Zhihao Li

Zhihao Li, Jianzhuang Liu, Zhensong Zhang et al. · pku

Top-down methods dominate the field of 3D human pose and shape estimation, because they are decoupled from human detection and allow researchers to focus on the core problem. However, cropping, their first step, discards the location information from the very beginning, which makes themselves unable to accurately predict the global rotation in the original camera coordinate system. To address this problem, we propose to Carry Location Information in Full Frames (CLIFF) into this task. Specifically, we feed more holistic features to CLIFF by concatenating the cropped-image feature with its bounding box information. We calculate the 2D reprojection loss with a broader view of the full frame, taking a projection process similar to that of the person projected in the image. Fed and supervised by global-location-aware information, CLIFF directly predicts the global rotation along with more accurate articulated poses. Besides, we propose a pseudo-ground-truth annotator based on CLIFF, which provides high-quality 3D annotations for in-the-wild 2D datasets and offers crucial full supervision for regression-based methods. Extensive experiments on popular benchmarks show that CLIFF outperforms prior arts by a significant margin, and reaches the first place on the AGORA leaderboard (the SMPL-Algorithms track). The code and data are available at https://github.com/huawei-noah/noah-research/tree/master/CLIFF.

Zhong Ji, Zhihao Li, Yan Zhang et al.

As a promising field, Multi-Query Image Retrieval (MQIR) aims at searching for the semantically relevant image given multiple region-specific text queries. Existing works mainly focus on a single-level similarity between image regions and text queries, which neglects the hierarchical guidance of multi-level similarities and results in incomplete alignments. Besides, the high-level semantic correlations that intrinsically connect different region-query pairs are rarely considered. To address above limitations, we propose a novel Hierarchical Matching and Reasoning Network (HMRN) for MQIR. It disentangles MQIR into three hierarchical semantic representations, which is responsible to capture fine-grained local details, contextual global scopes, and high-level inherent correlations. HMRN comprises two modules: Scalar-based Matching (SM) module and Vector-based Reasoning (VR) module. Specifically, the SM module characterizes the multi-level alignment similarity, which consists of a fine-grained local-level similarity and a context-aware global-level similarity. Afterwards, the VR module is developed to excavate the potential semantic correlations among multiple region-query pairs, which further explores the high-level reasoning similarity. Finally, these three-level similarities are aggregated into a joint similarity space to form the ultimate similarity. Extensive experiments on the benchmark dataset demonstrate that our HMRN substantially surpasses the current state-of-the-art methods. For instance, compared with the existing best method Drill-down, the metric R@1 in the last round is improved by 23.4%. Our source codes will be released at https://github.com/LZH-053/HMRN.

Buzhen Huang, Jingyi Ju, Zhihao Li et al.

Due to the mutual occlusion, severe scale variation, and complex spatial distribution, the current multi-person mesh recovery methods cannot produce accurate absolute body poses and shapes in large-scale crowded scenes. To address the obstacles, we fully exploit crowd features for reconstructing groups of people from a monocular image. A novel hypergraph relational reasoning network is proposed to formulate the complex and high-order relation correlations among individuals and groups in the crowd. We first extract compact human features and location information from the original high-resolution image. By conducting the relational reasoning on the extracted individual features, the underlying crowd collectiveness and interaction relationship can provide additional group information for the reconstruction. Finally, the updated individual features and the localization information are used to regress human meshes in camera coordinates. To facilitate the network training, we further build pseudo ground-truth on two crowd datasets, which may also promote future research on pose estimation and human behavior understanding in crowded scenes. The experimental results show that our approach outperforms other baseline methods both in crowded and common scenarios. The code and datasets are publicly available at https://github.com/boycehbz/GroupRec.

Zhihao Li, Biao Hou, Siteng Ma et al.

To overcome the inherent domain gap between remote sensing (RS) images and natural images, some self-supervised representation learning methods have made promising progress. However, they have overlooked the diverse angles present in RS objects. This paper proposes the Masked Angle-Aware Autoencoder (MA3E) to perceive and learn angles during pre-training. We design a \textit{scaling center crop} operation to create the rotated crop with random orientation on each original image, introducing the explicit angle variation. MA3E inputs this composite image while reconstruct the original image, aiming to effectively learn rotation-invariant representations by restoring the angle variation introduced on the rotated crop. To avoid biases caused by directly reconstructing the rotated crop, we propose an Optimal Transport (OT) loss that automatically assigns similar original image patches to each rotated crop patch for reconstruction. MA3E demonstrates more competitive performance than existing pre-training methods on seven different RS image datasets in three downstream tasks.

