Richard A. Shaw

Eduardo Pérez-Pellitero, Sibi Catley-Chandar, Richard Shaw et al.

This paper reviews the challenge on constrained high dynamic range (HDR) imaging that was part of the New Trends in Image Restoration and Enhancement (NTIRE) workshop, held in conjunction with CVPR 2022. This manuscript focuses on the competition set-up, datasets, the proposed methods and their results. The challenge aims at estimating an HDR image from multiple respective low dynamic range (LDR) observations, which might suffer from under- or over-exposed regions and different sources of noise. The challenge is composed of two tracks with an emphasis on fidelity and complexity constraints: In Track 1, participants are asked to optimize objective fidelity scores while imposing a low-complexity constraint (i.e. solutions can not exceed a given number of operations). In Track 2, participants are asked to minimize the complexity of their solutions while imposing a constraint on fidelity scores (i.e. solutions are required to obtain a higher fidelity score than the prescribed baseline). Both tracks use the same data and metrics: Fidelity is measured by means of PSNR with respect to a ground-truth HDR image (computed both directly and with a canonical tonemapping operation), while complexity metrics include the number of Multiply-Accumulate (MAC) operations and runtime (in seconds).

Michal Nazarczuk, Thomas Tanay, Sibi Catley-Chandar et al.

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/

Michal Nazarczuk, Sibi Catley-Chandar, Thomas Tanay et al.

This paper reviews the challenge on Sparse Neural Rendering that was part of the Advances in Image Manipulation (AIM) workshop, held in conjunction with ECCV 2024. This manuscript focuses on the competition set-up, the proposed methods and their respective results. The challenge aims at producing novel camera view synthesis of diverse scenes from sparse image observations. It is composed of two tracks, with differing levels of sparsity; 3 views in Track 1 (very sparse) and 9 views in Track 2 (sparse). Participants are asked to optimise objective fidelity to the ground-truth images as measured via the Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) metric. For both tracks, we use the newly introduced Sparse Rendering (SpaRe) dataset and the popular DTU MVS dataset. In this challenge, 5 teams submitted final results to Track 1 and 4 teams submitted final results to Track 2. The submitted models are varied and push the boundaries of the current state-of-the-art in sparse neural rendering. A detailed description of all models developed in the challenge is provided in this paper.

Richard Shaw, Sibi Catley-Chandar, Ales Leonardis et al.

Reconstruction of high-quality HDR images is at the core of modern computational photography. Significant progress has been made with multi-frame HDR reconstruction methods, producing high-resolution, rich and accurate color reconstructions with high-frequency details. However, they are still prone to fail in dynamic or largely over-exposed scenes, where frame misalignment often results in visible ghosting artifacts. Recent approaches attempt to alleviate this by utilizing an event-based camera (EBC), which measures only binary changes of illuminations. Despite their desirable high temporal resolution and dynamic range characteristics, such approaches have not outperformed traditional multi-frame reconstruction methods, mainly due to the lack of color information and low-resolution sensors. In this paper, we propose to leverage both bracketed LDR images and simultaneously captured events to obtain the best of both worlds: high-quality RGB information from bracketed LDRs and complementary high frequency and dynamic range information from events. We present a multi-modal end-to-end learning-based HDR imaging system that fuses bracketed images and event modalities in the feature domain using attention and multi-scale spatial alignment modules. We propose a novel event-to-image feature distillation module that learns to translate event features into the image-feature space with self-supervision. Our framework exploits the higher temporal resolution of events by sub-sampling the input event streams using a sliding window, enriching our combined feature representation. Our proposed approach surpasses SoTA multi-frame HDR reconstruction methods using synthetic and real events, with a 2dB and 1dB improvement in PSNR-L and PSNR-mu on the HdM HDR dataset, respectively.

Arthur Moreau, Jifei Song, Helisa Dhamo et al.

This work addresses the problem of real-time rendering of photorealistic human body avatars learned from multi-view videos. While the classical approaches to model and render virtual humans generally use a textured mesh, recent research has developed neural body representations that achieve impressive visual quality. However, these models are difficult to render in real-time and their quality degrades when the character is animated with body poses different than the training observations. We propose an animatable human model based on 3D Gaussian Splatting, that has recently emerged as a very efficient alternative to neural radiance fields. The body is represented by a set of gaussian primitives in a canonical space which is deformed with a coarse to fine approach that combines forward skinning and local non-rigid refinement. We describe how to learn our Human Gaussian Splatting (HuGS) model in an end-to-end fashion from multi-view observations, and evaluate it against the state-of-the-art approaches for novel pose synthesis of clothed body. Our method achieves 1.5 dB PSNR improvement over the state-of-the-art on THuman4 dataset while being able to render in real-time (80 fps for 512x512 resolution).

