding ground truths. Our CEVR model outperforms existing methods, as demonstrated by experimental results.
Large Spatial Model: End-to-end Unposed Images to Semantic 3D
Reconstructing and understanding 3D structures from a limited number of images is a well-established problem in computer vision. Traditional methods usually break this task into multiple subtasks, each requiring complex transformations between different data representations. For instance, dense reconstruction through Structure-from-Motion (SfM) involves converting images into key points, optimizing camera parameters, and estimating structures. Afterward, accurate sparse reconstructions are required for further dense modeling, which is subsequently fed into task-specific neural networks. This multi-step process results in considerable processing time and increased engineering complexity. In this work, we present the Large Spatial Model (LSM), which processes unposed RGB images directly into semantic radiance fields. LSM simultaneously estimates geometry, appearance, and semantics in a single feed-forward operation, and it can generate versatile label maps by interacting with language at novel viewpoints. Leveraging a Transformer-based architecture, LSM integrates global geometry through pixel-aligned point maps. To enhance spatial attribute regression, we incorporate local context aggregation with multi-scale fusion, improving the accuracy of fine local details. To tackle the scarcity of labeled 3D semantic data and enable natural language-driven scene manipulation, we incorporate a pre-trained 2D language-based segmentation model into a 3D-consistent semantic feature field. An efficient decoder then parameterizes a set of semantic anisotropic Gaussians, facilitating supervised end-to-end learning. Extensive experiments across various tasks show that LSM unifies multiple 3D vision tasks directly from unposed images, achieving real-time semantic 3D reconstruction for the first time.
Differentiable Blocks World: Qualitative 3D Decomposition by Rendering Primitives
Given a set of calibrated images of a scene, we present an approach that produces a simple, compact, and actionable 3D world representation by means of 3D primitives. While many approaches focus on recovering high-fidelity 3D scenes, we focus on parsing a scene into mid-level 3D representations made of a small set of textured primitives. Such representations are interpretable, easy to manipulate and suited for physics-based simulations. Moreover, unlike existing primitive decomposition methods that rely on 3D input data, our approach operates directly on images through differentiable rendering. Specifically, we model primitives as textured superquadric meshes and optimize their parameters from scratch with an image rendering loss. We highlight the importance of modeling transparency for each primitive, which is critical for optimization and also enables handling varying numbers of primitives. We show that the resulting textured primitives faithfully reconstruct the input images and accurately model the visible 3D points, while providing amodal shape completions of unseen object regions. We compare our approach to the state of the art on diverse scenes from DTU, and demonstrate its robustness on real-life captures from BlendedMVS and Nerfstudio. We also showcase how our results can be used to effortlessly edit a scene or perform physical simulations. Code and video results are available at https://www.tmonnier.com/DBW .
Reconstruct, Inpaint, Finetune: Dynamic Novel-view Synthesis from Monocular Videos
We explore novel-view synthesis for dynamic scenes from monocular videos. Prior approaches rely on costly test-time optimization of 4D representations or do not preserve scene geometry when trained in a feed-forward manner. Our approach is based on three key insights: (1) covisible pixels (that are visible in both the input and target views) can be rendered by first reconstructing the dynamic 3D scene and rendering the reconstruction from the novel-views and (2) hidden pixels in novel views can be "inpainted" with feed-forward 2D video diffusion models. Notably, our video inpainting diffusion model (CogNVS) can be self-supervised from 2D videos, allowing us to train it on a large corpus of in-the-wild videos. This in turn allows for (3) CogNVS to be applied zero-shot to novel test videos via test-time finetuning. We empirically verify that CogNVS outperforms almost all prior art for novel-view synthesis of dynamic scenes from monocular videos.
InstantIR: Blind Image Restoration with Instant Generative Reference
Handling test-time unknown degradation is the major challenge in Blind Image Restoration (BIR), necessitating high model generalization. An effective strategy is to incorporate prior knowledge, either from human input or generative model. In this paper, we introduce Instant-reference Image Restoration (InstantIR), a novel diffusion-based BIR method which dynamically adjusts generation condition during inference. We first extract a compact representation of the input via a pre-trained vision encoder. At each generation step, this representation is used to decode current diffusion latent and instantiate it in the generative prior. The degraded image is then encoded with this reference, providing robust generation condition. We observe the variance of generative references fluctuate with degradation intensity, which we further leverage as an indicator for developing a sampling algorithm adaptive to input quality. Extensive experiments demonstrate InstantIR achieves state-of-the-art performance and offering outstanding visual quality. Through modulating generative references with textual description, InstantIR can restore extreme degradation and additionally feature creative restoration.
NoiseDiffusion: Correcting Noise for Image Interpolation with Diffusion Models beyond Spherical Linear Interpolation
Image interpolation based on diffusion models is promising in creating fresh and interesting images. Advanced interpolation methods mainly focus on spherical linear interpolation, where images are encoded into the noise space and then interpolated for denoising to images. However, existing methods face challenges in effectively interpolating natural images (not generated by diffusion models), thereby restricting their practical applicability. Our experimental investigations reveal that these challenges stem from the invalidity of the encoding noise, which may no longer obey the expected noise distribution, e.g., a normal distribution. To address these challenges, we propose a novel approach to correct noise for image interpolation, NoiseDiffusion. Specifically, NoiseDiffusion approaches the invalid noise to the expected distribution by introducing subtle Gaussian noise and introduces a constraint to suppress noise with extreme values. In this context, promoting noise validity contributes to mitigating image artifacts, but the constraint and introduced exogenous noise typically lead to a reduction in signal-to-noise ratio, i.e., loss of original image information. Hence, NoiseDiffusion performs interpolation within the noisy image space and injects raw images into these noisy counterparts to address the challenge of information loss. Consequently, NoiseDiffusion enables us to interpolate natural images without causing artifacts or information loss, thus achieving the best interpolation results.
MetaCap: Meta-learning Priors from Multi-View Imagery for Sparse-view Human Performance Capture and Rendering
Faithful human performance capture and free-view rendering from sparse RGB observations is a long-standing problem in Vision and Graphics. The main challenges are the lack of observations and the inherent ambiguities of the setting, e.g. occlusions and depth ambiguity. As a result, radiance fields, which have shown great promise in capturing high-frequency appearance and geometry details in dense setups, perform poorly when naively supervising them on sparse camera views, as the field simply overfits to the sparse-view inputs. To address this, we propose MetaCap, a method for efficient and high-quality geometry recovery and novel view synthesis given very sparse or even a single view of the human. Our key idea is to meta-learn the radiance field weights solely from potentially sparse multi-view videos, which can serve as a prior when fine-tuning them on sparse imagery depicting the human. This prior provides a good network weight initialization, thereby effectively addressing ambiguities in sparse-view capture. Due to the articulated structure of the human body and motion-induced surface deformations, learning such a prior is non-trivial. Therefore, we propose to meta-learn the field weights in a pose-canonicalized space, which reduces the spatial feature range and makes feature learning more effective. Consequently, one can fine-tune our field parameters to quickly generalize to unseen poses, novel illumination conditions as well as novel and sparse (even monocular) camera views. For evaluating our method under different scenarios, we collect a new dataset, WildDynaCap, which contains subjects captured in, both, a dense camera dome and in-the-wild sparse camera rigs, and demonstrate superior results compared to recent state-of-the-art methods on, both, public and WildDynaCap dataset.
Under-Display Camera Image Restoration with Scattering Effect
The under-display camera (UDC) provides consumers with a full-screen visual experience without any obstruction due to notches or punched holes. However, the semi-transparent nature of the display inevitably introduces the severe degradation into UDC images. In this work, we address the UDC image restoration problem with the specific consideration of the scattering effect caused by the display. We explicitly model the scattering effect by treating the display as a piece of homogeneous scattering medium. With the physical model of the scattering effect, we improve the image formation pipeline for the image synthesis to construct a realistic UDC dataset with ground truths. To suppress the scattering effect for the eventual UDC image recovery, a two-branch restoration network is designed. More specifically, the scattering branch leverages global modeling capabilities of the channel-wise self-attention to estimate parameters of the scattering effect from degraded images. While the image branch exploits the local representation advantage of CNN to recover clear scenes, implicitly guided by the scattering branch. Extensive experiments are conducted on both real-world and synthesized data, demonstrating the superiority of the proposed method over the state-of-the-art UDC restoration techniques. The source code and dataset are available at https://github.com/NamecantbeNULL/SRUDC.
RegNeRF: Regularizing Neural Radiance Fields for View Synthesis from Sparse Inputs
Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) have emerged as a powerful representation for the task of novel view synthesis due to their simplicity and state-of-the-art performance. Though NeRF can produce photorealistic renderings of unseen viewpoints when many input views are available, its performance drops significantly when this number is reduced. We observe that the majority of artifacts in sparse input scenarios are caused by errors in the estimated scene geometry, and by divergent behavior at the start of training. We address this by regularizing the geometry and appearance of patches rendered from unobserved viewpoints, and annealing the ray sampling space during training. We additionally use a normalizing flow model to regularize the color of unobserved viewpoints. Our model outperforms not only other methods that optimize over a single scene, but in many cases also conditional models that are extensively pre-trained on large multi-view datasets.
Restoration by Generation with Constrained Priors
The inherent generative power of denoising diffusion models makes them well-suited for image restoration tasks where the objective is to find the optimal high-quality image within the generative space that closely resembles the input image. We propose a method to adapt a pretrained diffusion model for image restoration by simply adding noise to the input image to be restored and then denoise. Our method is based on the observation that the space of a generative model needs to be constrained. We impose this constraint by finetuning the generative model with a set of anchor images that capture the characteristics of the input image. With the constrained space, we can then leverage the sampling strategy used for generation to do image restoration. We evaluate against previous methods and show superior performances on multiple real-world restoration datasets in preserving identity and image quality. We also demonstrate an important and practical application on personalized restoration, where we use a personal album as the anchor images to constrain the generative space. This approach allows us to produce results that accurately preserve high-frequency details, which previous works are unable to do. Project webpage: https://gen2res.github.io.
DIRE for Diffusion-Generated Image Detection
Diffusion models have shown remarkable success in visual synthesis, but have also raised concerns about potential abuse for malicious purposes. In this paper, we seek to build a detector for telling apart real images from diffusion-generated images. We find that existing detectors struggle to detect images generated by diffusion models, even if we include generated images from a specific diffusion model in their training data. To address this issue, we propose a novel image representation called DIffusion Reconstruction Error (DIRE), which measures the error between an input image and its reconstruction counterpart by a pre-trained diffusion model. We observe that diffusion-generated images can be approximately reconstructed by a diffusion model while real images cannot. It provides a hint that DIRE can serve as a bridge to distinguish generated and real images. DIRE provides an effective way to detect images generated by most diffusion models, and it is general for detecting generated images from unseen diffusion models and robust to various perturbations. Furthermore, we establish a comprehensive diffusion-generated benchmark including images generated by eight diffusion models to evaluate the performance of diffusion-generated image detectors. Extensive experiments on our collected benchmark demonstrate that DIRE exhibits superiority over previous generated-image detectors. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/ZhendongWang6/DIRE.