Jingyi Ju, Buzhen Huang, Chen Zhu et al.

Incorporating physics in human motion capture to avoid artifacts like floating, foot sliding, and ground penetration is a promising direction. Existing solutions always adopt kinematic results as reference motions, and the physics is treated as a post-processing module. However, due to the depth ambiguity, monocular motion capture inevitably suffers from noises, and the noisy reference often leads to failure for physics-based tracking. To address the obstacles, our key-idea is to employ physics as denoising guidance in the reverse diffusion process to reconstruct physically plausible human motion from a modeled pose probability distribution. Specifically, we first train a latent gaussian model that encodes the uncertainty of 2D-to-3D lifting to facilitate reverse diffusion. Then, a physics module is constructed to track the motion sampled from the distribution. The discrepancies between the tracked motion and image observation are used to provide explicit guidance for the reverse diffusion model to refine the motion. With several iterations, the physics-based tracking and kinematic denoising promote each other to generate a physically plausible human motion. Experimental results show that our method outperforms previous physics-based methods in both joint accuracy and success rate. More information can be found at \url{https://github.com/Me-Ditto/Physics-Guided-Mocap}.

Zhihao Li, Ming Lu, Xu Zhang et al.

Conventional cameras capture image irradiance on a sensor and convert it to RGB images using an image signal processor (ISP). The images can then be used for photography or visual computing tasks in a variety of applications, such as public safety surveillance and autonomous driving. One can argue that since RAW images contain all the captured information, the conversion of RAW to RGB using an ISP is not necessary for visual computing. In this paper, we propose a novel $ρ$-Vision framework to perform high-level semantic understanding and low-level compression using RAW images without the ISP subsystem used for decades. Considering the scarcity of available RAW image datasets, we first develop an unpaired CycleR2R network based on unsupervised CycleGAN to train modular unrolled ISP and inverse ISP (invISP) models using unpaired RAW and RGB images. We can then flexibly generate simulated RAW images (simRAW) using any existing RGB image dataset and finetune different models originally trained for the RGB domain to process real-world camera RAW images. We demonstrate object detection and image compression capabilities in RAW-domain using RAW-domain YOLOv3 and RAW image compressor (RIC) on snapshots from various cameras. Quantitative results reveal that RAW-domain task inference provides better detection accuracy and compression compared to RGB-domain processing. Furthermore, the proposed \r{ho}-Vision generalizes across various camera sensors and different task-specific models. Additional advantages of the proposed $ρ$-Vision that eliminates the ISP are the potential reductions in computations and processing times.

Zixuan Fu, Lanqing Guo, Chong Wang et al.

Recent advancements in deep learning have shown impressive results in image and video denoising, leveraging extensive pairs of noisy and noise-free data for supervision. However, the challenge of acquiring paired videos for dynamic scenes hampers the practical deployment of deep video denoising techniques. In contrast, this obstacle is less pronounced in image denoising, where paired data is more readily available. Thus, a well-trained image denoiser could serve as a reliable spatial prior for video denoising. In this paper, we propose a novel unsupervised video denoising framework, named ``Temporal As a Plugin'' (TAP), which integrates tunable temporal modules into a pre-trained image denoiser. By incorporating temporal modules, our method can harness temporal information across noisy frames, complementing its power of spatial denoising. Furthermore, we introduce a progressive fine-tuning strategy that refines each temporal module using the generated pseudo clean video frames, progressively enhancing the network's denoising performance. Compared to other unsupervised video denoising methods, our framework demonstrates superior performance on both sRGB and raw video denoising datasets.

Zhihao Li, Yao Du, Yang Liu et al.

Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have advanced greatly in general tasks. However, they still face challenges in geometric reasoning, a task that requires synergistic integration of visual recognition proficiency and complex reasoning strength. Existing MLLMs prioritize optimizing the LLM backbone to enhance problem-solving capabilities, while rarely emphasizing improvements in discerning visual elements. However, we reveal that MLLMs suffer from severe visual perception deficiencies, including inaccurate geometric comprehension and severe visual hallucinations, which constrain their reasoning performance. To address this issue, we revisit geometric reasoning through a visual-centric lens that highlights the role of visual perception. To achieve this, we propose EAGLE, a novel coarse-to-fine visual enhancement framework that progressively leverages LLMs' guidance to improve perception proficiency. Specifically, given the substantial disparity between geometric diagrams and natural images, we first introduce Geometric Knowledge Injection. This process explores fundamental knowledge from diagram-caption data to enhance recognition capabilities and improve geometry-language alignments. Then, recognizing that different elements contribute unequally in the reasoning process, we introduce Geometric Knowledge Refinement. This stage leverages LLM-driven chain-of-thought solutions to guide the vision encoder in adaptively prioritizing key elements, fostering a synergistic interplay between visual comprehension and mathematical reasoning. Finally, we develop EAGLE, a geometry expert with strong perception and reasoning capabilities. Extensive experiments demonstrate its effectiveness on three popular benchmarks.

