Inverse Image-Based Rendering for Light Field Generation from Single Images
This addresses the problem of making light field generation more accessible and efficient for applications like virtual reality and photography, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing neural rendering techniques.
The paper tackles the problem of generating light fields from single images, which traditionally require multiple views or specialized hardware, by proposing an inverse image-based rendering method that reconstructs light flows from image pixels. The method outperforms state-of-the-art novel view synthesis approaches on various challenging datasets without needing retraining or fine-tuning after initial training on synthetic data.
A concept of light-fields computed from multiple view images on regular grids has proven its benefit for scene representations, and supported realistic renderings of novel views and photographic effects such as refocusing and shallow depth of field. In spite of its effectiveness of light flow computations, obtaining light fields requires either computational costs or specialized devices like a bulky camera setup and a specialized microlens array. In an effort to broaden its benefit and applicability, in this paper, we propose a novel view synthesis method for light field generation from only single images, named inverse image-based rendering. Unlike previous attempts to implicitly rebuild 3D geometry or to explicitly represent objective scenes, our method reconstructs light flows in a space from image pixels, which behaves in the opposite way to image-based rendering. To accomplish this, we design a neural rendering pipeline to render a target ray in an arbitrary viewpoint. Our neural renderer first stores the light flow of source rays from the input image, then computes the relationships among them through cross-attention, and finally predicts the color of the target ray based on these relationships. After the rendering pipeline generates the first novel view from a single input image, the generated out-of-view contents are updated to the set of source rays. This procedure is iteratively performed while ensuring the consistent generation of occluded contents. We demonstrate that our inverse image-based rendering works well with various challenging datasets without any retraining or finetuning after once trained on synthetic dataset, and outperforms relevant state-of-the-art novel view synthesis methods.