Contextual-based Image Inpainting: Infer, Match, and Translate
We study the task of image inpainting, which is to fill in the missing region of an incomplete image with plausible contents. To this end, we propose a learning-based approach to generate visually coherent completion given a high-resolution image with missing components. In order to overcome the difficulty to directly learn the distribution of high-dimensional image data, we divide the task into inference and translation as two separate steps and model each step with a deep neural network. We also use simple heuristics to guide the propagation of local textures from the boundary to the hole. We show that, by using such techniques, inpainting reduces to the problem of learning two image-feature translation functions in much smaller space and hence easier to train. We evaluate our method on several public datasets and show that we generate results of better visual quality than previous state-of-the-art methods.
MonoPatchNeRF: Improving Neural Radiance Fields with Patch-based Monocular Guidance
The latest regularized Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) approaches produce poor geometry and view extrapolation for multiview stereo (MVS) benchmarks such as ETH3D. In this paper, we aim to create 3D models that provide accurate geometry and view synthesis, partially closing the large geometric performance gap between NeRF and traditional MVS methods. We propose a patch-based approach that effectively leverages monocular surface normal and relative depth predictions. The patch-based ray sampling also enables the appearance regularization of normalized cross-correlation (NCC) and structural similarity (SSIM) between randomly sampled virtual and training views. We further show that "density restrictions" based on sparse structure-from-motion points can help greatly improve geometric accuracy with a slight drop in novel view synthesis metrics. Our experiments show 4x the performance of RegNeRF and 8x that of FreeNeRF on average F1@2cm for ETH3D MVS benchmark, suggesting a fruitful research direction to improve the geometric accuracy of NeRF-based models, and sheds light on a potential future approach to enable NeRF-based optimization to eventually outperform traditional MVS.
Deep Inception Generative Network for Cognitive Image Inpainting
Recent advances in deep learning have shown exciting promise in filling large holes and lead to another orientation for image inpainting. However, existing learning-based methods often create artifacts and fallacious textures because of insufficient cognition understanding. Previous generative networks are limited with single receptive type and give up pooling in consideration of detail sharpness. Human cognition is constant regardless of the target attribute. As multiple receptive fields improve the ability of abstract image characterization and pooling can keep feature invariant, specifically, deep inception learning is adopted to promote high-level feature representation and enhance model learning capacity for local patches. Moreover, approaches for generating diverse mask images are introduced and a random mask dataset is created. We benchmark our methods on ImageNet, Places2 dataset, and CelebA-HQ. Experiments for regular, irregular, and custom regions completion are all performed and free-style image inpainting is also presented. Quantitative comparisons with previous state-of-the-art methods show that ours obtain much more natural image completions.
Advances in Feed-Forward 3D Reconstruction and View Synthesis: A Survey
3D reconstruction and view synthesis are foundational problems in computer vision, graphics, and immersive technologies such as augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), and digital twins. Traditional methods rely on computationally intensive iterative optimization in a complex chain, limiting their applicability in real-world scenarios. Recent advances in feed-forward approaches, driven by deep learning, have revolutionized this field by enabling fast and generalizable 3D reconstruction and view synthesis. This survey offers a comprehensive review of feed-forward techniques for 3D reconstruction and view synthesis, with a taxonomy according to the underlying representation architectures including point cloud, 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS), Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF), etc. We examine key tasks such as pose-free reconstruction, dynamic 3D reconstruction, and 3D-aware image and video synthesis, highlighting their applications in digital humans, SLAM, robotics, and beyond. In addition, we review commonly used datasets with detailed statistics, along with evaluation protocols for various downstream tasks. We conclude by discussing open research challenges and promising directions for future work, emphasizing the potential of feed-forward approaches to advance the state of the art in 3D vision.
Learning Robust Generalizable Radiance Field with Visibility and Feature Augmented Point Representation
This paper introduces a novel paradigm for the generalizable neural radiance field (NeRF). Previous generic NeRF methods combine multiview stereo techniques with image-based neural rendering for generalization, yielding impressive results, while suffering from three issues. First, occlusions often result in inconsistent feature matching. Then, they deliver distortions and artifacts in geometric discontinuities and locally sharp shapes due to their individual process of sampled points and rough feature aggregation. Third, their image-based representations experience severe degradations when source views are not near enough to the target view. To address challenges, we propose the first paradigm that constructs the generalizable neural field based on point-based rather than image-based rendering, which we call the Generalizable neural Point Field (GPF). Our approach explicitly models visibilities by geometric priors and augments them with neural features. We propose a novel nonuniform log sampling strategy to improve both rendering speed and reconstruction quality. Moreover, we present a learnable kernel spatially augmented with features for feature aggregations, mitigating distortions at places with drastically varying geometries. Besides, our representation can be easily manipulated. Experiments show that our model can deliver better geometries, view consistencies, and rendering quality than all counterparts and benchmarks on three datasets in both generalization and finetuning settings, preliminarily proving the potential of the new paradigm for generalizable NeRF.
SUDS: Scalable Urban Dynamic Scenes
We extend neural radiance fields (NeRFs) to dynamic large-scale urban scenes. Prior work tends to reconstruct single video clips of short durations (up to 10 seconds). Two reasons are that such methods (a) tend to scale linearly with the number of moving objects and input videos because a separate model is built for each and (b) tend to require supervision via 3D bounding boxes and panoptic labels, obtained manually or via category-specific models. As a step towards truly open-world reconstructions of dynamic cities, we introduce two key innovations: (a) we factorize the scene into three separate hash table data structures to efficiently encode static, dynamic, and far-field radiance fields, and (b) we make use of unlabeled target signals consisting of RGB images, sparse LiDAR, off-the-shelf self-supervised 2D descriptors, and most importantly, 2D optical flow. Operationalizing such inputs via photometric, geometric, and feature-metric reconstruction losses enables SUDS to decompose dynamic scenes into the static background, individual objects, and their motions. When combined with our multi-branch table representation, such reconstructions can be scaled to tens of thousands of objects across 1.2 million frames from 1700 videos spanning geospatial footprints of hundreds of kilometers, (to our knowledge) the largest dynamic NeRF built to date. We present qualitative initial results on a variety of tasks enabled by our representations, including novel-view synthesis of dynamic urban scenes, unsupervised 3D instance segmentation, and unsupervised 3D cuboid detection. To compare to prior work, we also evaluate on KITTI and Virtual KITTI 2, surpassing state-of-the-art methods that rely on ground truth 3D bounding box annotations while being 10x quicker to train.
NeRFVS: Neural Radiance Fields for Free View Synthesis via Geometry Scaffolds
We present NeRFVS, a novel neural radiance fields (NeRF) based method to enable free navigation in a room. NeRF achieves impressive performance in rendering images for novel views similar to the input views while suffering for novel views that are significantly different from the training views. To address this issue, we utilize the holistic priors, including pseudo depth maps and view coverage information, from neural reconstruction to guide the learning of implicit neural representations of 3D indoor scenes. Concretely, an off-the-shelf neural reconstruction method is leveraged to generate a geometry scaffold. Then, two loss functions based on the holistic priors are proposed to improve the learning of NeRF: 1) A robust depth loss that can tolerate the error of the pseudo depth map to guide the geometry learning of NeRF; 2) A variance loss to regularize the variance of implicit neural representations to reduce the geometry and color ambiguity in the learning procedure. These two loss functions are modulated during NeRF optimization according to the view coverage information to reduce the negative influence brought by the view coverage imbalance. Extensive results demonstrate that our NeRFVS outperforms state-of-the-art view synthesis methods quantitatively and qualitatively on indoor scenes, achieving high-fidelity free navigation results.
Text-Aware Image Restoration with Diffusion Models
Image restoration aims to recover degraded images. However, existing diffusion-based restoration methods, despite great success in natural image restoration, often struggle to faithfully reconstruct textual regions in degraded images. Those methods frequently generate plausible but incorrect text-like patterns, a phenomenon we refer to as text-image hallucination. In this paper, we introduce Text-Aware Image Restoration (TAIR), a novel restoration task that requires the simultaneous recovery of visual contents and textual fidelity. To tackle this task, we present SA-Text, a large-scale benchmark of 100K high-quality scene images densely annotated with diverse and complex text instances. Furthermore, we propose a multi-task diffusion framework, called TeReDiff, that integrates internal features from diffusion models into a text-spotting module, enabling both components to benefit from joint training. This allows for the extraction of rich text representations, which are utilized as prompts in subsequent denoising steps. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms state-of-the-art restoration methods, achieving significant gains in text recognition accuracy. See our project page: https://cvlab-kaist.github.io/TAIR/
GRAF: Generative Radiance Fields for 3D-Aware Image Synthesis
While 2D generative adversarial networks have enabled high-resolution image synthesis, they largely lack an understanding of the 3D world and the image formation process. Thus, they do not provide precise control over camera viewpoint or object pose. To address this problem, several recent approaches leverage intermediate voxel-based representations in combination with differentiable rendering. However, existing methods either produce low image resolution or fall short in disentangling camera and scene properties, e.g., the object identity may vary with the viewpoint. In this paper, we propose a generative model for radiance fields which have recently proven successful for novel view synthesis of a single scene. In contrast to voxel-based representations, radiance fields are not confined to a coarse discretization of the 3D space, yet allow for disentangling camera and scene properties while degrading gracefully in the presence of reconstruction ambiguity. By introducing a multi-scale patch-based discriminator, we demonstrate synthesis of high-resolution images while training our model from unposed 2D images alone. We systematically analyze our approach on several challenging synthetic and real-world datasets. Our experiments reveal that radiance fields are a powerful representation for generative image synthesis, leading to 3D consistent models that render with high fidelity.
Denoising as Adaptation: Noise-Space Domain Adaptation for Image Restoration
Although learning-based image restoration methods have made significant progress, they still struggle with limited generalization to real-world scenarios due to the substantial domain gap caused by training on synthetic data. Existing methods address this issue by improving data synthesis pipelines, estimating degradation kernels, employing deep internal learning, and performing domain adaptation and regularization. Previous domain adaptation methods have sought to bridge the domain gap by learning domain-invariant knowledge in either feature or pixel space. However, these techniques often struggle to extend to low-level vision tasks within a stable and compact framework. In this paper, we show that it is possible to perform domain adaptation via the noise space using diffusion models. In particular, by leveraging the unique property of how auxiliary conditional inputs influence the multi-step denoising process, we derive a meaningful diffusion loss that guides the restoration model in progressively aligning both restored synthetic and real-world outputs with a target clean distribution. We refer to this method as denoising as adaptation. To prevent shortcuts during joint training, we present crucial strategies such as channel-shuffling layer and residual-swapping contrastive learning in the diffusion model. They implicitly blur the boundaries between conditioned synthetic and real data and prevent the reliance of the model on easily distinguishable features. Experimental results on three classical image restoration tasks, namely denoising, deblurring, and deraining, demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
What Do Single-view 3D Reconstruction Networks Learn?
Convolutional networks for single-view object reconstruction have shown impressive performance and have become a popular subject of research. All existing techniques are united by the idea of having an encoder-decoder network that performs non-trivial reasoning about the 3D structure of the output space. In this work, we set up two alternative approaches that perform image classification and retrieval respectively. These simple baselines yield better results than state-of-the-art methods, both qualitatively and quantitatively. We show that encoder-decoder methods are statistically indistinguishable from these baselines, thus indicating that the current state of the art in single-view object reconstruction does not actually perform reconstruction but image classification. We identify aspects of popular experimental procedures that elicit this behavior and discuss ways to improve the current state of research.