Zhihao Li, Si Yi, Zhan Ma

Image signal processing (ISP) is crucial for camera imaging, and neural networks (NN) solutions are extensively deployed for daytime scenes. The lack of sufficient nighttime image dataset and insights on nighttime illumination characteristics poses a great challenge for high-quality rendering using existing NN ISPs. To tackle it, we first built a high-resolution nighttime RAW-RGB (NR2R) dataset with white balance and tone mapping annotated by expert professionals. Meanwhile, to best capture the characteristics of nighttime illumination light sources, we develop the CBUnet, a two-stage NN ISP to cascade the compensation of color and brightness attributes. Experiments show that our method has better visual quality compared to traditional ISP pipeline, and is ranked at the second place in the NTIRE 2022 Night Photography Rendering Challenge for two tracks by respective People's and Professional Photographer's choices. The code and relevant materials are avaiable on our website: https://njuvision.github.io/CBUnet.

Ruiyuan Gao, Kai Chen, Zhihao Li et al.

Controllable generative models for images and videos have seen significant success, yet 3D scene generation, especially in unbounded scenarios like autonomous driving, remains underdeveloped. Existing methods lack flexible controllability and often rely on dense view data collection in controlled environments, limiting their generalizability across common datasets (e.g., nuScenes). In this paper, we introduce MagicDrive3D, a novel framework for controllable 3D street scene generation that combines video-based view synthesis with 3D representation (3DGS) generation. It supports multi-condition control, including road maps, 3D objects, and text descriptions. Unlike previous approaches that require 3D representation before training, MagicDrive3D first trains a multi-view video generation model to synthesize diverse street views. This method utilizes routinely collected autonomous driving data, reducing data acquisition challenges and enriching 3D scene generation. In the 3DGS generation step, we introduce Fault-Tolerant Gaussian Splatting to address minor errors and use monocular depth for better initialization, alongside appearance modeling to manage exposure discrepancies across viewpoints. Experiments show that MagicDrive3D generates diverse, high-quality 3D driving scenes, supports any-view rendering, and enhances downstream tasks like BEV segmentation, demonstrating its potential for autonomous driving simulation and beyond.

HyunJun Jung, Nikolas Brasch, Jifei Song et al.

Recent advances in neural radiance fields enable novel view synthesis of photo-realistic images in dynamic settings, which can be applied to scenarios with human animation. Commonly used implicit backbones to establish accurate models, however, require many input views and additional annotations such as human masks, UV maps and depth maps. In this work, we propose ParDy-Human (Parameterized Dynamic Human Avatar), a fully explicit approach to construct a digital avatar from as little as a single monocular sequence. ParDy-Human introduces parameter-driven dynamics into 3D Gaussian Splatting where 3D Gaussians are deformed by a human pose model to animate the avatar. Our method is composed of two parts: A first module that deforms canonical 3D Gaussians according to SMPL vertices and a consecutive module that further takes their designed joint encodings and predicts per Gaussian deformations to deal with dynamics beyond SMPL vertex deformations. Images are then synthesized by a rasterizer. ParDy-Human constitutes an explicit model for realistic dynamic human avatars which requires significantly fewer training views and images. Our avatars learning is free of additional annotations such as masks and can be trained with variable backgrounds while inferring full-resolution images efficiently even on consumer hardware. We provide experimental evidence to show that ParDy-Human outperforms state-of-the-art methods on ZJU-MoCap and THUman4.0 datasets both quantitatively and visually.

Yingji Zhong, Kaichen Zhou, Zhihao Li et al.

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) have shown remarkable capabilities for photorealistic novel view synthesis. One major deficiency of NeRF is that dense inputs are typically required, and the rendering quality will drop drastically given sparse inputs. In this paper, we highlight the effectiveness of rendered semantics from dense novel views, and show that rendered semantics can be treated as a more robust form of augmented data than rendered RGB. Our method enhances NeRF's performance by incorporating guidance derived from the rendered semantics. The rendered semantic guidance encompasses two levels: the supervision level and the feature level. The supervision-level guidance incorporates a bi-directional verification module that decides the validity of each rendered semantic label, while the feature-level guidance integrates a learnable codebook that encodes semantic-aware information, which is queried by each point via the attention mechanism to obtain semantic-relevant predictions. The overall semantic guidance is embedded into a self-improved pipeline. We also introduce a more challenging sparse-input indoor benchmark, where the number of inputs is limited to as few as 6. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method and it exhibits superior performance compared to existing approaches.

