Marco Volino

Marco Pesavento, Marco Volino, Adrian Hilton

We propose a novel framework to reconstruct super-resolution human shape from a single low-resolution input image. The approach overcomes limitations of existing approaches that reconstruct 3D human shape from a single image, which require high-resolution images together with auxiliary data such as surface normal or a parametric model to reconstruct high-detail shape. The proposed framework represents the reconstructed shape with a high-detail implicit function. Analogous to the objective of 2D image super-resolution, the approach learns the mapping from a low-resolution shape to its high-resolution counterpart and it is applied to reconstruct 3D shape detail from low-resolution images. The approach is trained end-to-end employing a novel loss function which estimates the information lost between a low and high-resolution representation of the same 3D surface shape. Evaluation for single image reconstruction of clothed people demonstrates that our method achieves high-detail surface reconstruction from low-resolution images without auxiliary data. Extensive experiments show that the proposed approach can estimate super-resolution human geometries with a significantly higher level of detail than that obtained with previous approaches when applied to low-resolution images.

Marco Pesavento, Marco Volino, Adrian Hilton

We present a novel framework to reconstruct complete 3D human shapes from a given target image by leveraging monocular unconstrained images. The objective of this work is to reproduce high-quality details in regions of the reconstructed human body that are not visible in the input target. The proposed methodology addresses the limitations of existing approaches for reconstructing 3D human shapes from a single image, which cannot reproduce shape details in occluded body regions. The missing information of the monocular input can be recovered by using multiple views captured from multiple cameras. However, multi-view reconstruction methods necessitate accurately calibrated and registered images, which can be challenging to obtain in real-world scenarios. Given a target RGB image and a collection of multiple uncalibrated and unregistered images of the same individual, acquired using a single camera, we propose a novel framework to generate complete 3D human shapes. We introduce a novel module to generate 2D multi-view normal maps of the person registered with the target input image. The module consists of body part-based reference selection and body part-based registration. The generated 2D normal maps are then processed by a multi-view attention-based neural implicit model that estimates an implicit representation of the 3D shape, ensuring the reproduction of details in both observed and occluded regions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed approach estimates higher quality details in the non-visible regions of the 3D clothed human shapes compared to related methods, without using parametric models.

Marco Pesavento, Yuanlu Xu, Nikolaos Sarafianos et al.

Recent progress in human shape learning, shows that neural implicit models are effective in generating 3D human surfaces from limited number of views, and even from a single RGB image. However, existing monocular approaches still struggle to recover fine geometric details such as face, hands or cloth wrinkles. They are also easily prone to depth ambiguities that result in distorted geometries along the camera optical axis. In this paper, we explore the benefits of incorporating depth observations in the reconstruction process by introducing ANIM, a novel method that reconstructs arbitrary 3D human shapes from single-view RGB-D images with an unprecedented level of accuracy. Our model learns geometric details from both multi-resolution pixel-aligned and voxel-aligned features to leverage depth information and enable spatial relationships, mitigating depth ambiguities. We further enhance the quality of the reconstructed shape by introducing a depth-supervision strategy, which improves the accuracy of the signed distance field estimation of points that lie on the reconstructed surface. Experiments demonstrate that ANIM outperforms state-of-the-art works that use RGB, surface normals, point cloud or RGB-D data as input. In addition, we introduce ANIM-Real, a new multi-modal dataset comprising high-quality scans paired with consumer-grade RGB-D camera, and our protocol to fine-tune ANIM, enabling high-quality reconstruction from real-world human capture.

Umar Farooq, Jean-Yves Guillemaut, Adrian Hilton et al.

The field of Novel View Synthesis has been revolutionized by 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS), which enables high-quality scene reconstruction that can be rendered in real-time. 3DGS-based techniques typically suffer from high GPU memory and disk storage requirements which limits their practical application on consumer-grade devices. We propose Opti3DGS, a novel frequency-modulated coarse-to-fine optimization framework that aims to minimize the number of Gaussian primitives used to represent a scene, thus reducing memory and storage demands. Opti3DGS leverages image frequency modulation, initially enforcing a coarse scene representation and progressively refining it by modulating frequency details in the training images. On the baseline 3DGS, we demonstrate an average reduction of 62% in Gaussians, a 40% reduction in the training GPU memory requirements and a 20% reduction in optimization time without sacrificing the visual quality. Furthermore, we show that our method integrates seamlessly with many 3DGS-based techniques, consistently reducing the number of Gaussian primitives while maintaining, and often improving, visual quality. Additionally, Opti3DGS inherently produces a level-of-detail scene representation at no extra cost, a natural byproduct of the optimization pipeline. Results and code will be made publicly available.