Zero-P-to-3: Zero-Shot Partial-View Images to 3D Object
Generative 3D reconstruction shows strong potential in incomplete observations. While sparse-view and single-image reconstruction are well-researched, partial observation remains underexplored. In this context, dense views are accessible only from a specific angular range, with other perspectives remaining inaccessible. This task presents two main challenges: (i) limited View Range: observations confined to a narrow angular scope prevent effective traditional interpolation techniques that require evenly distributed perspectives. (ii) inconsistent Generation: views created for invisible regions often lack coherence with both visible regions and each other, compromising reconstruction consistency. To address these challenges, we propose \method, a novel training-free approach that integrates the local dense observations and multi-source priors for reconstruction. Our method introduces a fusion-based strategy to effectively align these priors in DDIM sampling, thereby generating multi-view consistent images to supervise invisible views. We further design an iterative refinement strategy, which uses the geometric structures of the object to enhance reconstruction quality. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets show the superiority of our method over SOTAs, especially in invisible regions.
Geometry-Guided Ray Augmentation for Neural Surface Reconstruction with Sparse Views
In this paper, we propose a novel method for 3D scene and object reconstruction from sparse multi-view images. Different from previous methods that leverage extra information such as depth or generalizable features across scenes, our approach leverages the scene properties embedded in the multi-view inputs to create precise pseudo-labels for optimization without any prior training. Specifically, we introduce a geometry-guided approach that improves surface reconstruction accuracy from sparse views by leveraging spherical harmonics to predict the novel radiance while holistically considering all color observations for a point in the scene. Also, our pipeline exploits proxy geometry and correctly handles the occlusion in generating the pseudo-labels of radiance, which previous image-warping methods fail to avoid. Our method, dubbed Ray Augmentation (RayAug), achieves superior results on DTU and Blender datasets without requiring prior training, demonstrating its effectiveness in addressing the problem of sparse view reconstruction. Our pipeline is flexible and can be integrated into other implicit neural reconstruction methods for sparse views.
Solving 3D Inverse Problems using Pre-trained 2D Diffusion Models
Diffusion models have emerged as the new state-of-the-art generative model with high quality samples, with intriguing properties such as mode coverage and high flexibility. They have also been shown to be effective inverse problem solvers, acting as the prior of the distribution, while the information of the forward model can be granted at the sampling stage. Nonetheless, as the generative process remains in the same high dimensional (i.e. identical to data dimension) space, the models have not been extended to 3D inverse problems due to the extremely high memory and computational cost. In this paper, we combine the ideas from the conventional model-based iterative reconstruction with the modern diffusion models, which leads to a highly effective method for solving 3D medical image reconstruction tasks such as sparse-view tomography, limited angle tomography, compressed sensing MRI from pre-trained 2D diffusion models. In essence, we propose to augment the 2D diffusion prior with a model-based prior in the remaining direction at test time, such that one can achieve coherent reconstructions across all dimensions. Our method can be run in a single commodity GPU, and establishes the new state-of-the-art, showing that the proposed method can perform reconstructions of high fidelity and accuracy even in the most extreme cases (e.g. 2-view 3D tomography). We further reveal that the generalization capacity of the proposed method is surprisingly high, and can be used to reconstruct volumes that are entirely different from the training dataset.
GenFusion: Closing the Loop between Reconstruction and Generation via Videos
Recently, 3D reconstruction and generation have demonstrated impressive novel view synthesis results, achieving high fidelity and efficiency. However, a notable conditioning gap can be observed between these two fields, e.g., scalable 3D scene reconstruction often requires densely captured views, whereas 3D generation typically relies on a single or no input view, which significantly limits their applications. We found that the source of this phenomenon lies in the misalignment between 3D constraints and generative priors. To address this problem, we propose a reconstruction-driven video diffusion model that learns to condition video frames on artifact-prone RGB-D renderings. Moreover, we propose a cyclical fusion pipeline that iteratively adds restoration frames from the generative model to the training set, enabling progressive expansion and addressing the viewpoint saturation limitations seen in previous reconstruction and generation pipelines. Our evaluation, including view synthesis from sparse view and masked input, validates the effectiveness of our approach. More details at https://genfusion.sibowu.com.
360^circ Reconstruction From a Single Image Using Space Carved Outpainting
We introduce POP3D, a novel framework that creates a full 360^circ-view 3D model from a single image. POP3D resolves two prominent issues that limit the single-view reconstruction. Firstly, POP3D offers substantial generalizability to arbitrary categories, a trait that previous methods struggle to achieve. Secondly, POP3D further improves reconstruction fidelity and naturalness, a crucial aspect that concurrent works fall short of. Our approach marries the strengths of four primary components: (1) a monocular depth and normal predictor that serves to predict crucial geometric cues, (2) a space carving method capable of demarcating the potentially unseen portions of the target object, (3) a generative model pre-trained on a large-scale image dataset that can complete unseen regions of the target, and (4) a neural implicit surface reconstruction method tailored in reconstructing objects using RGB images along with monocular geometric cues. The combination of these components enables POP3D to readily generalize across various in-the-wild images and generate state-of-the-art reconstructions, outperforming similar works by a significant margin. Project page: http://cg.postech.ac.kr/research/POP3D
Deep Optimal Transport: A Practical Algorithm for Photo-realistic Image Restoration
We propose an image restoration algorithm that can control the perceptual quality and/or the mean square error (MSE) of any pre-trained model, trading one over the other at test time. Our algorithm is few-shot: Given about a dozen images restored by the model, it can significantly improve the perceptual quality and/or the MSE of the model for newly restored images without further training. Our approach is motivated by a recent theoretical result that links between the minimum MSE (MMSE) predictor and the predictor that minimizes the MSE under a perfect perceptual quality constraint. Specifically, it has been shown that the latter can be obtained by optimally transporting the output of the former, such that its distribution matches the source data. Thus, to improve the perceptual quality of a predictor that was originally trained to minimize MSE, we approximate the optimal transport by a linear transformation in the latent space of a variational auto-encoder, which we compute in closed-form using empirical means and covariances. Going beyond the theory, we find that applying the same procedure on models that were initially trained to achieve high perceptual quality, typically improves their perceptual quality even further. And by interpolating the results with the original output of the model, we can improve their MSE on the expense of perceptual quality. We illustrate our method on a variety of degradations applied to general content images of arbitrary dimensions.
GauFRe: Gaussian Deformation Fields for Real-time Dynamic Novel View Synthesis
We propose a method for dynamic scene reconstruction using deformable 3D Gaussians that is tailored for monocular video. Building upon the efficiency of Gaussian splatting, our approach extends the representation to accommodate dynamic elements via a deformable set of Gaussians residing in a canonical space, and a time-dependent deformation field defined by a multi-layer perceptron (MLP). Moreover, under the assumption that most natural scenes have large regions that remain static, we allow the MLP to focus its representational power by additionally including a static Gaussian point cloud. The concatenated dynamic and static point clouds form the input for the Gaussian Splatting rasterizer, enabling real-time rendering. The differentiable pipeline is optimized end-to-end with a self-supervised rendering loss. Our method achieves results that are comparable to state-of-the-art dynamic neural radiance field methods while allowing much faster optimization and rendering. Project website: https://lynl7130.github.io/gaufre/index.html
3D Reconstruction with Generalizable Neural Fields using Scene Priors
High-fidelity 3D scene reconstruction has been substantially advanced by recent progress in neural fields. However, most existing methods train a separate network from scratch for each individual scene. This is not scalable, inefficient, and unable to yield good results given limited views. While learning-based multi-view stereo methods alleviate this issue to some extent, their multi-view setting makes it less flexible to scale up and to broad applications. Instead, we introduce training generalizable Neural Fields incorporating scene Priors (NFPs). The NFP network maps any single-view RGB-D image into signed distance and radiance values. A complete scene can be reconstructed by merging individual frames in the volumetric space WITHOUT a fusion module, which provides better flexibility. The scene priors can be trained on large-scale datasets, allowing for fast adaptation to the reconstruction of a new scene with fewer views. NFP not only demonstrates SOTA scene reconstruction performance and efficiency, but it also supports single-image novel-view synthesis, which is underexplored in neural fields. More qualitative results are available at: https://oasisyang.github.io/neural-prior
Feature Guided Masked Autoencoder for Self-supervised Learning in Remote Sensing
Self-supervised learning guided by masked image modelling, such as Masked AutoEncoder (MAE), has attracted wide attention for pretraining vision transformers in remote sensing. However, MAE tends to excessively focus on pixel details, thereby limiting the model's capacity for semantic understanding, in particular for noisy SAR images. In this paper, we explore spectral and spatial remote sensing image features as improved MAE-reconstruction targets. We first conduct a study on reconstructing various image features, all performing comparably well or better than raw pixels. Based on such observations, we propose Feature Guided Masked Autoencoder (FG-MAE): reconstructing a combination of Histograms of Oriented Graidents (HOG) and Normalized Difference Indices (NDI) for multispectral images, and reconstructing HOG for SAR images. Experimental results on three downstream tasks illustrate the effectiveness of FG-MAE with a particular boost for SAR imagery. Furthermore, we demonstrate the well-inherited scalability of FG-MAE and release a first series of pretrained vision transformers for medium resolution SAR and multispectral images.
Decompositional Neural Scene Reconstruction with Generative Diffusion Prior
Decompositional reconstruction of 3D scenes, with complete shapes and detailed texture of all objects within, is intriguing for downstream applications but remains challenging, particularly with sparse views as input. Recent approaches incorporate semantic or geometric regularization to address this issue, but they suffer significant degradation in underconstrained areas and fail to recover occluded regions. We argue that the key to solving this problem lies in supplementing missing information for these areas. To this end, we propose DP-Recon, which employs diffusion priors in the form of Score Distillation Sampling (SDS) to optimize the neural representation of each individual object under novel views. This provides additional information for the underconstrained areas, but directly incorporating diffusion prior raises potential conflicts between the reconstruction and generative guidance. Therefore, we further introduce a visibility-guided approach to dynamically adjust the per-pixel SDS loss weights. Together these components enhance both geometry and appearance recovery while remaining faithful to input images. Extensive experiments across Replica and ScanNet++ demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms SOTA methods. Notably, it achieves better object reconstruction under 10 views than the baselines under 100 views. Our method enables seamless text-based editing for geometry and appearance through SDS optimization and produces decomposed object meshes with detailed UV maps that support photorealistic Visual effects (VFX) editing. The project page is available at https://dp-recon.github.io/.
DSplats: 3D Generation by Denoising Splats-Based Multiview Diffusion Models
Generating high-quality 3D content requires models capable of learning robust distributions of complex scenes and the real-world objects within them. Recent Gaussian-based 3D reconstruction techniques have achieved impressive results in recovering high-fidelity 3D assets from sparse input images by predicting 3D Gaussians in a feed-forward manner. However, these techniques often lack the extensive priors and expressiveness offered by Diffusion Models. On the other hand, 2D Diffusion Models, which have been successfully applied to denoise multiview images, show potential for generating a wide range of photorealistic 3D outputs but still fall short on explicit 3D priors and consistency. In this work, we aim to bridge these two approaches by introducing DSplats, a novel method that directly denoises multiview images using Gaussian Splat-based Reconstructors to produce a diverse array of realistic 3D assets. To harness the extensive priors of 2D Diffusion Models, we incorporate a pretrained Latent Diffusion Model into the reconstructor backbone to predict a set of 3D Gaussians. Additionally, the explicit 3D representation embedded in the denoising network provides a strong inductive bias, ensuring geometrically consistent novel view generation. Our qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate that DSplats not only produces high-quality, spatially consistent outputs, but also sets a new standard in single-image to 3D reconstruction. When evaluated on the Google Scanned Objects dataset, DSplats achieves a PSNR of 20.38, an SSIM of 0.842, and an LPIPS of 0.109.
