Yuemei Zhou

Gaochang Wu, Yuemei Zhou, Yebin Liu et al.

In this paper, we present a Geometry-aware Neural Interpolation (Geo-NI) framework for light field rendering. Previous learning-based approaches either rely on the capability of neural networks to perform direct interpolation, which we dubbed Neural Interpolation (NI), or explore scene geometry for novel view synthesis, also known as Depth Image-Based Rendering (DIBR). Instead, we incorporate the ideas behind these two kinds of approaches by launching the NI with a novel DIBR pipeline. Specifically, the proposed Geo-NI first performs NI using input light field sheared by a set of depth hypotheses. Then the DIBR is implemented by assigning the sheared light fields with a novel reconstruction cost volume according to the reconstruction quality under different depth hypotheses. The reconstruction cost is interpreted as a blending weight to render the final output light field by blending the reconstructed light fields along the dimension of depth hypothesis. By combining the superiorities of NI and DIBR, the proposed Geo-NI is able to render views with large disparity with the help of scene geometry while also reconstruct non-Lambertian effect when depth is prone to be ambiguous. Extensive experiments on various datasets demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed geometry-aware light field rendering framework.

Yuemei Zhou, Tao Yu, Zerong Zheng et al.

Existing state-of-the-art novel view synthesis methods rely on either fairly accurate 3D geometry estimation or sampling of the entire space for neural volumetric rendering, which limit the overall efficiency. In order to improve the rendering efficiency by reducing sampling points without sacrificing rendering quality, we propose to build a novel view synthesis framework based on learned MVS priors that enables general, fast and photo-realistic view synthesis simultaneously. Specifically, fewer but important points are sampled under the guidance of depth probability distributions extracted from the learned MVS architecture. Based on the learned probability-guided sampling, a neural volume rendering module is elaborately devised to fully aggregate source view information as well as the learned scene structures to synthesize photorealistic target view images. Finally, the rendering results in uncertain, occluded and unreferenced regions can be further improved by incorporating a confidence-aware refinement module. Experiments show that our method achieves 15 to 40 times faster rendering compared to state-of-the-art baselines, with strong generalization capacity and comparable high-quality novel view synthesis performance.