GRApr 27
Power Foam: Unifying Real-Time Differentiable Ray Tracing and RasterizationShrisudhan Govindarajan, Daniel Rebain, Dor Verbin et al.
We introduce a differentiable 3D representation that unifies the ray tracing capabilities of foam-based ray tracing with the efficiency of modern rasterization pipelines. While prior foam representations enable constant-time ray traversal through an explicit volumetric partition of space, their potentially unbounded cells hinder efficient tile-based rasterization. We address this limitation by generalizing Voronoi foams to bounded power diagrams with controllable cell extents, enabling spatially bounded primitives without requiring expensive Delaunay triangulations during training. We further introduce an oriented surface formulation that explicitly models interfaces between interior and exterior regions, and decouple geometry from appearance by embedding differentiable texture directly on these surfaces. Together, these contributions yield a representation that preserves state-of-the-art ray tracing efficiency while achieving rasterization performance competitive with current generation 3DGS, providing a practical path toward unified real-time differentiable rendering.
CVSep 9, 2024
Lagrangian Hashing for Compressed Neural Field RepresentationsShrisudhan Govindarajan, Zeno Sambugaro, Akhmedkhan et al.
We present Lagrangian Hashing, a representation for neural fields combining the characteristics of fast training NeRF methods that rely on Eulerian grids (i.e.~InstantNGP), with those that employ points equipped with features as a way to represent information (e.g. 3D Gaussian Splatting or PointNeRF). We achieve this by incorporating a point-based representation into the high-resolution layers of the hierarchical hash tables of an InstantNGP representation. As our points are equipped with a field of influence, our representation can be interpreted as a mixture of Gaussians stored within the hash table. We propose a loss that encourages the movement of our Gaussians towards regions that require more representation budget to be sufficiently well represented. Our main finding is that our representation allows the reconstruction of signals using a more compact representation without compromising quality.
CVMay 20, 2024Code
Stereo-Knowledge Distillation from dpMV to Dual Pixels for Light Field Video ReconstructionAryan Garg, Raghav Mallampali, Akshat Joshi et al.
Dual pixels contain disparity cues arising from the defocus blur. This disparity information is useful for many vision tasks ranging from autonomous driving to 3D creative realism. However, directly estimating disparity from dual pixels is less accurate. This work hypothesizes that distilling high-precision dark stereo knowledge, implicitly or explicitly, to efficient dual-pixel student networks enables faithful reconstructions. This dark knowledge distillation should also alleviate stereo-synchronization setup and calibration costs while dramatically increasing parameter and inference time efficiency. We collect the first and largest 3-view dual-pixel video dataset, dpMV, to validate our explicit dark knowledge distillation hypothesis. We show that these methods outperform purely monocular solutions, especially in challenging foreground-background separation regions using faithful guidance from dual pixels. Finally, we demonstrate an unconventional use case unlocked by dpMV and implicit dark knowledge distillation from an ensemble of teachers for Light Field (LF) video reconstruction. Our LF video reconstruction method is the fastest and most temporally consistent to date. It remains competitive in reconstruction fidelity while offering many other essential properties like high parameter efficiency, implicit disocclusion handling, zero-shot cross-dataset transfer, geometrically consistent inference on higher spatial-angular resolutions, and adaptive baseline control. All source code is available at the anonymous repository https://github.com/Aryan-Garg.
CVApr 29
Semantic Foam: Unifying Spatial and Semantic Scene DecompositionAmr Sharafeldin, Shrisudhan Govindarajan, Thomas Walker et al.
Modern scene reconstruction methods, such as 3D Gaussian Splatting, enable photo-realistic novel view synthesis at real-time speeds. However, their adoption in interactive graphics applications remains limited due to the difficulty of interacting with these representations compared to traditional, human-authored 3D assets. While prior work has attempted to impose semantic decomposition on these models, significant challenges remain in segmentation quality and cross-view consistency.To address these limitations, we introduce Semantic Foam, which extends the recently proposed Radiant Foam representation to semantic decomposition tasks. Our approach leverages the inherent spatial structure of Radiant Foam's volumetric Voronoi mesh and augments it with an explicit semantic feature field defined at the cell level. This design enables direct spatial regularization, improving consistency across views and mitigating artifacts caused by occlusion and inconsistent supervision, which are common issues in point-based representations.Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves superior object-level segmentation performance compared to state-of-the-art approaches such as Gaussian Grouping and SAGA.Project page: http://semanticfoam.github.io/
CVFeb 3, 2025
Radiant Foam: Real-Time Differentiable Ray TracingShrisudhan Govindarajan, Daniel Rebain, Kwang Moo Yi et al.
Research on differentiable scene representations is consistently moving towards more efficient, real-time models. Recently, this has led to the popularization of splatting methods, which eschew the traditional ray-based rendering of radiance fields in favor of rasterization. This has yielded a significant improvement in rendering speeds due to the efficiency of rasterization algorithms and hardware, but has come at a cost: the approximations that make rasterization efficient also make implementation of light transport phenomena like reflection and refraction much more difficult. We propose a novel scene representation which avoids these approximations, but keeps the efficiency and reconstruction quality of splatting by leveraging a decades-old efficient volumetric mesh ray tracing algorithm which has been largely overlooked in recent computer vision research. The resulting model, which we name Radiant Foam, achieves rendering speed and quality comparable to Gaussian Splatting, without the constraints of rasterization. Unlike ray traced Gaussian models that use hardware ray tracing acceleration, our method requires no special hardware or APIs beyond the standard features of a programmable GPU.
CVApr 19, 2024
BANF: Band-limited Neural Fields for Levels of Detail ReconstructionAhan Shabanov, Shrisudhan Govindarajan, Cody Reading et al.
Largely due to their implicit nature, neural fields lack a direct mechanism for filtering, as Fourier analysis from discrete signal processing is not directly applicable to these representations. Effective filtering of neural fields is critical to enable level-of-detail processing in downstream applications, and support operations that involve sampling the field on regular grids (e.g. marching cubes). Existing methods that attempt to decompose neural fields in the frequency domain either resort to heuristics or require extensive modifications to the neural field architecture. We show that via a simple modification, one can obtain neural fields that are low-pass filtered, and in turn show how this can be exploited to obtain a frequency decomposition of the entire signal. We demonstrate the validity of our technique by investigating level-of-detail reconstruction, and showing how coarser representations can be computed effectively.
CVFeb 18, 2025
NoKSR: Kernel-Free Neural Surface Reconstruction via Point Cloud SerializationZhen Li, Weiwei Sun, Shrisudhan Govindarajan et al.
We present a novel approach to large-scale point cloud surface reconstruction by developing an efficient framework that converts an irregular point cloud into a signed distance field (SDF). Our backbone builds upon recent transformer-based architectures (i.e., PointTransformerV3), that serializes the point cloud into a locality-preserving sequence of tokens. We efficiently predict the SDF value at a point by aggregating nearby tokens, where fast approximate neighbors can be retrieved thanks to the serialization. We serialize the point cloud at different levels/scales, and non-linearly aggregate a feature to predict the SDF value. We show that aggregating across multiple scales is critical to overcome the approximations introduced by the serialization (i.e. false negatives in the neighborhood). Our frameworks sets the new state-of-the-art in terms of accuracy and efficiency (better or similar performance with half the latency of the best prior method, coupled with a simpler implementation), particularly on outdoor datasets where sparse-grid methods have shown limited performance.