Binxiao Huang, Zhihao Li, Shiyong Liu et al.

3D Gaussian splatting (3DGS) has demonstrated exceptional performance in image-based 3D reconstruction and real-time rendering. However, regions with complex textures require numerous Gaussians to capture significant color variations accurately, leading to inefficiencies in rendering speed. To address this challenge, we introduce a hybrid representation for indoor scenes that combines 3DGS with textured meshes. Our approach uses textured meshes to handle texture-rich flat areas, while retaining Gaussians to model intricate geometries. The proposed method begins by pruning and refining the extracted mesh to eliminate geometrically complex regions. We then employ a joint optimization for 3DGS and mesh, incorporating a warm-up strategy and transmittance-aware supervision to balance their contributions seamlessly.Extensive experiments demonstrate that the hybrid representation maintains comparable rendering quality and achieves superior frames per second FPS with fewer Gaussian primitives.

Kangjie Chen, Yingji Zhong, Zhihao Li et al.

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has demonstrated impressive performance in novel view synthesis under dense-view settings. However, in sparse-view scenarios, despite the realistic renderings in training views, 3DGS occasionally manifests appearance artifacts in novel views. This paper investigates the appearance artifacts in sparse-view 3DGS and uncovers a core limitation of current approaches: the optimized Gaussians are overly-entangled with one another to aggressively fit the training views, which leads to a neglect of the real appearance distribution of the underlying scene and results in appearance artifacts in novel views. The analysis is based on a proposed metric, termed Co-Adaptation Score (CA), which quantifies the entanglement among Gaussians, i.e., co-adaptation, by computing the pixel-wise variance across multiple renderings of the same viewpoint, with different random subsets of Gaussians. The analysis reveals that the degree of co-adaptation is naturally alleviated as the number of training views increases. Based on the analysis, we propose two lightweight strategies to explicitly mitigate the co-adaptation in sparse-view 3DGS: (1) random gaussian dropout; (2) multiplicative noise injection to the opacity. Both strategies are designed to be plug-and-play, and their effectiveness is validated across various methods and benchmarks. We hope that our insights into the co-adaptation effect will inspire the community to achieve a more comprehensive understanding of sparse-view 3DGS.

Yuxuan Lin, Ruihang Chu, Zhenyu Chen et al.

Generative 3D reconstruction shows strong potential in incomplete observations. While sparse-view and single-image reconstruction are well-researched, partial observation remains underexplored. In this context, dense views are accessible only from a specific angular range, with other perspectives remaining inaccessible. This task presents two main challenges: (i) limited View Range: observations confined to a narrow angular scope prevent effective traditional interpolation techniques that require evenly distributed perspectives. (ii) inconsistent Generation: views created for invisible regions often lack coherence with both visible regions and each other, compromising reconstruction consistency. To address these challenges, we propose \method, a novel training-free approach that integrates the local dense observations and multi-source priors for reconstruction. Our method introduces a fusion-based strategy to effectively align these priors in DDIM sampling, thereby generating multi-view consistent images to supervise invisible views. We further design an iterative refinement strategy, which uses the geometric structures of the object to enhance reconstruction quality. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets show the superiority of our method over SOTAs, especially in invisible regions.

Abdelrahman Abdelhamed, Mahmoud Afifi, Radu Timofte et al.

This paper reviews the NTIRE 2020 challenge on real image denoising with focus on the newly introduced dataset, the proposed methods and their results. The challenge is a new version of the previous NTIRE 2019 challenge on real image denoising that was based on the SIDD benchmark. This challenge is based on a newly collected validation and testing image datasets, and hence, named SIDD+. This challenge has two tracks for quantitatively evaluating image denoising performance in (1) the Bayer-pattern rawRGB and (2) the standard RGB (sRGB) color spaces. Each track ~250 registered participants. A total of 22 teams, proposing 24 methods, competed in the final phase of the challenge. The proposed methods by the participating teams represent the current state-of-the-art performance in image denoising targeting real noisy images. The newly collected SIDD+ datasets are publicly available at: https://bit.ly/siddplus_data.