Through the Curved Cover: Synthesizing Cover Aberrated Scenes with Refractive Field
This addresses a practical problem for extended reality headsets and field robots where protective covers degrade camera performance, representing a domain-specific incremental advance.
The paper tackles the problem of novel view synthesis through protective covers that cause optical aberrations, introducing SynthCover which uses a Refractive Field to estimate cover geometry and calculate refracted rays, achieving significant improvements in rendering quality compared to prior methods.
Recent extended reality headsets and field robots have adopted covers to protect the front-facing cameras from environmental hazards and falls. The surface irregularities on the cover can lead to optical aberrations like blurring and non-parametric distortions. Novel view synthesis methods like NeRF and 3D Gaussian Splatting are ill-equipped to synthesize from sequences with optical aberrations. To address this challenge, we introduce SynthCover to enable novel view synthesis through protective covers for downstream extended reality applications. SynthCover employs a Refractive Field that estimates the cover's geometry, enabling precise analytical calculation of refracted rays. Experiments on synthetic and real-world scenes demonstrate our method's ability to accurately model scenes viewed through protective covers, achieving a significant improvement in rendering quality compared to prior methods. We also show that the model can adjust well to various cover geometries with synthetic sequences captured with covers of different surface curvatures. To motivate further studies on this problem, we provide the benchmarked dataset containing real and synthetic walkable scenes captured with protective cover optical aberrations.