Neal Wadhwa

dblp:01/175 · DBLP profile ↗
← Back
21ranked-venue papers
4as first author
7since 2021 · last 2025
0009-0008-1874-563XORCID · corroborated

Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several

Graphics, computer vision, multimedia, augmented reality and games · 19 · 4 first-author · 6 since 2021Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 11 · 5 since 2021
YearPublicationVenuePosition
2025 ReCapture: Generative Video Camera Controls for User-Provided Videos using Masked Video Fine-Tuning
abstract
Recently, breakthroughs in video modeling have allowed for controllable camera trajectories in generated videos. However, these methods cannot be directly applied to user-provided videos that are not generated by a video model. In this paper, we present ReCapture, a method for generating new videos with novel camera trajectories from a single user-provided video. Our method allows us to re-generate the reference video, with all its existing scene motion, from vastly different angles and with cinematic camera motion. Notably, using our method we can also plausibly hallucinate parts of the scene that were not observable in the reference video. Our method works by (1) generating a noisy anchor video with a new camera trajectory using multiview diffusion models or depth-based point cloud rendering and then (2) regenerating the anchor video into a clean and temporally consistent reangled video using our proposed masked video fine-tuning technique.
Junhao Zhang 0001, Roni Paiss, Shiran Zada, Nikhil Karnad, David E. Jacobs, Yael Pritch, Inbar Mosseri, Zheng Shou 0001, Neal Wadhwa, Nataniel Ruiz
CVPR9
2025 Magic Insert: Style-Aware Drag-And-Drop
abstract
We present Magic Insert, a method for dragging-and-dropping subjects from a user-provided image into a target image of a different style in a physically plausible manner while matching the style of the target image. This work formalizes the problem of style-aware drag-and-drop and presents a method for tackling it by addressing two sub-problems: style-aware personalization and realistic object insertion in stylized images. For style-aware personalization, our method first fine-tunes a pretrained text-to-image diffusion model using LoRA and learned text tokens on the subject image, and then infuses it with a CLIP representation of the target style. For object insertion, we use Bootstrapped Domain Adaption to adapt a domain-specific photorealistic object insertion model to the domain of diverse artistic styles. Overall, the method significantly outperforms traditional approaches such as inpainting. Finally, we present a dataset, SubjectPlop, to facilitate evaluation and future progress in this area. Project page: https://magicinsert.github.io/
Nataniel Ruiz, Yuanzhen Li, Neal Wadhwa, Yael Pritch, Michael Rubinstein, David E. Jacobs, Shlomi Fruchter
ICCV3
2025 Unbounded: A Generative Infinite Game of Character Life Simulation
abstract
We introduce the concept of a generative infinite game, a video game that transcends the traditional boundaries of finite, hard-coded systems by using generative models. Inspired by James P. Carse's distinction between finite and infinite games, we leverage recent advances in generative AI to create Unbounded: a game of character life simulation that is fully encapsulated in generative models. Specifically, Unbounded draws inspiration from sandbox life simulations and allows you to interact with your autonomous virtual character in a virtual world by feeding, playing with and guiding it - with open-ended mechanics generated by an LLM, some of which can be emergent. In order to develop Unbounded, we propose technical innovations in both the LLM and visual generation domains. Specifically, we present: (1) a specialized, distilled large language model (LLM) that dynamically generates game mechanics, narratives, and character interactions in real-time, and (2) a new dynamic regional image prompt Adapter (IP-Adapter) for vision models that ensures consistent yet flexible visual generation of a character across multiple environments. We evaluate our system through both qualitative and quantitative analysis, showing significant improvements in character life simulation, user instruction following, narrative coherence, and visual consistency for both characters and the environments compared to traditional related approaches.
Jialu Li 0001, Yuanzhen Li, Neal Wadhwa, Yael Pritch, David E. Jacobs, Michael Rubinstein, Mohit Bansal, Nataniel Ruiz
ICLR3
2024 HyperDreamBooth: HyperNetworks for Fast Personalization of Text-to-Image Models
abstract
