Julien Valentin

Sergey Prokudin, Qianli Ma, Maxime Raafat et al.

Recent years have witnessed significant progress in the field of neural surface reconstruction. While the extensive focus was put on volumetric and implicit approaches, a number of works have shown that explicit graphics primitives such as point clouds can significantly reduce computational complexity, without sacrificing the reconstructed surface quality. However, less emphasis has been put on modeling dynamic surfaces with point primitives. In this work, we present a dynamic point field model that combines the representational benefits of explicit point-based graphics with implicit deformation networks to allow efficient modeling of non-rigid 3D surfaces. Using explicit surface primitives also allows us to easily incorporate well-established constraints such as-isometric-as-possible regularisation. While learning this deformation model is prone to local optima when trained in a fully unsupervised manner, we propose to additionally leverage semantic information such as keypoint dynamics to guide the deformation learning. We demonstrate our model with an example application of creating an expressive animatable human avatar from a collection of 3D scans. Here, previous methods mostly rely on variants of the linear blend skinning paradigm, which fundamentally limits the expressivity of such models when dealing with complex cloth appearances such as long skirts. We show the advantages of our dynamic point field framework in terms of its representational power, learning efficiency, and robustness to out-of-distribution novel poses.

Stephan J. Garbin, Marek Kowalski, Matthew Johnson et al.

Recent work on Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) showed how neural networks can be used to encode complex 3D environments that can be rendered photorealistically from novel viewpoints. Rendering these images is very computationally demanding and recent improvements are still a long way from enabling interactive rates, even on high-end hardware. Motivated by scenarios on mobile and mixed reality devices, we propose FastNeRF, the first NeRF-based system capable of rendering high fidelity photorealistic images at 200Hz on a high-end consumer GPU. The core of our method is a graphics-inspired factorization that allows for (i) compactly caching a deep radiance map at each position in space, (ii) efficiently querying that map using ray directions to estimate the pixel values in the rendered image. Extensive experiments show that the proposed method is 3000 times faster than the original NeRF algorithm and at least an order of magnitude faster than existing work on accelerating NeRF, while maintaining visual quality and extensibility.

Srinath Sridhar, Davis Rempe, Julien Valentin et al.

We investigate the problem of learning category-specific 3D shape reconstruction from a variable number of RGB views of previously unobserved object instances. Most approaches for multiview shape reconstruction operate on sparse shape representations, or assume a fixed number of views. We present a method that can estimate dense 3D shape, and aggregate shape across multiple and varying number of input views. Given a single input view of an object instance, we propose a representation that encodes the dense shape of the visible object surface as well as the surface behind line of sight occluded by the visible surface. When multiple input views are available, the shape representation is designed to be aggregated into a single 3D shape using an inexpensive union operation. We train a 2D CNN to learn to predict this representation from a variable number of views (1 or more). We further aggregate multiview information by using permutation equivariant layers that promote order-agnostic view information exchange at the feature level. Experiments show that our approach is able to produce dense 3D reconstructions of objects that improve in quality as more views are added.