Human from Blur: Human Pose Tracking from Blurry Images
We propose a method to estimate 3D human poses from substantially blurred images. The key idea is to tackle the inverse problem of image deblurring by modeling the forward problem with a 3D human model, a texture map, and a sequence of poses to describe human motion. The blurring process is then modeled by a temporal image aggregation step. Using a differentiable renderer, we can solve the inverse problem by backpropagating the pixel-wise reprojection error to recover the best human motion representation that explains a single or multiple input images. Since the image reconstruction loss alone is insufficient, we present additional regularization terms. To the best of our knowledge, we present the first method to tackle this problem. Our method consistently outperforms other methods on significantly blurry inputs since they lack one or multiple key functionalities that our method unifies, i.e. image deblurring with sub-frame accuracy and explicit 3D modeling of non-rigid human motion.
Sat-DN: Implicit Surface Reconstruction from Multi-View Satellite Images with Depth and Normal Supervision
With advancements in satellite imaging technology, acquiring high-resolution multi-view satellite imagery has become increasingly accessible, enabling rapid and location-independent ground model reconstruction. However, traditional stereo matching methods struggle to capture fine details, and while neural radiance fields (NeRFs) achieve high-quality reconstructions, their training time is prohibitively long. Moreover, challenges such as low visibility of building facades, illumination and style differences between pixels, and weakly textured regions in satellite imagery further make it hard to reconstruct reasonable terrain geometry and detailed building facades. To address these issues, we propose Sat-DN, a novel framework leveraging a progressively trained multi-resolution hash grid reconstruction architecture with explicit depth guidance and surface normal consistency constraints to enhance reconstruction quality. The multi-resolution hash grid accelerates training, while the progressive strategy incrementally increases the learning frequency, using coarse low-frequency geometry to guide the reconstruction of fine high-frequency details. The depth and normal constraints ensure a clear building outline and correct planar distribution. Extensive experiments on the DFC2019 dataset demonstrate that Sat-DN outperforms existing methods, achieving state-of-the-art results in both qualitative and quantitative evaluations. The code is available at https://github.com/costune/SatDN.
SAMURAI: Shape And Material from Unconstrained Real-world Arbitrary Image collections
Inverse rendering of an object under entirely unknown capture conditions is a fundamental challenge in computer vision and graphics. Neural approaches such as NeRF have achieved photorealistic results on novel view synthesis, but they require known camera poses. Solving this problem with unknown camera poses is highly challenging as it requires joint optimization over shape, radiance, and pose. This problem is exacerbated when the input images are captured in the wild with varying backgrounds and illuminations. Standard pose estimation techniques fail in such image collections in the wild due to very few estimated correspondences across images. Furthermore, NeRF cannot relight a scene under any illumination, as it operates on radiance (the product of reflectance and illumination). We propose a joint optimization framework to estimate the shape, BRDF, and per-image camera pose and illumination. Our method works on in-the-wild online image collections of an object and produces relightable 3D assets for several use-cases such as AR/VR. To our knowledge, our method is the first to tackle this severely unconstrained task with minimal user interaction. Project page: https://markboss.me/publication/2022-samurai/ Video: https://youtu.be/LlYuGDjXp-8
Long-LRM: Long-sequence Large Reconstruction Model for Wide-coverage Gaussian Splats
We propose Long-LRM, a generalizable 3D Gaussian reconstruction model that is capable of reconstructing a large scene from a long sequence of input images. Specifically, our model can process 32 source images at 960x540 resolution within only 1.3 seconds on a single A100 80G GPU. Our architecture features a mixture of the recent Mamba2 blocks and the classical transformer blocks which allowed many more tokens to be processed than prior work, enhanced by efficient token merging and Gaussian pruning steps that balance between quality and efficiency. Unlike previous feed-forward models that are limited to processing 1~4 input images and can only reconstruct a small portion of a large scene, Long-LRM reconstructs the entire scene in a single feed-forward step. On large-scale scene datasets such as DL3DV-140 and Tanks and Temples, our method achieves performance comparable to optimization-based approaches while being two orders of magnitude more efficient. Project page: https://arthurhero.github.io/projects/llrm
ReNoise: Real Image Inversion Through Iterative Noising
Recent advancements in text-guided diffusion models have unlocked powerful image manipulation capabilities. However, applying these methods to real images necessitates the inversion of the images into the domain of the pretrained diffusion model. Achieving faithful inversion remains a challenge, particularly for more recent models trained to generate images with a small number of denoising steps. In this work, we introduce an inversion method with a high quality-to-operation ratio, enhancing reconstruction accuracy without increasing the number of operations. Building on reversing the diffusion sampling process, our method employs an iterative renoising mechanism at each inversion sampling step. This mechanism refines the approximation of a predicted point along the forward diffusion trajectory, by iteratively applying the pretrained diffusion model, and averaging these predictions. We evaluate the performance of our ReNoise technique using various sampling algorithms and models, including recent accelerated diffusion models. Through comprehensive evaluations and comparisons, we show its effectiveness in terms of both accuracy and speed. Furthermore, we confirm that our method preserves editability by demonstrating text-driven image editing on real images.
Bridging the Gap Between Computational Photography and Visual Recognition
What is the current state-of-the-art for image restoration and enhancement applied to degraded images acquired under less than ideal circumstances? Can the application of such algorithms as a pre-processing step to improve image interpretability for manual analysis or automatic visual recognition to classify scene content? While there have been important advances in the area of computational photography to restore or enhance the visual quality of an image, the capabilities of such techniques have not always translated in a useful way to visual recognition tasks. Consequently, there is a pressing need for the development of algorithms that are designed for the joint problem of improving visual appearance and recognition, which will be an enabling factor for the deployment of visual recognition tools in many real-world scenarios. To address this, we introduce the UG^2 dataset as a large-scale benchmark composed of video imagery captured under challenging conditions, and two enhancement tasks designed to test algorithmic impact on visual quality and automatic object recognition. Furthermore, we propose a set of metrics to evaluate the joint improvement of such tasks as well as individual algorithmic advances, including a novel psychophysics-based evaluation regime for human assessment and a realistic set of quantitative measures for object recognition performance. We introduce six new algorithms for image restoration or enhancement, which were created as part of the IARPA sponsored UG^2 Challenge workshop held at CVPR 2018. Under the proposed evaluation regime, we present an in-depth analysis of these algorithms and a host of deep learning-based and classic baseline approaches. From the observed results, it is evident that we are in the early days of building a bridge between computational photography and visual recognition, leaving many opportunities for innovation in this area.
ColonNeRF: High-Fidelity Neural Reconstruction of Long Colonoscopy
Colonoscopy reconstruction is pivotal for diagnosing colorectal cancer. However, accurate long-sequence colonoscopy reconstruction faces three major challenges: (1) dissimilarity among segments of the colon due to its meandering and convoluted shape; (2) co-existence of simple and intricately folded geometry structures; (3) sparse viewpoints due to constrained camera trajectories. To tackle these challenges, we introduce a new reconstruction framework based on neural radiance field (NeRF), named ColonNeRF, which leverages neural rendering for novel view synthesis of long-sequence colonoscopy. Specifically, to reconstruct the entire colon in a piecewise manner, our ColonNeRF introduces a region division and integration module, effectively reducing shape dissimilarity and ensuring geometric consistency in each segment. To learn both the simple and complex geometry in a unified framework, our ColonNeRF incorporates a multi-level fusion module that progressively models the colon regions from easy to hard. Additionally, to overcome the challenges from sparse views, we devise a DensiNet module for densifying camera poses under the guidance of semantic consistency. We conduct extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets to evaluate our ColonNeRF. Quantitatively, ColonNeRF exhibits a 67%-85% increase in LPIPS-ALEX scores. Qualitatively, our reconstruction visualizations show much clearer textures and more accurate geometric details. These sufficiently demonstrate our superior performance over the state-of-the-art methods.
Scene4U: Hierarchical Layered 3D Scene Reconstruction from Single Panoramic Image for Your Immerse Exploration
The reconstruction of immersive and realistic 3D scenes holds significant practical importance in various fields of computer vision and computer graphics. Typically, immersive and realistic scenes should be free from obstructions by dynamic objects, maintain global texture consistency, and allow for unrestricted exploration. The current mainstream methods for image-driven scene construction involves iteratively refining the initial image using a moving virtual camera to generate the scene. However, previous methods struggle with visual discontinuities due to global texture inconsistencies under varying camera poses, and they frequently exhibit scene voids caused by foreground-background occlusions. To this end, we propose a novel layered 3D scene reconstruction framework from panoramic image, named Scene4U. Specifically, Scene4U integrates an open-vocabulary segmentation model with a large language model to decompose a real panorama into multiple layers. Then, we employs a layered repair module based on diffusion model to restore occluded regions using visual cues and depth information, generating a hierarchical representation of the scene. The multi-layer panorama is then initialized as a 3D Gaussian Splatting representation, followed by layered optimization, which ultimately produces an immersive 3D scene with semantic and structural consistency that supports free exploration. Scene4U outperforms state-of-the-art method, improving by 24.24% in LPIPS and 24.40% in BRISQUE, while also achieving the fastest training speed. Additionally, to demonstrate the robustness of Scene4U and allow users to experience immersive scenes from various landmarks, we build WorldVista3D dataset for 3D scene reconstruction, which contains panoramic images of globally renowned sites. The implementation code and dataset will be released at https://github.com/LongHZ140516/Scene4U .
SparSplat: Fast Multi-View Reconstruction with Generalizable 2D Gaussian Splatting
Recovering 3D information from scenes via multi-view stereo reconstruction (MVS) and novel view synthesis (NVS) is inherently challenging, particularly in scenarios involving sparse-view setups. The advent of 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) enabled real-time, photorealistic NVS. Following this, 2D Gaussian Splatting (2DGS) leveraged perspective accurate 2D Gaussian primitive rasterization to achieve accurate geometry representation during rendering, improving 3D scene reconstruction while maintaining real-time performance. Recent approaches have tackled the problem of sparse real-time NVS using 3DGS within a generalizable, MVS-based learning framework to regress 3D Gaussian parameters. Our work extends this line of research by addressing the challenge of generalizable sparse 3D reconstruction and NVS jointly, and manages to perform successfully at both tasks. We propose an MVS-based learning pipeline that regresses 2DGS surface element parameters in a feed-forward fashion to perform 3D shape reconstruction and NVS from sparse-view images. We further show that our generalizable pipeline can benefit from preexisting foundational multi-view deep visual features. The resulting model attains the state-of-the-art results on the DTU sparse 3D reconstruction benchmark in terms of Chamfer distance to ground-truth, as-well as state-of-the-art NVS. It also demonstrates strong generalization on the BlendedMVS and Tanks and Temples datasets. We note that our model outperforms the prior state-of-the-art in feed-forward sparse view reconstruction based on volume rendering of implicit representations, while offering an almost 2 orders of magnitude higher inference speed.