Helisa Dhamo, Yinyu Nie, Arthur Moreau et al.

3D head animation has seen major quality and runtime improvements over the last few years, particularly empowered by the advances in differentiable rendering and neural radiance fields. Real-time rendering is a highly desirable goal for real-world applications. We propose HeadGaS, a model that uses 3D Gaussian Splats (3DGS) for 3D head reconstruction and animation. In this paper we introduce a hybrid model that extends the explicit 3DGS representation with a base of learnable latent features, which can be linearly blended with low-dimensional parameters from parametric head models to obtain expression-dependent color and opacity values. We demonstrate that HeadGaS delivers state-of-the-art results in real-time inference frame rates, surpassing baselines by up to 2dB, while accelerating rendering speed by over x10.

Richard Shaw, Michal Nazarczuk, Jifei Song et al.

Novel view synthesis has shown rapid progress recently, with methods capable of producing increasingly photorealistic results. 3D Gaussian Splatting has emerged as a promising method, producing high-quality renderings of scenes and enabling interactive viewing at real-time frame rates. However, it is limited to static scenes. In this work, we extend 3D Gaussian Splatting to reconstruct dynamic scenes. We model a scene's dynamics using dynamic MLPs, learning deformations from temporally-local canonical representations to per-frame 3D Gaussians. To disentangle static and dynamic regions, tuneable parameters weigh each Gaussian's respective MLP parameters, improving the dynamics modelling of imbalanced scenes. We introduce a sliding window training strategy that partitions the sequence into smaller manageable windows to handle arbitrary length scenes while maintaining high rendering quality. We propose an adaptive sampling strategy to determine appropriate window size hyperparameters based on the scene's motion, balancing training overhead with visual quality. Training a separate dynamic 3D Gaussian model for each sliding window allows the canonical representation to change, enabling the reconstruction of scenes with significant geometric changes. Temporal consistency is enforced using a fine-tuning step with self-supervising consistency loss on randomly sampled novel views. As a result, our method produces high-quality renderings of general dynamic scenes with competitive quantitative performance, which can be viewed in real-time in our dynamic interactive viewer.

Arthur Moreau, Mohammed Brahimi, Richard Shaw et al.

We present Better Together, a method that simultaneously solves the human pose estimation problem while reconstructing a photorealistic 3D human avatar from multi-view videos. While prior art usually solves these problems separately, we argue that joint optimization of skeletal motion with a 3D renderable body model brings synergistic effects, i.e. yields more precise motion capture and improved visual quality of real-time rendering of avatars. To achieve this, we introduce a novel animatable avatar with 3D Gaussians rigged on a personalized mesh and propose to optimize the motion sequence with time-dependent MLPs that provide accurate and temporally consistent pose estimates. We first evaluate our method on highly challenging yoga poses and demonstrate state-of-the-art accuracy on multi-view human pose estimation, reducing error by 35% on body joints and 45% on hand joints compared to keypoint-based methods. At the same time, our method significantly boosts the visual quality of animatable avatars (+2dB PSNR on novel view synthesis) on diverse challenging subjects.

Richard Shaw, Carole H. Sudre, Sebastien Ourselin et al.

Quality control (QC) of medical images is essential to ensure that downstream analyses such as segmentation can be performed successfully. Currently, QC is predominantly performed visually at significant time and operator cost. We aim to automate the process by formulating a probabilistic network that estimates uncertainty through a heteroscedastic noise model, hence providing a proxy measure of task-specific image quality that is learnt directly from the data. By augmenting the training data with different types of simulated k-space artefacts, we propose a novel cascading CNN architecture based on a student-teacher framework to decouple sources of uncertainty related to different k-space augmentations in an entirely self-supervised manner. This enables us to predict separate uncertainty quantities for the different types of data degradation. While the uncertainty measures reflect the presence and severity of image artefacts, the network also provides the segmentation predictions given the quality of the data. We show models trained with simulated artefacts provide informative measures of uncertainty on real-world images and we validate our uncertainty predictions on problematic images identified by human-raters.

Leon Derczynski, Richard Shaw, Ben Solway et al.

Question answering involves developing methods to extract useful information from large collections of documents. This is done with specialised search engines such as Answer Finder. The aim of Answer Finder is to provide an answer to a question rather than a page listing related documents that may contain the correct answer. So, a question such as "How tall is the Eiffel Tower" would simply return "325m" or "1,063ft". Our task was to build on the current version of Answer Finder by improving information retrieval, and also improving the pre-processing involved in question series analysis.