Mingyu Yin

Mingyu Yin, Li Sun, Qingli Li

View synthesis is usually done by an autoencoder, in which the encoder maps a source view image into a latent content code, and the decoder transforms it into a target view image according to the condition. However, the source contents are often not well kept in this setting, which leads to unnecessary changes during the view translation. Although adding skipped connections, like Unet, alleviates the problem, but it often causes the failure on the view conformity. This paper proposes a new architecture by performing the source-to-target deformation in an iterative way. Instead of simply incorporating the features from multiple layers of the encoder, we design soft and hard deformation modules, which warp the encoder features to the target view at different resolutions, and give results to the decoder to complement the details. Particularly, the current warping flow is not only used to align the feature of the same resolution, but also as an approximation to coarsely deform the high resolution feature. Then the residual flow is estimated and applied in the high resolution, so that the deformation is built up in the coarse-to-fine fashion. To better constrain the model, we synthesize a rough target view image based on the intermediate flows and their warped features. The extensive ablation studies and the final results on two different data sets show the effectiveness of the proposed model.

Mingyu Yin, Li Sun, Qingli Li

Novel view synthesis often needs the paired data from both the source and target views. This paper proposes a view translation model under cVAE-GAN framework without requiring the paired data. We design a conditional deformable module (CDM) which uses the view condition vectors as the filters to convolve the feature maps of the main branch in VAE. It generates several pairs of displacement maps to deform the features, like the 2D optical flows. The results are fed into the deformed feature based normalization module (DFNM), which scales and offsets the main branch feature, given its deformed one as the input from the side branch. Taking the advantage of the CDM and DFNM, the encoder outputs a view-irrelevant posterior, while the decoder takes the code drawn from it to synthesize the reconstructed and the viewtranslated images. To further ensure the disentanglement between the views and other factors, we add adversarial training on the code. The results and ablation studies on MultiPIE and 3D chair datasets validate the effectiveness of the framework in cVAE and the designed module.