What Regularized Auto-Encoders Learn from the Data Generating Distribution
What do auto-encoders learn about the underlying data generating distribution? Recent work suggests that some auto-encoder variants do a good job of capturing the local manifold structure of data. This paper clarifies some of these previous observations by showing that minimizing a particular form of regularized reconstruction error yields a reconstruction function that locally characterizes the shape of the data generating density. We show that the auto-encoder captures the score (derivative of the log-density with respect to the input). It contradicts previous interpretations of reconstruction error as an energy function. Unlike previous results, the theorems provided here are completely generic and do not depend on the parametrization of the auto-encoder: they show what the auto-encoder would tend to if given enough capacity and examples. These results are for a contractive training criterion we show to be similar to the denoising auto-encoder training criterion with small corruption noise, but with contraction applied on the whole reconstruction function rather than just encoder. Similarly to score matching, one can consider the proposed training criterion as a convenient alternative to maximum likelihood because it does not involve a partition function. Finally, we show how an approximate Metropolis-Hastings MCMC can be setup to recover samples from the estimated distribution, and this is confirmed in sampling experiments.
Incremental Transformer Structure Enhanced Image Inpainting with Masking Positional Encoding
Image inpainting has made significant advances in recent years. However, it is still challenging to recover corrupted images with both vivid textures and reasonable structures. Some specific methods only tackle regular textures while losing holistic structures due to the limited receptive fields of convolutional neural networks (CNNs). On the other hand, attention-based models can learn better long-range dependency for the structure recovery, but they are limited by the heavy computation for inference with large image sizes. To address these issues, we propose to leverage an additional structure restorer to facilitate the image inpainting incrementally. The proposed model restores holistic image structures with a powerful attention-based transformer model in a fixed low-resolution sketch space. Such a grayscale space is easy to be upsampled to larger scales to convey correct structural information. Our structure restorer can be integrated with other pretrained inpainting models efficiently with the zero-initialized residual addition. Furthermore, a masking positional encoding strategy is utilized to improve the performance with large irregular masks. Extensive experiments on various datasets validate the efficacy of our model compared with other competitors. Our codes are released in https://github.com/DQiaole/ZITS_inpainting.
ReconViaGen: Towards Accurate Multi-view 3D Object Reconstruction via Generation
Existing multi-view 3D object reconstruction methods heavily rely on sufficient overlap between input views, where occlusions and sparse coverage in practice frequently yield severe reconstruction incompleteness. Recent advancements in diffusion-based 3D generative techniques offer the potential to address these limitations by leveraging learned generative priors to hallucinate invisible parts of objects, thereby generating plausible 3D structures. However, the stochastic nature of the inference process limits the accuracy and reliability of generation results, preventing existing reconstruction frameworks from integrating such 3D generative priors. In this work, we comprehensively analyze the reasons why diffusion-based 3D generative methods fail to achieve high consistency, including (a) the insufficiency in constructing and leveraging cross-view connections when extracting multi-view image features as conditions, and (b) the poor controllability of iterative denoising during local detail generation, which easily leads to plausible but inconsistent fine geometric and texture details with inputs. Accordingly, we propose ReconViaGen to innovatively integrate reconstruction priors into the generative framework and devise several strategies that effectively address these issues. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our ReconViaGen can reconstruct complete and accurate 3D models consistent with input views in both global structure and local details.Project page: https://jiahao620.github.io/reconviagen.
Review of Feed-forward 3D Reconstruction: From DUSt3R to VGGT
3D reconstruction, which aims to recover the dense three-dimensional structure of a scene, is a cornerstone technology for numerous applications, including augmented/virtual reality, autonomous driving, and robotics. While traditional pipelines like Structure from Motion (SfM) and Multi-View Stereo (MVS) achieve high precision through iterative optimization, they are limited by complex workflows, high computational cost, and poor robustness in challenging scenarios like texture-less regions. Recently, deep learning has catalyzed a paradigm shift in 3D reconstruction. A new family of models, exemplified by DUSt3R, has pioneered a feed-forward approach. These models employ a unified deep network to jointly infer camera poses and dense geometry directly from an Unconstrained set of images in a single forward pass. This survey provides a systematic review of this emerging domain. We begin by dissecting the technical framework of these feed-forward models, including their Transformer-based correspondence modeling, joint pose and geometry regression mechanisms, and strategies for scaling from two-view to multi-view scenarios. To highlight the disruptive nature of this new paradigm, we contrast it with both traditional pipelines and earlier learning-based methods like MVSNet. Furthermore, we provide an overview of relevant datasets and evaluation metrics. Finally, we discuss the technology's broad application prospects and identify key future challenges and opportunities, such as model accuracy and scalability, and handling dynamic scenes.
Adaptive Blind All-in-One Image Restoration
Blind all-in-one image restoration models aim to recover a high-quality image from an input degraded with unknown distortions. However, these models require all the possible degradation types to be defined during the training stage while showing limited generalization to unseen degradations, which limits their practical application in complex cases. In this paper, we propose a simple but effective adaptive blind all-in-one restoration (ABAIR) model, which can address multiple degradations, generalizes well to unseen degradations, and efficiently incorporate new degradations by training a small fraction of parameters. First, we train our baseline model on a large dataset of natural images with multiple synthetic degradations, augmented with a segmentation head to estimate per-pixel degradation types, resulting in a powerful backbone able to generalize to a wide range of degradations. Second, we adapt our baseline model to varying image restoration tasks using independent low-rank adapters. Third, we learn to adaptively combine adapters to versatile images via a flexible and lightweight degradation estimator. Our model is both powerful in handling specific distortions and flexible in adapting to complex tasks, it not only outperforms the state-of-the-art by a large margin on five- and three-task IR setups, but also shows improved generalization to unseen degradations and also composite distortions.
Enhancing Photorealism Enhancement
We present an approach to enhancing the realism of synthetic images. The images are enhanced by a convolutional network that leverages intermediate representations produced by conventional rendering pipelines. The network is trained via a novel adversarial objective, which provides strong supervision at multiple perceptual levels. We analyze scene layout distributions in commonly used datasets and find that they differ in important ways. We hypothesize that this is one of the causes of strong artifacts that can be observed in the results of many prior methods. To address this we propose a new strategy for sampling image patches during training. We also introduce multiple architectural improvements in the deep network modules used for photorealism enhancement. We confirm the benefits of our contributions in controlled experiments and report substantial gains in stability and realism in comparison to recent image-to-image translation methods and a variety of other baselines.
Neural Surface Priors for Editable Gaussian Splatting
In computer graphics, there is a need to recover easily modifiable representations of 3D geometry and appearance from image data. We introduce a novel method for this task using 3D Gaussian Splatting, which enables intuitive scene editing through mesh adjustments. Starting with input images and camera poses, we reconstruct the underlying geometry using a neural Signed Distance Field and extract a high-quality mesh. Our model then estimates a set of Gaussians, where each component is flat, and the opacity is conditioned on the recovered neural surface. To facilitate editing, we produce a proxy representation that encodes information about the Gaussians' shape and position. Unlike other methods, our pipeline allows modifications applied to the extracted mesh to be propagated to the proxy representation, from which we recover the updated parameters of the Gaussians. This effectively transfers the mesh edits back to the recovered appearance representation. By leveraging mesh-guided transformations, our approach simplifies 3D scene editing and offers improvements over existing methods in terms of usability and visual fidelity of edits. The complete source code for this project can be accessed at https://github.com/WJakubowska/NeuralSurfacePriors
ConsisSR: Delving Deep into Consistency in Diffusion-based Image Super-Resolution
Real-world image super-resolution (Real-ISR) aims at restoring high-quality (HQ) images from low-quality (LQ) inputs corrupted by unknown and complex degradations. In particular, pretrained text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models provide strong generative priors to reconstruct credible and intricate details. However, T2I generation focuses on semantic consistency while Real-ISR emphasizes pixel-level reconstruction, which hinders existing methods from fully exploiting diffusion priors. To address this challenge, we introduce ConsisSR to handle both semantic and pixel-level consistency. Specifically, compared to coarse-grained text prompts, we exploit the more powerful CLIP image embedding and effectively leverage both modalities through our Hybrid Prompt Adapter (HPA) for semantic guidance. Secondly, we introduce Time-aware Latent Augmentation (TALA) to mitigate the inherent gap between T2I generation and Real-ISR consistency requirements. By randomly mixing LQ and HQ latent inputs, our model not only handle timestep-specific diffusion noise but also refine the accumulated latent representations. Last but not least, our GAN-Embedding strategy employs the pretrained Real-ESRGAN model to refine the diffusion start point. This accelerates the inference process to 10 steps while preserving sampling quality, in a training-free manner. Our method demonstrates state-of-the-art performance among both full-scale and accelerated models. The code will be made publicly available.
Sparfels: Fast Reconstruction from Sparse Unposed Imagery
We present a method for Sparse view reconstruction with surface element splatting that runs within 3 minutes on a consumer grade GPU. While few methods address sparse radiance field learning from noisy or unposed sparse cameras, shape recovery remains relatively underexplored in this setting. Several radiance and shape learning test-time optimization methods address the sparse posed setting by learning data priors or using combinations of external monocular geometry priors. Differently, we propose an efficient and simple pipeline harnessing a single recent 3D foundation model. We leverage its various task heads, notably point maps and camera initializations to instantiate a bundle adjusting 2D Gaussian Splatting (2DGS) model, and image correspondences to guide camera optimization midst 2DGS training. Key to our contribution is a novel formulation of splatted color variance along rays, which can be computed efficiently. Reducing this moment in training leads to more accurate shape reconstructions. We demonstrate state-of-the-art performances in the sparse uncalibrated setting in reconstruction and novel view benchmarks based on established multi-view datasets.
WildFusion: Learning 3D-Aware Latent Diffusion Models in View Space
Modern learning-based approaches to 3D-aware image synthesis achieve high photorealism and 3D-consistent viewpoint changes for the generated images. Existing approaches represent instances in a shared canonical space. However, for in-the-wild datasets a shared canonical system can be difficult to define or might not even exist. In this work, we instead model instances in view space, alleviating the need for posed images and learned camera distributions. We find that in this setting, existing GAN-based methods are prone to generating flat geometry and struggle with distribution coverage. We hence propose WildFusion, a new approach to 3D-aware image synthesis based on latent diffusion models (LDMs). We first train an autoencoder that infers a compressed latent representation, which additionally captures the images' underlying 3D structure and enables not only reconstruction but also novel view synthesis. To learn a faithful 3D representation, we leverage cues from monocular depth prediction. Then, we train a diffusion model in the 3D-aware latent space, thereby enabling synthesis of high-quality 3D-consistent image samples, outperforming recent state-of-the-art GAN-based methods. Importantly, our 3D-aware LDM is trained without any direct supervision from multiview images or 3D geometry and does not require posed images or learned pose or camera distributions. It directly learns a 3D representation without relying on canonical camera coordinates. This opens up promising research avenues for scalable 3D-aware image synthesis and 3D content creation from in-the-wild image data. See https://katjaschwarz.github.io/wildfusion for videos of our 3D results.
