Maria Kolos

Maria Kolos, Artem Sevastopolsky, Victor Lempitsky

We propose and evaluate a neural point-based graphics method that can model semi-transparent scene parts. Similarly to its predecessor pipeline, ours uses point clouds to model proxy geometry, and augments each point with a neural descriptor. Additionally, a learnable transparency value is introduced in our approach for each point. Our neural rendering procedure consists of two steps. Firstly, the point cloud is rasterized using ray grouping into a multi-channel image. This is followed by the neural rendering step that "translates" the rasterized image into an RGB output using a learnable convolutional network. New scenes can be modeled using gradient-based optimization of neural descriptors and of the rendering network. We show that novel views of semi-transparent point cloud scenes can be generated after training with our approach. Our experiments demonstrate the benefit of introducing semi-transparency into the neural point-based modeling for a range of scenes with semi-transparent parts.

Kara-Ali Aliev, Artem Sevastopolsky, Maria Kolos et al.

We present a new point-based approach for modeling the appearance of real scenes. The approach uses a raw point cloud as the geometric representation of a scene, and augments each point with a learnable neural descriptor that encodes local geometry and appearance. A deep rendering network is learned in parallel with the descriptors, so that new views of the scene can be obtained by passing the rasterizations of a point cloud from new viewpoints through this network. The input rasterizations use the learned descriptors as point pseudo-colors. We show that the proposed approach can be used for modeling complex scenes and obtaining their photorealistic views, while avoiding explicit surface estimation and meshing. In particular, compelling results are obtained for scene scanned using hand-held commodity RGB-D sensors as well as standard RGB cameras even in the presence of objects that are challenging for standard mesh-based modeling.

Maria Kolos, Anton Marin, Alexey Artemov et al.

Data-driven methods such as convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are known to deliver state-of-the-art performance on image recognition tasks when the training data are abundant. However, in some instances, such as change detection in remote sensing images, annotated data cannot be obtained in sufficient quantities. In this work, we propose a simple and efficient method for creating realistic targeted synthetic datasets in the remote sensing domain, leveraging the opportunities offered by game development engines. We provide a description of the pipeline for procedural geometry generation and rendering as well as an evaluation of the efficiency of produced datasets in a change detection scenario. Our evaluations demonstrate that our pipeline helps to improve the performance and convergence of deep learning models when the amount of real-world data is severely limited.