When Epipolar Constraint Meets Non-local Operators in Multi-View StereoTianqi Liu, Xinyi Ye, Weiyue Zhao et al.
Learning-based multi-view stereo (MVS) method heavily relies on feature matching, which requires distinctive and descriptive representations. An effective solution is to apply non-local feature aggregation, e.g., Transformer. Albeit useful, these techniques introduce heavy computation overheads for MVS. Each pixel densely attends to the whole image. In contrast, we propose to constrain non-local feature augmentation within a pair of lines: each point only attends the corresponding pair of epipolar lines. Our idea takes inspiration from the classic epipolar geometry, which shows that one point with different depth hypotheses will be projected to the epipolar line on the other view. This constraint reduces the 2D search space into the epipolar line in stereo matching. Similarly, this suggests that the matching of MVS is to distinguish a series of points lying on the same line. Inspired by this point-to-line search, we devise a line-to-point non-local augmentation strategy. We first devise an optimized searching algorithm to split the 2D feature maps into epipolar line pairs. Then, an Epipolar Transformer (ET) performs non-local feature augmentation among epipolar line pairs. We incorporate the ET into a learning-based MVS baseline, named ET-MVSNet. ET-MVSNet achieves state-of-the-art reconstruction performance on both the DTU and Tanks-and-Temples benchmark with high efficiency. Code is available at https://github.com/TQTQliu/ET-MVSNet.
Fast Full-frame Video Stabilization with Iterative OptimizationWeiyue Zhao, Xin Li, Zhan Peng et al.
Video stabilization refers to the problem of transforming a shaky video into a visually pleasing one. The question of how to strike a good trade-off between visual quality and computational speed has remained one of the open challenges in video stabilization. Inspired by the analogy between wobbly frames and jigsaw puzzles, we propose an iterative optimization-based learning approach using synthetic datasets for video stabilization, which consists of two interacting submodules: motion trajectory smoothing and full-frame outpainting. First, we develop a two-level (coarse-to-fine) stabilizing algorithm based on the probabilistic flow field. The confidence map associated with the estimated optical flow is exploited to guide the search for shared regions through backpropagation. Second, we take a divide-and-conquer approach and propose a novel multiframe fusion strategy to render full-frame stabilized views. An important new insight brought about by our iterative optimization approach is that the target video can be interpreted as the fixed point of nonlinear mapping for video stabilization. We formulate video stabilization as a problem of minimizing the amount of jerkiness in motion trajectories, which guarantees convergence with the help of fixed-point theory. Extensive experimental results are reported to demonstrate the superiority of the proposed approach in terms of computational speed and visual quality. The code will be available on GitHub.
5.0CVApr 11, 2023
Point-and-Shoot All-in-Focus Photo Synthesis from Smartphone Camera PairXianrui Luo, Juewen Peng, Weiyue Zhao et al.
All-in-Focus (AIF) photography is expected to be a commercial selling point for modern smartphones. Standard AIF synthesis requires manual, time-consuming operations such as focal stack compositing, which is unfriendly to ordinary people. To achieve point-and-shoot AIF photography with a smartphone, we expect that an AIF photo can be generated from one shot of the scene, instead of from multiple photos captured by the same camera. Benefiting from the multi-camera module in modern smartphones, we introduce a new task of AIF synthesis from main (wide) and ultra-wide cameras. The goal is to recover sharp details from defocused regions in the main-camera photo with the help of the ultra-wide-camera one. The camera setting poses new challenges such as parallax-induced occlusions and inconsistent color between cameras. To overcome the challenges, we introduce a predict-and-refine network to mitigate occlusions and propose dynamic frequency-domain alignment for color correction. To enable effective training and evaluation, we also build an AIF dataset with 2686 unique scenes. Each scene includes two photos captured by the main camera, one photo captured by the ultrawide camera, and a synthesized AIF photo. Results show that our solution, termed EasyAIF, can produce high-quality AIF photos and outperforms strong baselines quantitatively and qualitatively. For the first time, we demonstrate point-and-shoot AIF photo synthesis successfully from main and ultra-wide cameras.
Constraining Depth Map Geometry for Multi-View Stereo: A Dual-Depth Approach with Saddle-shaped Depth CellsXinyi Ye, Weiyue Zhao, Tianqi Liu et al.
Learning-based multi-view stereo (MVS) methods deal with predicting accurate depth maps to achieve an accurate and complete 3D representation. Despite the excellent performance, existing methods ignore the fact that a suitable depth geometry is also critical in MVS. In this paper, we demonstrate that different depth geometries have significant performance gaps, even using the same depth prediction error. Therefore, we introduce an ideal depth geometry composed of Saddle-Shaped Cells, whose predicted depth map oscillates upward and downward around the ground-truth surface, rather than maintaining a continuous and smooth depth plane. To achieve it, we develop a coarse-to-fine framework called Dual-MVSNet (DMVSNet), which can produce an oscillating depth plane. Technically, we predict two depth values for each pixel (Dual-Depth), and propose a novel loss function and a checkerboard-shaped selecting strategy to constrain the predicted depth geometry. Compared to existing methods,DMVSNet achieves a high rank on the DTU benchmark and obtains the top performance on challenging scenes of Tanks and Temples, demonstrating its strong performance and generalization ability. Our method also points to a new research direction for considering depth geometry in MVS.
3D Multi-frame Fusion for Video StabilizationZhan Peng, Xinyi Ye, Weiyue Zhao et al.
In this paper, we present RStab, a novel framework for video stabilization that integrates 3D multi-frame fusion through volume rendering. Departing from conventional methods, we introduce a 3D multi-frame perspective to generate stabilized images, addressing the challenge of full-frame generation while preserving structure. The core of our approach lies in Stabilized Rendering (SR), a volume rendering module, which extends beyond the image fusion by incorporating feature fusion. The core of our RStab framework lies in Stabilized Rendering (SR), a volume rendering module, fusing multi-frame information in 3D space. Specifically, SR involves warping features and colors from multiple frames by projection, fusing them into descriptors to render the stabilized image. However, the precision of warped information depends on the projection accuracy, a factor significantly influenced by dynamic regions. In response, we introduce the Adaptive Ray Range (ARR) module to integrate depth priors, adaptively defining the sampling range for the projection process. Additionally, we propose Color Correction (CC) assisting geometric constraints with optical flow for accurate color aggregation. Thanks to the three modules, our RStab demonstrates superior performance compared with previous stabilizers in the field of view (FOV), image quality, and video stability across various datasets.
8.5CVJan 22, 2020
LRF-Net: Learning Local Reference Frames for 3D Local Shape Description and MatchingAngfan Zhu, Jiaqi Yang, Weiyue Zhao et al.
The local reference frame (LRF) acts as a critical role in 3D local shape description and matching. However, most of existing LRFs are hand-crafted and suffer from limited repeatability and robustness. This paper presents the first attempt to learn an LRF via a Siamese network that needs weak supervision only. In particular, we argue that each neighboring point in the local surface gives a unique contribution to LRF construction and measure such contributions via learned weights. Extensive analysis and comparative experiments on three public datasets addressing different application scenarios have demonstrated that LRF-Net is more repeatable and robust than several state-of-the-art LRF methods (LRF-Net is only trained on one dataset). In addition, LRF-Net can significantly boost the local shape description and 6-DoF pose estimation performance when matching 3D point clouds.