SHINOBI: Shape and Illumination using Neural Object Decomposition via BRDF Optimization In-the-wild
We present SHINOBI, an end-to-end framework for the reconstruction of shape, material, and illumination from object images captured with varying lighting, pose, and background. Inverse rendering of an object based on unconstrained image collections is a long-standing challenge in computer vision and graphics and requires a joint optimization over shape, radiance, and pose. We show that an implicit shape representation based on a multi-resolution hash encoding enables faster and robust shape reconstruction with joint camera alignment optimization that outperforms prior work. Further, to enable the editing of illumination and object reflectance (i.e. material) we jointly optimize BRDF and illumination together with the object's shape. Our method is class-agnostic and works on in-the-wild image collections of objects to produce relightable 3D assets for several use cases such as AR/VR, movies, games, etc. Project page: https://shinobi.aengelhardt.com Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFENQ6AcYd8&feature=youtu.be
Efficient Meshy Neural Fields for Animatable Human Avatars
Efficiently digitizing high-fidelity animatable human avatars from videos is a challenging and active research topic. Recent volume rendering-based neural representations open a new way for human digitization with their friendly usability and photo-realistic reconstruction quality. However, they are inefficient for long optimization times and slow inference speed; their implicit nature results in entangled geometry, materials, and dynamics of humans, which are hard to edit afterward. Such drawbacks prevent their direct applicability to downstream applications, especially the prominent rasterization-based graphic ones. We present EMA, a method that Efficiently learns Meshy neural fields to reconstruct animatable human Avatars. It jointly optimizes explicit triangular canonical mesh, spatial-varying material, and motion dynamics, via inverse rendering in an end-to-end fashion. Each above component is derived from separate neural fields, relaxing the requirement of a template, or rigging. The mesh representation is highly compatible with the efficient rasterization-based renderer, thus our method only takes about an hour of training and can render in real-time. Moreover, only minutes of optimization is enough for plausible reconstruction results. The disentanglement of meshes enables direct downstream applications. Extensive experiments illustrate the very competitive performance and significant speed boost against previous methods. We also showcase applications including novel pose synthesis, material editing, and relighting. The project page: https://xk-huang.github.io/ema/.
SuperNormal: Neural Surface Reconstruction via Multi-View Normal Integration
We present SuperNormal, a fast, high-fidelity approach to multi-view 3D reconstruction using surface normal maps. With a few minutes, SuperNormal produces detailed surfaces on par with 3D scanners. We harness volume rendering to optimize a neural signed distance function (SDF) powered by multi-resolution hash encoding. To accelerate training, we propose directional finite difference and patch-based ray marching to approximate the SDF gradients numerically. While not compromising reconstruction quality, this strategy is nearly twice as efficient as analytical gradients and about three times faster than axis-aligned finite difference. Experiments on the benchmark dataset demonstrate the superiority of SuperNormal in efficiency and accuracy compared to existing multi-view photometric stereo methods. On our captured objects, SuperNormal produces more fine-grained geometry than recent neural 3D reconstruction methods.
DevilSight: Augmenting Monocular Human Avatar Reconstruction through a Virtual Perspective
We present a novel framework to reconstruct human avatars from monocular videos. Recent approaches have struggled either to capture the fine-grained dynamic details from the input or to generate plausible details at novel viewpoints, which mainly stem from the limited representational capacity of the avatar model and insufficient observational data. To overcome these challenges, we propose to leverage the advanced video generative model, Human4DiT, to generate the human motions from alternative perspective as an additional supervision signal. This approach not only enriches the details in previously unseen regions but also effectively regularizes the avatar representation to mitigate artifacts. Furthermore, we introduce two complementary strategies to enhance video generation: To ensure consistent reproduction of human motion, we inject the physical identity into the model through video fine-tuning. For higher-resolution outputs with finer details, a patch-based denoising algorithm is employed. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms recent state-of-the-art approaches and validate the effectiveness of our proposed strategies.
Two-shot Spatially-varying BRDF and Shape Estimation
Capturing the shape and spatially-varying appearance (SVBRDF) of an object from images is a challenging task that has applications in both computer vision and graphics. Traditional optimization-based approaches often need a large number of images taken from multiple views in a controlled environment. Newer deep learning-based approaches require only a few input images, but the reconstruction quality is not on par with optimization techniques. We propose a novel deep learning architecture with a stage-wise estimation of shape and SVBRDF. The previous predictions guide each estimation, and a joint refinement network later refines both SVBRDF and shape. We follow a practical mobile image capture setting and use unaligned two-shot flash and no-flash images as input. Both our two-shot image capture and network inference can run on mobile hardware. We also create a large-scale synthetic training dataset with domain-randomized geometry and realistic materials. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets show that our network trained on a synthetic dataset can generalize well to real-world images. Comparisons with recent approaches demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed approach.
Robust Dynamic Radiance Fields
Dynamic radiance field reconstruction methods aim to model the time-varying structure and appearance of a dynamic scene. Existing methods, however, assume that accurate camera poses can be reliably estimated by Structure from Motion (SfM) algorithms. These methods, thus, are unreliable as SfM algorithms often fail or produce erroneous poses on challenging videos with highly dynamic objects, poorly textured surfaces, and rotating camera motion. We address this robustness issue by jointly estimating the static and dynamic radiance fields along with the camera parameters (poses and focal length). We demonstrate the robustness of our approach via extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments. Our results show favorable performance over the state-of-the-art dynamic view synthesis methods.
On the Robustness of deep learning-based MRI Reconstruction to image transformations
Although deep learning (DL) has received much attention in accelerated magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), recent studies show that tiny input perturbations may lead to instabilities of DL-based MRI reconstruction models. However, the approaches of robustifying these models are underdeveloped. Compared to image classification, it could be much more challenging to achieve a robust MRI image reconstruction network considering its regression-based learning objective, limited amount of training data, and lack of efficient robustness metrics. To circumvent the above limitations, our work revisits the problem of DL-based image reconstruction through the lens of robust machine learning. We find a new instability source of MRI image reconstruction, i.e., the lack of reconstruction robustness against spatial transformations of an input, e.g., rotation and cutout. Inspired by this new robustness metric, we develop a robustness-aware image reconstruction method that can defend against both pixel-wise adversarial perturbations as well as spatial transformations. Extensive experiments are also conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approaches.
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 MLPs, 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.
CoherentGS: Sparse Novel View Synthesis with Coherent 3D Gaussians
The field of 3D reconstruction from images has rapidly evolved in the past few years, first with the introduction of Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) and more recently with 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS). The latter provides a significant edge over NeRF in terms of the training and inference speed, as well as the reconstruction quality. Although 3DGS works well for dense input images, the unstructured point-cloud like representation quickly overfits to the more challenging setup of extremely sparse input images (e.g., 3 images), creating a representation that appears as a jumble of needles from novel views. To address this issue, we propose regularized optimization and depth-based initialization. Our key idea is to introduce a structured Gaussian representation that can be controlled in 2D image space. We then constraint the Gaussians, in particular their position, and prevent them from moving independently during optimization. Specifically, we introduce single and multiview constraints through an implicit convolutional decoder and a total variation loss, respectively. With the coherency introduced to the Gaussians, we further constrain the optimization through a flow-based loss function. To support our regularized optimization, we propose an approach to initialize the Gaussians using monocular depth estimates at each input view. We demonstrate significant improvements compared to the state-of-the-art sparse-view NeRF-based approaches on a variety of scenes.
CamCtrl3D: Single-Image Scene Exploration with Precise 3D Camera Control
We propose a method for generating fly-through videos of a scene, from a single image and a given camera trajectory. We build upon an image-to-video latent diffusion model. We condition its UNet denoiser on the camera trajectory, using four techniques. (1) We condition the UNet's temporal blocks on raw camera extrinsics, similar to MotionCtrl. (2) We use images containing camera rays and directions, similar to CameraCtrl. (3) We reproject the initial image to subsequent frames and use the resulting video as a condition. (4) We use 2D<=>3D transformers to introduce a global 3D representation, which implicitly conditions on the camera poses. We combine all conditions in a ContolNet-style architecture. We then propose a metric that evaluates overall video quality and the ability to preserve details with view changes, which we use to analyze the trade-offs of individual and combined conditions. Finally, we identify an optimal combination of conditions. We calibrate camera positions in our datasets for scale consistency across scenes, and we train our scene exploration model, CamCtrl3D, demonstrating state-of-theart results.
Ambient Diffusion Posterior Sampling: Solving Inverse Problems with Diffusion Models trained on Corrupted Data
We provide a framework for solving inverse problems with diffusion models learned from linearly corrupted data. Our method, Ambient Diffusion Posterior Sampling (A-DPS), leverages a generative model pre-trained on one type of corruption (e.g. image inpainting) to perform posterior sampling conditioned on measurements from a potentially different forward process (e.g. image blurring). We test the efficacy of our approach on standard natural image datasets (CelebA, FFHQ, and AFHQ) and we show that A-DPS can sometimes outperform models trained on clean data for several image restoration tasks in both speed and performance. We further extend the Ambient Diffusion framework to train MRI models with access only to Fourier subsampled multi-coil MRI measurements at various acceleration factors (R=2, 4, 6, 8). We again observe that models trained on highly subsampled data are better priors for solving inverse problems in the high acceleration regime than models trained on fully sampled data. We open-source our code and the trained Ambient Diffusion MRI models: https://github.com/utcsilab/ambient-diffusion-mri .
Understanding Deep Image Representations by Inverting Them
Image representations, from SIFT and Bag of Visual Words to Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), are a crucial component of almost any image understanding system. Nevertheless, our understanding of them remains limited. In this paper we conduct a direct analysis of the visual information contained in representations by asking the following question: given an encoding of an image, to which extent is it possible to reconstruct the image itself? To answer this question we contribute a general framework to invert representations. We show that this method can invert representations such as HOG and SIFT more accurately than recent alternatives while being applicable to CNNs too. We then use this technique to study the inverse of recent state-of-the-art CNN image representations for the first time. Among our findings, we show that several layers in CNNs retain photographically accurate information about the image, with different degrees of geometric and photometric invariance.
3DILG: Irregular Latent Grids for 3D Generative Modeling
We propose a new representation for encoding 3D shapes as neural fields. The representation is designed to be compatible with the transformer architecture and to benefit both shape reconstruction and shape generation. Existing works on neural fields are grid-based representations with latents defined on a regular grid. In contrast, we define latents on irregular grids, enabling our representation to be sparse and adaptive. In the context of shape reconstruction from point clouds, our shape representation built on irregular grids improves upon grid-based methods in terms of reconstruction accuracy. For shape generation, our representation promotes high-quality shape generation using auto-regressive probabilistic models. We show different applications that improve over the current state of the art. First, we show results for probabilistic shape reconstruction from a single higher resolution image. Second, we train a probabilistic model conditioned on very low resolution images. Third, we apply our model to category-conditioned generation. All probabilistic experiments confirm that we are able to generate detailed and high quality shapes to yield the new state of the art in generative 3D shape modeling.
Exploiting Diffusion Prior for Real-World Image Super-Resolution
We present a novel approach to leverage prior knowledge encapsulated in pre-trained text-to-image diffusion models for blind super-resolution (SR). Specifically, by employing our time-aware encoder, we can achieve promising restoration results without altering the pre-trained synthesis model, thereby preserving the generative prior and minimizing training cost. To remedy the loss of fidelity caused by the inherent stochasticity of diffusion models, we introduce a controllable feature wrapping module that allows users to balance quality and fidelity by simply adjusting a scalar value during the inference process. Moreover, we develop a progressive aggregation sampling strategy to overcome the fixed-size constraints of pre-trained diffusion models, enabling adaptation to resolutions of any size. A comprehensive evaluation of our method using both synthetic and real-world benchmarks demonstrates its superiority over current state-of-the-art approaches.
