Phong Nguyen-Ha

Phong Nguyen-Ha, Lam Huynh, Esa Rahtu et al.

We present CG-NeRF, a cascade and generalizable neural radiance fields method for view synthesis. Recent generalizing view synthesis methods can render high-quality novel views using a set of nearby input views. However, the rendering speed is still slow due to the nature of uniformly-point sampling of neural radiance fields. Existing scene-specific methods can train and render novel views efficiently but can not generalize to unseen data. Our approach addresses the problems of fast and generalizing view synthesis by proposing two novel modules: a coarse radiance fields predictor and a convolutional-based neural renderer. This architecture infers consistent scene geometry based on the implicit neural fields and renders new views efficiently using a single GPU. We first train CG-NeRF on multiple 3D scenes of the DTU dataset, and the network can produce high-quality and accurate novel views on unseen real and synthetic data using only photometric losses. Moreover, our method can leverage a denser set of reference images of a single scene to produce accurate novel views without relying on additional explicit representations and still maintains the high-speed rendering of the pre-trained model. Experimental results show that CG-NeRF outperforms state-of-the-art generalizable neural rendering methods on various synthetic and real datasets.

Ahmed Alhawwary, Janne Mustaniemi, Phong Nguyen-Ha et al.

Portraits or selfie images taken from a close distance typically suffer from perspective distortion. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end deep learning-based rectification pipeline to mitigate the effects of perspective distortion. We learn to predict the facial depth by training a deep CNN. The estimated depth is utilized to adjust the camera-to-subject distance by moving the camera farther, increasing the camera focal length, and reprojecting the 3D image features to the new perspective. The reprojected features are then fed to an inpainting module to fill in the missing pixels. We leverage a differentiable renderer to enable end-to-end training of our depth estimation and feature extraction nets to improve the rectified outputs. To boost the results of the inpainting module, we incorporate an auxiliary module to predict the horizontal movement of the camera which decreases the area that requires hallucination of challenging face parts such as ears. Unlike previous works, we process the full-frame input image at once without cropping the subject's face and processing it separately from the rest of the body, eliminating the need for complex post-processing steps to attach the face back to the subject's body. To train our network, we utilize the popular game engine Unreal Engine to generate a large synthetic face dataset containing various subjects, head poses, expressions, eyewear, clothes, and lighting. Quantitative and qualitative results show that our rectification pipeline outperforms previous methods, and produces comparable results with a time-consuming 3D GAN-based method while being more than 260 times faster.

Phong Nguyen-Ha, Nikolaos Sarafianos, Christoph Lassner et al.

Capturing and faithfully rendering photo-realistic humans from novel views is a fundamental problem for AR/VR applications. While prior work has shown impressive performance capture results in laboratory settings, it is non-trivial to achieve casual free-viewpoint human capture and rendering for unseen identities with high fidelity, especially for facial expressions, hands, and clothes. To tackle these challenges we introduce a novel view synthesis framework that generates realistic renders from unseen views of any human captured from a single-view and sparse RGB-D sensor, similar to a low-cost depth camera, and without actor-specific models. We propose an architecture to create dense feature maps in novel views obtained by sphere-based neural rendering, and create complete renders using a global context inpainting model. Additionally, an enhancer network leverages the overall fidelity, even in occluded areas from the original view, producing crisp renders with fine details. We show that our method generates high-quality novel views of synthetic and real human actors given a single-stream, sparse RGB-D input. It generalizes to unseen identities, and new poses and faithfully reconstructs facial expressions. Our approach outperforms prior view synthesis methods and is robust to different levels of depth sparsity.

Lam Huynh, Phong Nguyen-Ha, Jiri Matas et al.

In this paper, we propose enhancing monocular depth estimation by adding 3D points as depth guidance. Unlike existing depth completion methods, our approach performs well on extremely sparse and unevenly distributed point clouds, which makes it agnostic to the source of the 3D points. We achieve this by introducing a novel multi-scale 3D point fusion network that is both lightweight and efficient. We demonstrate its versatility on two different depth estimation problems where the 3D points have been acquired with conventional structure-from-motion and LiDAR. In both cases, our network performs on par with state-of-the-art depth completion methods and achieves significantly higher accuracy when only a small number of points is used while being more compact in terms of the number of parameters. We show that our method outperforms some contemporary deep learning based multi-view stereo and structure-from-motion methods both in accuracy and in compactness.

Phong Nguyen-Ha, Animesh Karnewar, Lam Huynh et al.

We propose a new cascaded architecture for novel view synthesis, called RGBD-Net, which consists of two core components: a hierarchical depth regression network and a depth-aware generator network. The former one predicts depth maps of the target views by using adaptive depth scaling, while the latter one leverages the predicted depths and renders spatially and temporally consistent target images. In the experimental evaluation on standard datasets, RGBD-Net not only outperforms the state-of-the-art by a clear margin, but it also generalizes well to new scenes without per-scene optimization. Moreover, we show that RGBD-Net can be optionally trained without depth supervision while still retaining high-quality rendering. Thanks to the depth regression network, RGBD-Net can be also used for creating dense 3D point clouds that are more accurate than those produced by some state-of-the-art multi-view stereo methods.

Phong Nguyen-Ha, Lam Huynh, Esa Rahtu et al.

This paper addresses the problem of novel view synthesis by means of neural rendering, where we are interested in predicting the novel view at an arbitrary camera pose based on a given set of input images from other viewpoints. Using the known query pose and input poses, we create an ordered set of observations that leads to the target view. Thus, the problem of single novel view synthesis is reformulated as a sequential view prediction task. In this paper, the proposed Transformer-based Generative Query Network (T-GQN) extends the neural-rendering methods by adding two new concepts. First, we use multi-view attention learning between context images to obtain multiple implicit scene representations. Second, we introduce a sequential rendering decoder to predict an image sequence, including the target view, based on the learned representations. Finally, we evaluate our model on various challenging datasets and demonstrate that our model not only gives consistent predictions but also doesn't require any retraining for finetuning.

Lam Huynh, Phong Nguyen-Ha, Jiri Matas et al.

Recovering the scene depth from a single image is an ill-posed problem that requires additional priors, often referred to as monocular depth cues, to disambiguate different 3D interpretations. In recent works, those priors have been learned in an end-to-end manner from large datasets by using deep neural networks. In this paper, we propose guiding depth estimation to favor planar structures that are ubiquitous especially in indoor environments. This is achieved by incorporating a non-local coplanarity constraint to the network with a novel attention mechanism called depth-attention volume (DAV). Experiments on two popular indoor datasets, namely NYU-Depth-v2 and ScanNet, show that our method achieves state-of-the-art depth estimation results while using only a fraction of the number of parameters needed by the competing methods.

Phong Nguyen-Ha, Lam Huynh, Esa Rahtu et al.

The problem of predicting a novel view of the scene using an arbitrary number of observations is a challenging problem for computers as well as for humans. This paper introduces the Generative Adversarial Query Network (GAQN), a general learning framework for novel view synthesis that combines Generative Query Network (GQN) and Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). The conventional GQN encodes input views into a latent representation that is used to generate a new view through a recurrent variational decoder. The proposed GAQN builds on this work by adding two novel aspects: First, we extend the current GQN architecture with an adversarial loss function for improving the visual quality and convergence speed. Second, we introduce a feature-matching loss function for stabilizing the training procedure. The experiments demonstrate that GAQN is able to produce high-quality results and faster convergence compared to the conventional approach.