Ayushi Dutta, Marco Pesavento, Marco Volino et al.

Recent approaches to jointly reconstruct 3D humans and objects from a single RGB image represent 3D shapes with template-based or coarse models, which fail to capture details of loose clothing on human bodies. In this paper, we introduce a novel implicit approach for jointly reconstructing realistic 3D clothed humans and objects from a monocular view. For the first time, we model both the human and the object with an implicit representation, allowing to capture more realistic details such as clothing. This task is extremely challenging due to human-object occlusions and the lack of 3D information in 2D images, often leading to poor detail reconstruction and depth ambiguity. To address these problems, we propose a novel attention-based neural implicit model that leverages image pixel alignment from both the input human-object image for a global understanding of the human-object scene and from local separate views of the human and object images to improve realism with, for example, clothing details. Additionally, the network is conditioned on semantic features derived from an estimated human-object pose prior, which provides 3D spatial information about the shared space of humans and objects. To handle human occlusion caused by objects, we use a generative diffusion model that inpaints the occluded regions, recovering otherwise lost details. For training and evaluation, we introduce a synthetic dataset featuring rendered scenes of inter-occluded 3D human scans and diverse objects. Extensive evaluation on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrates the superior quality of the proposed human-object reconstructions over competitive methods.

Haosen Yang, Chenhao Zhang, Wenqing Wang et al.

Point management is critical for optimizing 3D Gaussian Splatting models, as point initiation (e.g., via structure from motion) is often distributionally inappropriate. Typically, Adaptive Density Control (ADC) algorithm is adopted, leveraging view-averaged gradient magnitude thresholding for point densification, opacity thresholding for pruning, and regular all-points opacity reset. We reveal that this strategy is limited in tackling intricate/special image regions (e.g., transparent) due to inability of identifying all 3D zones requiring point densification, and lacking an appropriate mechanism to handle ill-conditioned points with negative impacts (e.g., occlusion due to false high opacity). To address these limitations, we propose a Localized Point Management (LPM) strategy, capable of identifying those error-contributing zones in greatest need for both point addition and geometry calibration. Zone identification is achieved by leveraging the underlying multiview geometry constraints, subject to image rendering errors. We apply point densification in the identified zones and then reset the opacity of the points in front of these regions, creating a new opportunity to correct poorly conditioned points. Serving as a versatile plugin, LPM can be seamlessly integrated into existing static 3D and dynamic 4D Gaussian Splatting models with minimal additional cost. Experimental evaluations validate the efficacy of our LPM in boosting a variety of existing 3D/4D models both quantitatively and qualitatively. Notably, LPM improves both static 3DGS and dynamic SpaceTimeGS to achieve state-of-the-art rendering quality while retaining real-time speeds, excelling on challenging datasets such as Tanks & Temples and the Neural 3D Video dataset.

Marco Pesavento, Marco Volino, Adrian Hilton

A common problem in the 4D reconstruction of people from multi-view video is the quality of the captured dynamic texture appearance which depends on both the camera resolution and capture volume. Typically the requirement to frame cameras to capture the volume of a dynamic performance ($>50m^3$) results in the person occupying only a small proportion $<$ 10% of the field of view. Even with ultra high-definition 4k video acquisition this results in sampling the person at less-than standard definition 0.5k video resolution resulting in low-quality rendering. In this paper we propose a solution to this problem through super-resolution appearance transfer from a static high-resolution appearance capture rig using digital stills cameras ($> 8k$) to capture the person in a small volume ($<8m^3$). A pipeline is proposed for super-resolution appearance transfer from high-resolution static capture to dynamic video performance capture to produce super-resolution dynamic textures. This addresses two key problems: colour mapping between different camera systems; and dynamic texture map super-resolution using a learnt model. Comparative evaluation demonstrates a significant qualitative and quantitative improvement in rendering the 4D performance capture with super-resolution dynamic texture appearance. The proposed approach reproduces the high-resolution detail of the static capture whilst maintaining the appearance dynamics of the captured video.

