Alex Colburn

Xiaoming Zhao, Alex Colburn, Fangchang Ma et al. · apple-ml, uw

Rendering scenes observed in a monocular video from novel viewpoints is a challenging problem. For static scenes the community has studied both scene-specific optimization techniques, which optimize on every test scene, and generalized techniques, which only run a deep net forward pass on a test scene. In contrast, for dynamic scenes, scene-specific optimization techniques exist, but, to our best knowledge, there is currently no generalized method for dynamic novel view synthesis from a given monocular video. To answer whether generalized dynamic novel view synthesis from monocular videos is possible today, we establish an analysis framework based on existing techniques and work toward the generalized approach. We find a pseudo-generalized process without scene-specific appearance optimization is possible, but geometrically and temporally consistent depth estimates are needed. Despite no scene-specific appearance optimization, the pseudo-generalized approach improves upon some scene-specific methods.

Pengsheng Guo, Miguel Angel Bautista, Alex Colburn et al.

We study the problem of novel view synthesis from sparse source observations of a scene comprised of 3D objects. We propose a simple yet effective approach that is neither continuous nor implicit, challenging recent trends on view synthesis. Our approach explicitly encodes observations into a volumetric representation that enables amortized rendering. We demonstrate that although continuous radiance field representations have gained a lot of attention due to their expressive power, our simple approach obtains comparable or even better novel view reconstruction quality comparing with state-of-the-art baselines while increasing rendering speed by over 400x. Our model is trained in a category-agnostic manner and does not require scene-specific optimization. Therefore, it is able to generalize novel view synthesis to object categories not seen during training. In addition, we show that with our simple formulation, we can use view synthesis as a self-supervision signal for efficient learning of 3D geometry without explicit 3D supervision.

Emilien Dupont, Miguel Angel Bautista, Alex Colburn et al.

We propose a framework for learning neural scene representations directly from images, without 3D supervision. Our key insight is that 3D structure can be imposed by ensuring that the learned representation transforms like a real 3D scene. Specifically, we introduce a loss which enforces equivariance of the scene representation with respect to 3D transformations. Our formulation allows us to infer and render scenes in real time while achieving comparable results to models requiring minutes for inference. In addition, we introduce two challenging new datasets for scene representation and neural rendering, including scenes with complex lighting and backgrounds. Through experiments, we show that our model achieves compelling results on these datasets as well as on standard ShapeNet benchmarks.

Deepali Aneja, Alex Colburn, Gary Faigin et al.

We present DeepExpr, a novel expression transfer system from humans to multiple stylized characters via deep learning. We developed : 1) a data-driven perceptual model of facial expressions, 2) a novel stylized character data set with cardinal expression annotations : FERG (Facial Expression Research Group) - DB (added two new characters), and 3) . We evaluated our method on a set of retrieval tasks on our collected stylized character dataset of expressions. We have also shown that the ranking order predicted by the proposed features is highly correlated with the ranking order provided by a facial expression expert and Mechanical Turk (MT) experiments.

Chuhang Zou, Jheng-Wei Su, Chi-Han Peng et al.

Recent approaches for predicting layouts from 360 panoramas produce excellent results. These approaches build on a common framework consisting of three steps: a pre-processing step based on edge-based alignment, prediction of layout elements, and a post-processing step by fitting a 3D layout to the layout elements. Until now, it has been difficult to compare the methods due to multiple different design decisions, such as the encoding network (e.g. SegNet or ResNet), type of elements predicted (e.g. corners, wall/floor boundaries, or semantic segmentation), or method of fitting the 3D layout. To address this challenge, we summarize and describe the common framework, the variants, and the impact of the design decisions. For a complete evaluation, we also propose extended annotations for the Matterport3D dataset [3], and introduce two depth-based evaluation metrics.

Chuhang Zou, Alex Colburn, Qi Shan et al.

We propose an algorithm to predict room layout from a single image that generalizes across panoramas and perspective images, cuboid layouts and more general layouts (e.g. L-shape room). Our method operates directly on the panoramic image, rather than decomposing into perspective images as do recent works. Our network architecture is similar to that of RoomNet, but we show improvements due to aligning the image based on vanishing points, predicting multiple layout elements (corners, boundaries, size and translation), and fitting a constrained Manhattan layout to the resulting predictions. Our method compares well in speed and accuracy to other existing work on panoramas, achieves among the best accuracy for perspective images, and can handle both cuboid-shaped and more general Manhattan layouts.