Janne Heikkila

Snehal Bhayani, Viktor Larsson, Torsten Sattler et al.

In this paper we study the problem of estimating the semi-generalized pose of a partially calibrated camera, i.e., the pose of a perspective camera with unknown focal length w.r.t. a generalized camera, from a hybrid set of 2D-2D and 2D-3D point correspondences. We study all possible camera configurations within the generalized camera system. To derive practical solvers to previously unsolved challenging configurations, we test different parameterizations as well as different solving strategies based on the state-of-the-art methods for generating efficient polynomial solvers. We evaluate the three most promising solvers, i.e., the H51f solver with five 2D-2D correspondences and one 2D-3D correspondence viewed by the same camera inside generalized camera, the H32f solver with three 2D-2D and two 2D-3D correspondences, and the H13f solver with one 2D-2D and three 2D-3D correspondences, on synthetic and real data. We show that in the presence of noise in the 3D points these solvers provide better estimates than the corresponding absolute pose solvers.

Phong Nguyen-Ha, Lam Huynh, Esa Rahtu et al.

We present CG-NeRF, a cascade and generalizable neural radiance fields method for view synthesis. Recent generalizing view synthesis methods can render high-quality novel views using a set of nearby input views. However, the rendering speed is still slow due to the nature of uniformly-point sampling of neural radiance fields. Existing scene-specific methods can train and render novel views efficiently but can not generalize to unseen data. Our approach addresses the problems of fast and generalizing view synthesis by proposing two novel modules: a coarse radiance fields predictor and a convolutional-based neural renderer. This architecture infers consistent scene geometry based on the implicit neural fields and renders new views efficiently using a single GPU. We first train CG-NeRF on multiple 3D scenes of the DTU dataset, and the network can produce high-quality and accurate novel views on unseen real and synthetic data using only photometric losses. Moreover, our method can leverage a denser set of reference images of a single scene to produce accurate novel views without relying on additional explicit representations and still maintains the high-speed rendering of the pre-trained model. Experimental results show that CG-NeRF outperforms state-of-the-art generalizable neural rendering methods on various synthetic and real datasets.

Lam Huynh, Esa Rahtu, Jiri Matas et al.

We present LDP, a lightweight dense prediction neural architecture search (NAS) framework. Starting from a pre-defined generic backbone, LDP applies the novel Assisted Tabu Search for efficient architecture exploration. LDP is fast and suitable for various dense estimation problems, unlike previous NAS methods that are either computational demanding or deployed only for a single subtask. The performance of LPD is evaluated on monocular depth estimation, semantic segmentation, and image super-resolution tasks on diverse datasets, including NYU-Depth-v2, KITTI, Cityscapes, COCO-stuff, DIV2K, Set5, Set14, BSD100, Urban100. Experiments show that the proposed framework yields consistent improvements on all tested dense prediction tasks, while being $5\%-315\%$ more compact in terms of the number of model parameters than prior arts.

Riku Togashi, Mayu Otani, Yuta Nakashima et al.

Evaluation measures have a crucial impact on the direction of research. Therefore, it is of utmost importance to develop appropriate and reliable evaluation measures for new applications where conventional measures are not well suited. Video Moment Retrieval (VMR) is one such application, and the current practice is to use R@$K,θ$ for evaluating VMR systems. However, this measure has two disadvantages. First, it is rank-insensitive: It ignores the rank positions of successfully localised moments in the top-$K$ ranked list by treating the list as a set. Second, it binarizes the Intersection over Union (IoU) of each retrieved video moment using the threshold $θ$ and thereby ignoring fine-grained localisation quality of ranked moments. We propose an alternative measure for evaluating VMR, called Average Max IoU (AxIoU), which is free from the above two problems. We show that AxIoU satisfies two important axioms for VMR evaluation, namely, \textbf{Invariance against Redundant Moments} and \textbf{Monotonicity with respect to the Best Moment}, and also that R@$K,θ$ satisfies the first axiom only. We also empirically examine how AxIoU agrees with R@$K,θ$, as well as its stability with respect to change in the test data and human-annotated temporal boundaries.

Phong Nguyen-Ha, Nikolaos Sarafianos, Christoph Lassner et al.

Capturing and faithfully rendering photo-realistic humans from novel views is a fundamental problem for AR/VR applications. While prior work has shown impressive performance capture results in laboratory settings, it is non-trivial to achieve casual free-viewpoint human capture and rendering for unseen identities with high fidelity, especially for facial expressions, hands, and clothes. To tackle these challenges we introduce a novel view synthesis framework that generates realistic renders from unseen views of any human captured from a single-view and sparse RGB-D sensor, similar to a low-cost depth camera, and without actor-specific models. We propose an architecture to create dense feature maps in novel views obtained by sphere-based neural rendering, and create complete renders using a global context inpainting model. Additionally, an enhancer network leverages the overall fidelity, even in occluded areas from the original view, producing crisp renders with fine details. We show that our method generates high-quality novel views of synthetic and real human actors given a single-stream, sparse RGB-D input. It generalizes to unseen identities, and new poses and faithfully reconstructs facial expressions. Our approach outperforms prior view synthesis methods and is robust to different levels of depth sparsity.

Lam Huynh, Phong Nguyen, Jiri Matas et al.

This paper presents a novel neural architecture search method, called LiDNAS, for generating lightweight monocular depth estimation models. Unlike previous neural architecture search (NAS) approaches, where finding optimized networks are computationally highly demanding, the introduced novel Assisted Tabu Search leads to efficient architecture exploration. Moreover, we construct the search space on a pre-defined backbone network to balance layer diversity and search space size. The LiDNAS method outperforms the state-of-the-art NAS approach, proposed for disparity and depth estimation, in terms of search efficiency and output model performance. The LiDNAS optimized models achieve results superior to compact depth estimation state-of-the-art on NYU-Depth-v2, KITTI, and ScanNet, while being 7%-500% more compact in size, i.e the number of model parameters.

