R Srinath

Ankit Dhiman, R Srinath, Srinjay Sarkar et al.

Colorization is a well-explored problem in the domains of image and video processing. However, extending colorization to 3D scenes presents significant challenges. Recent Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) and Gaussian-Splatting(3DGS) methods enable high-quality novel-view synthesis for multi-view images. However, the question arises: How can we colorize these 3D representations? This work presents a method for synthesizing colorized novel views from input grayscale multi-view images. Using image or video colorization methods to colorize novel views from these 3D representations naively will yield output with severe inconsistencies. We introduce a novel method to use powerful image colorization models for colorizing 3D representations. We propose a distillation-based method that transfers color from these networks trained on natural images to the target 3D representation. Notably, this strategy does not add any additional weights or computational overhead to the original representation during inference. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method produces high-quality colorized views for indoor and outdoor scenes, showcasing significant cross-view consistency advantages over baseline approaches. Our method is agnostic to the underlying 3D representation and easily generalizable to NeRF and 3DGS methods. Further, we validate the efficacy of our approach in several diverse applications: 1.) Infra-Red (IR) multi-view images and 2.) Legacy grayscale multi-view image sequences. Project Webpage: https://val.cds.iisc.ac.in/chroma-distill.github.io/

Tao Lu, Ankit Dhiman, R Srinath et al.

Novel-view synthesis is an important problem in computer vision with applications in 3D reconstruction, mixed reality, and robotics. Recent methods like 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) have become the preferred method for this task, providing high-quality novel views in real time. However, the training time of a 3DGS model is slow, often taking 30 minutes for a scene with 200 views. In contrast, our goal is to reduce the optimization time by training for fewer steps while maintaining high rendering quality. Specifically, we combine the guidance from both the position error and the appearance error to achieve a more effective densification. To balance the rate between adding new Gaussians and fitting old Gaussians, we develop a convergence-aware budget control mechanism. Moreover, to make the densification process more reliable, we selectively add new Gaussians from mostly visited regions. With these designs, we reduce the Gaussian optimization steps to one-third of the previous approach while achieving a comparable or even better novel view rendering quality. To further facilitate the rapid fitting of 4K resolution images, we introduce a dilation-based rendering technique. Our method, Turbo-GS, speeds up optimization for typical scenes and scales well to high-resolution (4K) scenarios on standard datasets. Through extensive experiments, we show that our method is significantly faster in optimization than other methods while retaining quality. Project page: https://ivl.cs.brown.edu/research/turbo-gs.