Long-Term Photometric Consistent Novel View Synthesis with Diffusion Models
Novel view synthesis from a single input image is a challenging task, where the goal is to generate a new view of a scene from a desired camera pose that may be separated by a large motion. The highly uncertain nature of this synthesis task due to unobserved elements within the scene (i.e. occlusion) and outside the field-of-view makes the use of generative models appealing to capture the variety of possible outputs. In this paper, we propose a novel generative model capable of producing a sequence of photorealistic images consistent with a specified camera trajectory, and a single starting image. Our approach is centred on an autoregressive conditional diffusion-based model capable of interpolating visible scene elements, and extrapolating unobserved regions in a view, in a geometrically consistent manner. Conditioning is limited to an image capturing a single camera view and the (relative) pose of the new camera view. To measure the consistency over a sequence of generated views, we introduce a new metric, the thresholded symmetric epipolar distance (TSED), to measure the number of consistent frame pairs in a sequence. While previous methods have been shown to produce high quality images and consistent semantics across pairs of views, we show empirically with our metric that they are often inconsistent with the desired camera poses. In contrast, we demonstrate that our method produces both photorealistic and view-consistent imagery.
Improving Reconstruction Autoencoder Out-of-distribution Detection with Mahalanobis Distance
There is an increasingly apparent need for validating the classifications made by deep learning systems in safety-critical applications like autonomous vehicle systems. A number of recent papers have proposed methods for detecting anomalous image data that appear different from known inlier data samples, including reconstruction-based autoencoders. Autoencoders optimize the compression of input data to a latent space of a dimensionality smaller than the original input and attempt to accurately reconstruct the input using that compressed representation. Since the latent vector is optimized to capture the salient features from the inlier class only, it is commonly assumed that images of objects from outside of the training class cannot effectively be compressed and reconstructed. Some thus consider reconstruction error as a kind of novelty measure. Here we suggest that reconstruction-based approaches fail to capture particular anomalies that lie far from known inlier samples in latent space but near the latent dimension manifold defined by the parameters of the model. We propose incorporating the Mahalanobis distance in latent space to better capture these out-of-distribution samples and our results show that this method often improves performance over the baseline approach.
Learning to Detect Multi-class Anomalies with Just One Normal Image Prompt
Unsupervised reconstruction networks using self-attention transformers have achieved state-of-the-art performance for multi-class (unified) anomaly detection with a single model. However, these self-attention reconstruction models primarily operate on target features, which may result in perfect reconstruction for both normal and anomaly features due to high consistency with context, leading to failure in detecting anomalies. Additionally, these models often produce inaccurate anomaly segmentation due to performing reconstruction in a low spatial resolution latent space. To enable reconstruction models enjoying high efficiency while enhancing their generalization for unified anomaly detection, we propose a simple yet effective method that reconstructs normal features and restores anomaly features with just One Normal Image Prompt (OneNIP). In contrast to previous work, OneNIP allows for the first time to reconstruct or restore anomalies with just one normal image prompt, effectively boosting unified anomaly detection performance. Furthermore, we propose a supervised refiner that regresses reconstruction errors by using both real normal and synthesized anomalous images, which significantly improves pixel-level anomaly segmentation. OneNIP outperforms previous methods on three industry anomaly detection benchmarks: MVTec, BTAD, and VisA. The code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/gaobb/OneNIP.
Fast View Synthesis of Casual Videos
Novel view synthesis from an in-the-wild video is difficult due to challenges like scene dynamics and lack of parallax. While existing methods have shown promising results with implicit neural radiance fields, they are slow to train and render. This paper revisits explicit video representations to synthesize high-quality novel views from a monocular video efficiently. We treat static and dynamic video content separately. Specifically, we build a global static scene model using an extended plane-based scene representation to synthesize temporally coherent novel video. Our plane-based scene representation is augmented with spherical harmonics and displacement maps to capture view-dependent effects and model non-planar complex surface geometry. We opt to represent the dynamic content as per-frame point clouds for efficiency. While such representations are inconsistency-prone, minor temporal inconsistencies are perceptually masked due to motion. We develop a method to quickly estimate such a hybrid video representation and render novel views in real time. Our experiments show that our method can render high-quality novel views from an in-the-wild video with comparable quality to state-of-the-art methods while being 100x faster in training and enabling real-time rendering.
CTSR: Controllable Fidelity-Realness Trade-off Distillation for Real-World Image Super Resolution
Real-world image super-resolution is a critical image processing task, where two key evaluation criteria are the fidelity to the original image and the visual realness of the generated results. Although existing methods based on diffusion models excel in visual realness by leveraging strong priors, they often struggle to achieve an effective balance between fidelity and realness. In our preliminary experiments, we observe that a linear combination of multiple models outperforms individual models, motivating us to harness the strengths of different models for a more effective trade-off. Based on this insight, we propose a distillation-based approach that leverages the geometric decomposition of both fidelity and realness, alongside the performance advantages of multiple teacher models, to strike a more balanced trade-off. Furthermore, we explore the controllability of this trade-off, enabling a flexible and adjustable super-resolution process, which we call CTSR (Controllable Trade-off Super-Resolution). Experiments conducted on several real-world image super-resolution benchmarks demonstrate that our method surpasses existing state-of-the-art approaches, achieving superior performance across both fidelity and realness metrics.
VGGT-SLAM: Dense RGB SLAM Optimized on the SL(4) Manifold
We present VGGT-SLAM, a dense RGB SLAM system constructed by incrementally and globally aligning submaps created from the feed-forward scene reconstruction approach VGGT using only uncalibrated monocular cameras. While related works align submaps using similarity transforms (i.e., translation, rotation, and scale), we show that such approaches are inadequate in the case of uncalibrated cameras. In particular, we revisit the idea of reconstruction ambiguity, where given a set of uncalibrated cameras with no assumption on the camera motion or scene structure, the scene can only be reconstructed up to a 15-degrees-of-freedom projective transformation of the true geometry. This inspires us to recover a consistent scene reconstruction across submaps by optimizing over the SL(4) manifold, thus estimating 15-degrees-of-freedom homography transforms between sequential submaps while accounting for potential loop closure constraints. As verified by extensive experiments, we demonstrate that VGGT-SLAM achieves improved map quality using long video sequences that are infeasible for VGGT due to its high GPU requirements.
MiraGe: Editable 2D Images using Gaussian Splatting
Implicit Neural Representations (INRs) approximate discrete data through continuous functions and are commonly used for encoding 2D images. Traditional image-based INRs employ neural networks to map pixel coordinates to RGB values, capturing shapes, colors, and textures within the network's weights. Recently, GaussianImage has been proposed as an alternative, using Gaussian functions instead of neural networks to achieve comparable quality and compression. Such a solution obtains a quality and compression ratio similar to classical INR models but does not allow image modification. In contrast, our work introduces a novel method, MiraGe, which uses mirror reflections to perceive 2D images in 3D space and employs flat-controlled Gaussians for precise 2D image editing. Our approach improves the rendering quality and allows realistic image modifications, including human-inspired perception of photos in the 3D world. Thanks to modeling images in 3D space, we obtain the illusion of 3D-based modification in 2D images. We also show that our Gaussian representation can be easily combined with a physics engine to produce physics-based modification of 2D images. Consequently, MiraGe allows for better quality than the standard approach and natural modification of 2D images
VQ-NeRF: Vector Quantization Enhances Implicit Neural Representations
Recent advancements in implicit neural representations have contributed to high-fidelity surface reconstruction and photorealistic novel view synthesis. However, the computational complexity inherent in these methodologies presents a substantial impediment, constraining the attainable frame rates and resolutions in practical applications. In response to this predicament, we propose VQ-NeRF, an effective and efficient pipeline for enhancing implicit neural representations via vector quantization. The essence of our method involves reducing the sampling space of NeRF to a lower resolution and subsequently reinstating it to the original size utilizing a pre-trained VAE decoder, thereby effectively mitigating the sampling time bottleneck encountered during rendering. Although the codebook furnishes representative features, reconstructing fine texture details of the scene remains challenging due to high compression rates. To overcome this constraint, we design an innovative multi-scale NeRF sampling scheme that concurrently optimizes the NeRF model at both compressed and original scales to enhance the network's ability to preserve fine details. Furthermore, we incorporate a semantic loss function to improve the geometric fidelity and semantic coherence of our 3D reconstructions. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our model in achieving the optimal trade-off between rendering quality and efficiency. Evaluation on the DTU, BlendMVS, and H3DS datasets confirms the superior performance of our approach.
Mono4DGS-HDR: High Dynamic Range 4D Gaussian Splatting from Alternating-exposure Monocular Videos
We introduce Mono4DGS-HDR, the first system for reconstructing renderable 4D high dynamic range (HDR) scenes from unposed monocular low dynamic range (LDR) videos captured with alternating exposures. To tackle such a challenging problem, we present a unified framework with two-stage optimization approach based on Gaussian Splatting. The first stage learns a video HDR Gaussian representation in orthographic camera coordinate space, eliminating the need for camera poses and enabling robust initial HDR video reconstruction. The second stage transforms video Gaussians into world space and jointly refines the world Gaussians with camera poses. Furthermore, we propose a temporal luminance regularization strategy to enhance the temporal consistency of the HDR appearance. Since our task has not been studied before, we construct a new evaluation benchmark using publicly available datasets for HDR video reconstruction. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Mono4DGS-HDR significantly outperforms alternative solutions adapted from state-of-the-art methods in both rendering quality and speed.
Pixel-Aware Stable Diffusion for Realistic Image Super-resolution and Personalized Stylization
Realistic image super-resolution (Real-ISR) aims to reproduce perceptually realistic image details from a low-quality input. The commonly used adversarial training based Real-ISR methods often introduce unnatural visual artifacts and fail to generate realistic textures for natural scene images. The recently developed generative stable diffusion models provide a potential solution to Real-ISR with pre-learned strong image priors. However, the existing methods along this line either fail to keep faithful pixel-wise image structures or resort to extra skipped connections to reproduce details, which requires additional training in image space and limits their extension to other related tasks in latent space such as image stylization. In this work, we propose a pixel-aware stable diffusion (PASD) network to achieve robust Real-ISR as well as personalized stylization. In specific, a pixel-aware cross attention module is introduced to enable diffusion models perceiving image local structures in pixel-wise level, while a degradation removal module is used to extract degradation insensitive features to guide the diffusion process together with image high level information. By simply replacing the base diffusion model with a personalized one, our method can generate diverse stylized images without the need to collect pairwise training data. PASD can be easily integrated into existing diffusion models such as Stable Diffusion. Experiments on Real-ISR and personalized stylization demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach. The source code and models can be found at https://github.com/yangxy/PASD.
Density estimation using Real NVP
Unsupervised learning of probabilistic models is a central yet challenging problem in machine learning. Specifically, designing models with tractable learning, sampling, inference and evaluation is crucial in solving this task. We extend the space of such models using real-valued non-volume preserving (real NVP) transformations, a set of powerful invertible and learnable transformations, resulting in an unsupervised learning algorithm with exact log-likelihood computation, exact sampling, exact inference of latent variables, and an interpretable latent space. We demonstrate its ability to model natural images on four datasets through sampling, log-likelihood evaluation and latent variable manipulations.