Lam Huynh, Matteo Pedone, Phong Nguyen et al.

Deep neural networks have recently thrived on single image depth estimation. That being said, current developments on this topic highlight an apparent compromise between accuracy and network size. This work proposes an accurate and lightweight framework for monocular depth estimation based on a self-attention mechanism stemming from salient point detection. Specifically, we utilize a sparse set of keypoints to train a FuSaNet model that consists of two major components: Fusion-Net and Saliency-Net. In addition, we introduce a normalized Hessian loss term invariant to scaling and shear along the depth direction, which is shown to substantially improve the accuracy. The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art results on NYU-Depth-v2 and KITTI while using 3.1-38.4 times smaller model in terms of the number of parameters than baseline approaches. Experiments on the SUN-RGBD further demonstrate the generalizability of the proposed method.

Snehal Bhayani, Torsten Sattler, Daniel Barath et al.

In this paper, we propose the first minimal solutions for estimating the semi-generalized homography given a perspective and a generalized camera. The proposed solvers use five 2D-2D image point correspondences induced by a scene plane. One of them assumes the perspective camera to be fully calibrated, while the other solver estimates the unknown focal length together with the absolute pose parameters. This setup is particularly important in structure-from-motion and image-based localization pipelines, where a new camera is localized in each step with respect to a set of known cameras and 2D-3D correspondences might not be available. As a consequence of a clever parametrization and the elimination ideal method, our approach only needs to solve a univariate polynomial of degree five or three. The proposed solvers are stable and efficient as demonstrated by a number of synthetic and real-world experiments.

Lam Huynh, Phong Nguyen-Ha, Jiri Matas et al.

In this paper, we propose enhancing monocular depth estimation by adding 3D points as depth guidance. Unlike existing depth completion methods, our approach performs well on extremely sparse and unevenly distributed point clouds, which makes it agnostic to the source of the 3D points. We achieve this by introducing a novel multi-scale 3D point fusion network that is both lightweight and efficient. We demonstrate its versatility on two different depth estimation problems where the 3D points have been acquired with conventional structure-from-motion and LiDAR. In both cases, our network performs on par with state-of-the-art depth completion methods and achieves significantly higher accuracy when only a small number of points is used while being more compact in terms of the number of parameters. We show that our method outperforms some contemporary deep learning based multi-view stereo and structure-from-motion methods both in accuracy and in compactness.

Phong Nguyen-Ha, Animesh Karnewar, Lam Huynh et al.

We propose a new cascaded architecture for novel view synthesis, called RGBD-Net, which consists of two core components: a hierarchical depth regression network and a depth-aware generator network. The former one predicts depth maps of the target views by using adaptive depth scaling, while the latter one leverages the predicted depths and renders spatially and temporally consistent target images. In the experimental evaluation on standard datasets, RGBD-Net not only outperforms the state-of-the-art by a clear margin, but it also generalizes well to new scenes without per-scene optimization. Moreover, we show that RGBD-Net can be optionally trained without depth supervision while still retaining high-quality rendering. Thanks to the depth regression network, RGBD-Net can be also used for creating dense 3D point clouds that are more accurate than those produced by some state-of-the-art multi-view stereo methods.

Phong Nguyen-Ha, Lam Huynh, Esa Rahtu et al.

This paper addresses the problem of novel view synthesis by means of neural rendering, where we are interested in predicting the novel view at an arbitrary camera pose based on a given set of input images from other viewpoints. Using the known query pose and input poses, we create an ordered set of observations that leads to the target view. Thus, the problem of single novel view synthesis is reformulated as a sequential view prediction task. In this paper, the proposed Transformer-based Generative Query Network (T-GQN) extends the neural-rendering methods by adding two new concepts. First, we use multi-view attention learning between context images to obtain multiple implicit scene representations. Second, we introduce a sequential rendering decoder to predict an image sequence, including the target view, based on the learned representations. Finally, we evaluate our model on various challenging datasets and demonstrate that our model not only gives consistent predictions but also doesn't require any retraining for finetuning.

Lam Huynh, Phong Nguyen-Ha, Jiri Matas et al.

Recovering the scene depth from a single image is an ill-posed problem that requires additional priors, often referred to as monocular depth cues, to disambiguate different 3D interpretations. In recent works, those priors have been learned in an end-to-end manner from large datasets by using deep neural networks. In this paper, we propose guiding depth estimation to favor planar structures that are ubiquitous especially in indoor environments. This is achieved by incorporating a non-local coplanarity constraint to the network with a novel attention mechanism called depth-attention volume (DAV). Experiments on two popular indoor datasets, namely NYU-Depth-v2 and ScanNet, show that our method achieves state-of-the-art depth estimation results while using only a fraction of the number of parameters needed by the competing methods.

Phong Nguyen-Ha, Lam Huynh, Esa Rahtu et al.

The problem of predicting a novel view of the scene using an arbitrary number of observations is a challenging problem for computers as well as for humans. This paper introduces the Generative Adversarial Query Network (GAQN), a general learning framework for novel view synthesis that combines Generative Query Network (GQN) and Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). The conventional GQN encodes input views into a latent representation that is used to generate a new view through a recurrent variational decoder. The proposed GAQN builds on this work by adding two novel aspects: First, we extend the current GQN architecture with an adversarial loss function for improving the visual quality and convergence speed. Second, we introduce a feature-matching loss function for stabilizing the training procedure. The experiments demonstrate that GAQN is able to produce high-quality results and faster convergence compared to the conventional approach.