Marco Pesavento, Marco Volino, Adrian Hilton

This paper proposes a novel Attention-based Multi-Reference Super-resolution network (AMRSR) that, given a low-resolution image, learns to adaptively transfer the most similar texture from multiple reference images to the super-resolution output whilst maintaining spatial coherence. The use of multiple reference images together with attention-based sampling is demonstrated to achieve significantly improved performance over state-of-the-art reference super-resolution approaches on multiple benchmark datasets. Reference super-resolution approaches have recently been proposed to overcome the ill-posed problem of image super-resolution by providing additional information from a high-resolution reference image. Multi-reference super-resolution extends this approach by providing a more diverse pool of image features to overcome the inherent information deficit whilst maintaining memory efficiency. A novel hierarchical attention-based sampling approach is introduced to learn the similarity between low-resolution image features and multiple reference images based on a perceptual loss. Ablation demonstrates the contribution of both multi-reference and hierarchical attention-based sampling to overall performance. Perceptual and quantitative ground-truth evaluation demonstrates significant improvement in performance even when the reference images deviate significantly from the target image. The project website can be found at https://marcopesavento.github.io/AMRSR/

Hanne Stenzel, Davide Berghi, Marco Volino et al.

As audio-visual systems increasingly bring immersive and interactive capabilities into our work and leisure activities, so the need for naturalistic test material grows. New volumetric datasets have captured high-quality 3D video, but accompanying audio is often neglected, making it hard to test an integrated bimodal experience. Designed to cover diverse sound types and features, the presented volumetric dataset was constructed from audio and video studio recordings of scenes to yield forty short action sequences. Potential uses in technical and scientific tests are discussed.

Davide Berghi, Hanne Stenzel, Marco Volino et al.

Immersive audio-visual perception relies on the spatial integration of both auditory and visual information which are heterogeneous sensing modalities with different fields of reception and spatial resolution. This study investigates the perceived coherence of audiovisual object events presented either centrally or peripherally with horizontally aligned/misaligned sound. Various object events were selected to represent three acoustic feature classes. Subjective test results in a simulated virtual environment from 18 participants indicate a wider capture region in the periphery, with an outward bias favoring more lateral sounds. Centered stimulus results support previous findings for simpler scenes.

Armin Mustafa, Marco Volino, Hansung Kim et al.

Existing techniques for dynamic scene reconstruction from multiple wide-baseline cameras primarily focus on reconstruction in controlled environments, with fixed calibrated cameras and strong prior constraints. This paper introduces a general approach to obtain a 4D representation of complex dynamic scenes from multi-view wide-baseline static or moving cameras without prior knowledge of the scene structure, appearance, or illumination. Contributions of the work are: An automatic method for initial coarse reconstruction to initialize joint estimation; Sparse-to-dense temporal correspondence integrated with joint multi-view segmentation and reconstruction to introduce temporal coherence; and a general robust approach for joint segmentation refinement and dense reconstruction of dynamic scenes by introducing shape constraint. Comparison with state-of-the-art approaches on a variety of complex indoor and outdoor scenes, demonstrates improved accuracy in both multi-view segmentation and dense reconstruction. This paper demonstrates unsupervised reconstruction of complete temporally coherent 4D scene models with improved non-rigid object segmentation and shape reconstruction and its application to free-viewpoint rendering and virtual reality.

Andrew Gilbert, Marco Volino, John Collomosse et al.

We present a convolutional autoencoder that enables high fidelity volumetric reconstructions of human performance to be captured from multi-view video comprising only a small set of camera views. Our method yields similar end-to-end reconstruction error to that of a probabilistic visual hull computed using significantly more (double or more) viewpoints. We use a deep prior implicitly learned by the autoencoder trained over a dataset of view-ablated multi-view video footage of a wide range of subjects and actions. This opens up the possibility of high-end volumetric performance capture in on-set and prosumer scenarios where time or cost prohibit a high witness camera count.

Armin Mustafa, Marco Volino, Jean-yves Guillemaut et al.

Light-field video has recently been used in virtual and augmented reality applications to increase realism and immersion. However, existing light-field methods are generally limited to static scenes due to the requirement to acquire a dense scene representation. The large amount of data and the absence of methods to infer temporal coherence pose major challenges in storage, compression and editing compared to conventional video. In this paper, we propose the first method to extract a spatio-temporally coherent light-field video representation. A novel method to obtain Epipolar Plane Images (EPIs) from a spare light-field camera array is proposed. EPIs are used to constrain scene flow estimation to obtain 4D temporally coherent representations of dynamic light-fields. Temporal coherence is achieved on a variety of light-field datasets. Evaluation of the proposed light-field scene flow against existing multi-view dense correspondence approaches demonstrates a significant improvement in accuracy of temporal coherence.