Super-resolving Real-world Image Illumination Enhancement: A New Dataset and A Conditional Diffusion Model
Most existing super-resolution methods and datasets have been developed to improve the image quality in well-lighted conditions. However, these methods do not work well in real-world low-light conditions as the images captured in such conditions lose most important information and contain significant unknown noises. To solve this problem, we propose a SRRIIE dataset with an efficient conditional diffusion probabilistic models-based method. The proposed dataset contains 4800 paired low-high quality images. To ensure that the dataset are able to model the real-world image degradation in low-illumination environments, we capture images using an ILDC camera and an optical zoom lens with exposure levels ranging from -6 EV to 0 EV and ISO levels ranging from 50 to 12800. We comprehensively evaluate with various reconstruction and perceptual metrics and demonstrate the practicabilities of the SRRIIE dataset for deep learning-based methods. We show that most existing methods are less effective in preserving the structures and sharpness of restored images from complicated noises. To overcome this problem, we revise the condition for Raw sensor data and propose a novel time-melding condition for diffusion probabilistic model. Comprehensive quantitative and qualitative experimental results on the real-world benchmark datasets demonstrate the feasibility and effectivenesses of the proposed conditional diffusion probabilistic model on Raw sensor data. Code and dataset will be available at https://github.com/Yaofang-Liu/Super-Resolving
Image Inpainting via Generative Multi-column Convolutional Neural Networks
In this paper, we propose a generative multi-column network for image inpainting. This network synthesizes different image components in a parallel manner within one stage. To better characterize global structures, we design a confidence-driven reconstruction loss while an implicit diversified MRF regularization is adopted to enhance local details. The multi-column network combined with the reconstruction and MRF loss propagates local and global information derived from context to the target inpainting regions. Extensive experiments on challenging street view, face, natural objects and scenes manifest that our method produces visual compelling results even without previously common post-processing.
Undertrained Image Reconstruction for Realistic Degradation in Blind Image Super-Resolution
Most super-resolution (SR) models struggle with real-world low-resolution (LR) images. This issue arises because the degradation characteristics in the synthetic datasets differ from those in real-world LR images. Since SR models are trained on pairs of high-resolution (HR) and LR images generated by downsampling, they are optimized for simple degradation. However, real-world LR images contain complex degradation caused by factors such as the imaging process and JPEG compression. Due to these differences in degradation characteristics, most SR models perform poorly on real-world LR images. This study proposes a dataset generation method using undertrained image reconstruction models. These models have the property of reconstructing low-quality images with diverse degradation from input images. By leveraging this property, this study generates LR images with diverse degradation from HR images to construct the datasets. Fine-tuning pre-trained SR models on our generated datasets improves noise removal and blur reduction, enhancing performance on real-world LR images. Furthermore, an analysis of the datasets reveals that degradation diversity contributes to performance improvements, whereas color differences between HR and LR images may degrade performance. 11 pages, (11 figures and 2 tables)
Envision3D: One Image to 3D with Anchor Views Interpolation
We present Envision3D, a novel method for efficiently generating high-quality 3D content from a single image. Recent methods that extract 3D content from multi-view images generated by diffusion models show great potential. However, it is still challenging for diffusion models to generate dense multi-view consistent images, which is crucial for the quality of 3D content extraction. To address this issue, we propose a novel cascade diffusion framework, which decomposes the challenging dense views generation task into two tractable stages, namely anchor views generation and anchor views interpolation. In the first stage, we train the image diffusion model to generate global consistent anchor views conditioning on image-normal pairs. Subsequently, leveraging our video diffusion model fine-tuned on consecutive multi-view images, we conduct interpolation on the previous anchor views to generate extra dense views. This framework yields dense, multi-view consistent images, providing comprehensive 3D information. To further enhance the overall generation quality, we introduce a coarse-to-fine sampling strategy for the reconstruction algorithm to robustly extract textured meshes from the generated dense images. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method is capable of generating high-quality 3D content in terms of texture and geometry, surpassing previous image-to-3D baseline methods.
Sparse-View 3D Reconstruction: Recent Advances and Open Challenges
Sparse-view 3D reconstruction is essential for applications in which dense image acquisition is impractical, such as robotics, augmented/virtual reality (AR/VR), and autonomous systems. In these settings, minimal image overlap prevents reliable correspondence matching, causing traditional methods, such as structure-from-motion (SfM) and multiview stereo (MVS), to fail. This survey reviews the latest advances in neural implicit models (e.g., NeRF and its regularized versions), explicit point-cloud-based approaches (e.g., 3D Gaussian Splatting), and hybrid frameworks that leverage priors from diffusion and vision foundation models (VFMs).We analyze how geometric regularization, explicit shape modeling, and generative inference are used to mitigate artifacts such as floaters and pose ambiguities in sparse-view settings. Comparative results on standard benchmarks reveal key trade-offs between the reconstruction accuracy, efficiency, and generalization. Unlike previous reviews, our survey provides a unified perspective on geometry-based, neural implicit, and generative (diffusion-based) methods. We highlight the persistent challenges in domain generalization and pose-free reconstruction and outline future directions for developing 3D-native generative priors and achieving real-time, unconstrained sparse-view reconstruction.
Cameras as Rays: Pose Estimation via Ray Diffusion
Estimating camera poses is a fundamental task for 3D reconstruction and remains challenging given sparsely sampled views (<10). In contrast to existing approaches that pursue top-down prediction of global parametrizations of camera extrinsics, we propose a distributed representation of camera pose that treats a camera as a bundle of rays. This representation allows for a tight coupling with spatial image features improving pose precision. We observe that this representation is naturally suited for set-level transformers and develop a regression-based approach that maps image patches to corresponding rays. To capture the inherent uncertainties in sparse-view pose inference, we adapt this approach to learn a denoising diffusion model which allows us to sample plausible modes while improving performance. Our proposed methods, both regression- and diffusion-based, demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on camera pose estimation on CO3D while generalizing to unseen object categories and in-the-wild captures.
DMV3D: Denoising Multi-View Diffusion using 3D Large Reconstruction Model
We propose DMV3D, a novel 3D generation approach that uses a transformer-based 3D large reconstruction model to denoise multi-view diffusion. Our reconstruction model incorporates a triplane NeRF representation and can denoise noisy multi-view images via NeRF reconstruction and rendering, achieving single-stage 3D generation in sim30s on single A100 GPU. We train DMV3D on large-scale multi-view image datasets of highly diverse objects using only image reconstruction losses, without accessing 3D assets. We demonstrate state-of-the-art results for the single-image reconstruction problem where probabilistic modeling of unseen object parts is required for generating diverse reconstructions with sharp textures. We also show high-quality text-to-3D generation results outperforming previous 3D diffusion models. Our project website is at: https://justimyhxu.github.io/projects/dmv3d/ .
Efficient View Synthesis and 3D-based Multi-Frame Denoising with Multiplane Feature Representations
While current multi-frame restoration methods combine information from multiple input images using 2D alignment techniques, recent advances in novel view synthesis are paving the way for a new paradigm relying on volumetric scene representations. In this work, we introduce the first 3D-based multi-frame denoising method that significantly outperforms its 2D-based counterparts with lower computational requirements. Our method extends the multiplane image (MPI) framework for novel view synthesis by introducing a learnable encoder-renderer pair manipulating multiplane representations in feature space. The encoder fuses information across views and operates in a depth-wise manner while the renderer fuses information across depths and operates in a view-wise manner. The two modules are trained end-to-end and learn to separate depths in an unsupervised way, giving rise to Multiplane Feature (MPF) representations. Experiments on the Spaces and Real Forward-Facing datasets as well as on raw burst data validate our approach for view synthesis, multi-frame denoising, and view synthesis under noisy conditions.
Factorized Diffusion: Perceptual Illusions by Noise Decomposition
Given a factorization of an image into a sum of linear components, we present a zero-shot method to control each individual component through diffusion model sampling. For example, we can decompose an image into low and high spatial frequencies and condition these components on different text prompts. This produces hybrid images, which change appearance depending on viewing distance. By decomposing an image into three frequency subbands, we can generate hybrid images with three prompts. We also use a decomposition into grayscale and color components to produce images whose appearance changes when they are viewed in grayscale, a phenomena that naturally occurs under dim lighting. And we explore a decomposition by a motion blur kernel, which produces images that change appearance under motion blurring. Our method works by denoising with a composite noise estimate, built from the components of noise estimates conditioned on different prompts. We also show that for certain decompositions, our method recovers prior approaches to compositional generation and spatial control. Finally, we show that we can extend our approach to generate hybrid images from real images. We do this by holding one component fixed and generating the remaining components, effectively solving an inverse problem.
NSARM: Next-Scale Autoregressive Modeling for Robust Real-World Image Super-Resolution
Most recent real-world image super-resolution (Real-ISR) methods employ pre-trained text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models to synthesize the high-quality image either from random Gaussian noise, which yields realistic results but is slow due to iterative denoising, or directly from the input low-quality image, which is efficient but at the price of lower output quality. These approaches train ControlNet or LoRA modules while keeping the pre-trained model fixed, which often introduces over-enhanced artifacts and hallucinations, suffering from the robustness to inputs of varying degradations. Recent visual autoregressive (AR) models, such as pre-trained Infinity, can provide strong T2I generation capabilities while offering superior efficiency by using the bitwise next-scale prediction strategy. Building upon next-scale prediction, we introduce a robust Real-ISR framework, namely Next-Scale Autoregressive Modeling (NSARM). Specifically, we train NSARM in two stages: a transformation network is first trained to map the input low-quality image to preliminary scales, followed by an end-to-end full-model fine-tuning. Such a comprehensive fine-tuning enhances the robustness of NSARM in Real-ISR tasks without compromising its generative capability. Extensive quantitative and qualitative evaluations demonstrate that as a pure AR model, NSARM achieves superior visual results over existing Real-ISR methods while maintaining a fast inference speed. Most importantly, it demonstrates much higher robustness to the quality of input images, showing stronger generalization performance. Project page: https://github.com/Xiangtaokong/NSARM
Efficient-VQGAN: Towards High-Resolution Image Generation with Efficient Vision Transformers
Vector-quantized image modeling has shown great potential in synthesizing high-quality images. However, generating high-resolution images remains a challenging task due to the quadratic computational overhead of the self-attention process. In this study, we seek to explore a more efficient two-stage framework for high-resolution image generation with improvements in the following three aspects. (1) Based on the observation that the first quantization stage has solid local property, we employ a local attention-based quantization model instead of the global attention mechanism used in previous methods, leading to better efficiency and reconstruction quality. (2) We emphasize the importance of multi-grained feature interaction during image generation and introduce an efficient attention mechanism that combines global attention (long-range semantic consistency within the whole image) and local attention (fined-grained details). This approach results in faster generation speed, higher generation fidelity, and improved resolution. (3) We propose a new generation pipeline incorporating autoencoding training and autoregressive generation strategy, demonstrating a better paradigm for image synthesis. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our approach in high-quality and high-resolution image reconstruction and generation.
Solving Inverse Problems with Latent Diffusion Models via Hard Data Consistency
Diffusion models have recently emerged as powerful generative priors for solving inverse problems. However, training diffusion models in the pixel space are both data-intensive and computationally demanding, which restricts their applicability as priors for high-dimensional real-world data such as medical images. Latent diffusion models, which operate in a much lower-dimensional space, offer a solution to these challenges. However, incorporating latent diffusion models to solve inverse problems remains a challenging problem due to the nonlinearity of the encoder and decoder. To address these issues, we propose ReSample, an algorithm that can solve general inverse problems with pre-trained latent diffusion models. Our algorithm incorporates data consistency by solving an optimization problem during the reverse sampling process, a concept that we term as hard data consistency. Upon solving this optimization problem, we propose a novel resampling scheme to map the measurement-consistent sample back onto the noisy data manifold and theoretically demonstrate its benefits. Lastly, we apply our algorithm to solve a wide range of linear and nonlinear inverse problems in both natural and medical images, demonstrating that our approach outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches, including those based on pixel-space diffusion models.
