Shilei Sun

Shilei Sun, Ming Liu, Zhongyi Fan et al.

Accelerating neural radiance fields training is of substantial practical value, as the ray sampling strategy profoundly impacts network convergence. More efficient ray sampling can thus directly enhance existing NeRF models' training efficiency. We therefore propose a novel ray sampling approach for neural radiance fields that improves training efficiency while retaining photorealistic rendering results. First, we analyze the relationship between the pixel loss distribution of sampled rays and rendering quality. This reveals redundancy in the original NeRF's uniform ray sampling. Guided by this finding, we develop a sampling method leveraging pixel regions and depth boundaries. Our main idea is to sample fewer rays in training views, yet with each ray more informative for scene fitting. Sampling probability increases in pixel areas exhibiting significant color and depth variation, greatly reducing wasteful rays from other regions without sacrificing precision. Through this method, not only can the convergence of the network be accelerated, but the spatial geometry of a scene can also be perceived more accurately. Rendering outputs are enhanced, especially for texture-complex regions. Experiments demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art techniques on public benchmark datasets.

Zhouyong Liu, Shun Luo, Wubin Li et al.

Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are powerful models that have achieved excellent performance on difficult computer vision tasks. Although CNNs perform well whenever large labeled training samples are available, they work badly on video frame synthesis due to objects deforming and moving, scene lighting changes, and cameras moving in video sequence. In this paper, we present a novel and general end-to-end architecture, called convolutional Transformer or ConvTransformer, for video frame sequence learning and video frame synthesis. The core ingredient of ConvTransformer is the proposed attention layer, i.e., multi-head convolutional self-attention layer, that learns the sequential dependence of video sequence. ConvTransformer uses an encoder, built upon multi-head convolutional self-attention layer, to encode the sequential dependence between the input frames, and then a decoder decodes the long-term dependence between the target synthesized frames and the input frames. Experiments on video future frame extrapolation task show ConvTransformer to be superior in quality while being more parallelizable to recent approaches built upon convolutional LSTM (ConvLSTM). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that ConvTransformer architecture is proposed and applied to video frame synthesis.