Personalization has emerged as a prominent aspect within the field of generative AI, enabling the synthesis of individuals in diverse contexts and styles, while retaining high-fidelity to their identities. However, the process of personalization presents inherent challenges in terms of time and memory requirements. Fine-tuning each personalized model needs considerable GPU time investment, and storing a personalized model per subject can be demanding in terms of storage capacity. To overcome these challenges, we propose HyperDreamBooth—a hypernetwork capable of efficiently generating a small set of personalized weights from a single image of a person. By composing these weights into the diffusion model, coupled with fast finetuning, HyperDreamBooth can generate a person's face in various contexts and styles, with high subject details while also preserving the model's crucial knowledge of diverse styles and semantic modifications. Our method achieves personalization on faces in roughly 20 seconds, 25x faster than DreamBooth and 125x faster than Textual Inversion, using as few as one reference image, with the same quality and style diversity as DreamBooth. Also our method yields a model that is 10,000x smaller than a normal DreamBooth model.
Nataniel Ruiz, Yuanzhen Li, Varun Jampani, Tingbo Hou, Yael Pritch, Neal Wadhwa, Michael Rubinstein, Kfir Aberman
CVPR7
2024 RealFill: Reference-Driven Generation for Authentic Image Completion
abstract
Recent advances in generative imagery have brought forth outpainting and inpainting models that can produce high-quality, plausible image content in unknown regions. However, the content these models hallucinate is necessarily inauthentic, since they are unaware of the true scene. In this work, we propose RealFill, a novel generative approach for image completion that fills in missing regions of an image with the content that should have been there. RealFill is a generative inpainting model that is personalized using only a few reference images of a scene. These reference images do not have to be aligned with the target image, and can be taken with drastically varying viewpoints, lighting conditions, camera apertures, or image styles. Once personalized, RealFill is able to complete a target image with visually compelling contents that are faithful to the original scene. We evaluate RealFill on a new image completion benchmark that covers a set of diverse and challenging scenarios, and find that it outperforms existing approaches by a large margin. Project page: https://realfill.github.io.
Luming Tang, Nataniel Ruiz, Qinghao Chu, Yuanzhen Li, Aleksander Holynski, David E. Jacobs, Bharath Hariharan, Yael Pritch, Neal Wadhwa, Kfir Aberman, Michael Rubinstein
ACM Trans. Graph.9
2021 Defocus Map Estimation and Deblurring from a Single Dual-Pixel Image
abstract
We present a method that takes as input a single dual-pixel image, and simultaneously estimates the image’s defocus map—the amount of defocus blur at each pixel—and recovers an all-in-focus image. Our method is inspired from recent works that leverage the dual-pixel sensors available in many consumer cameras to assist with autofocus, and use them for recovery of defocus maps or all-in-focus images. These prior works have solved the two recovery problems independently of each other, and often require large labeled datasets for supervised training. By contrast, we show that it is beneficial to treat these two closely-connected problems simultaneously. To this end, we set up an optimization problem that, by carefully modeling the optics of dual-pixel images, jointly solves both problems. We use data captured with a consumer smartphone camera to demonstrate that, after a one-time calibration step, our approach improves upon prior works for both defocus map estimation and blur removal, despite being entirely unsupervised.
Shumian Xin, Neal Wadhwa, Tianfan Xue, Jonathan T. Barron, Pratul P. Srinivasan, Jiawen Chen 0001, Ioannis Gkioulekas, Rahul Garg 0002
ICCV2
2021 Learned Dual-View Reflection Removal
abstract
Traditional reflection removal algorithms either use a single image as input, which suffers from intrinsic ambiguities, or use multiple images from a moving camera, which is inconvenient for users. We instead propose a learning-based dereflection algorithm that uses stereo images as input. This is an effective trade-off between the two extremes: the parallax between two views provides cues to remove reflections, and two views are easy to capture due to the adoption of stereo cameras in smartphones. Our model consists of a learning-based reflection-invariant flow model for dual-view registration, and a learned synthesis model for combining aligned image pairs. Because no dataset for dual-view reflection removal exists, we render a synthetic dataset of dual-views with and without reflections for use in training. Our evaluation on an additional real-world dataset of stereo pairs shows that our algorithm outperforms existing single-image and multi-image dereflection approaches.
Simon Niklaus, Xuaner Cecilia Zhang, Jonathan T. Barron, Neal Wadhwa, Rahul Garg 0002, Feng Liu 0015, Tianfan Xue
WACV4
2020 Learning to Autofocus
Charles Herrmann, Richard Strong Bowen, Neal Wadhwa, Rahul Garg 0002, Qiurui He 0001, Jonathan T. Barron, Ramin Zabih
CVPR3
2020 Du2Net: Learning Depth Estimation from Dual-Cameras and Dual-Pixels
Yinda Zhang 0001, Neal Wadhwa, Sergio Orts, Christian Häne, Sean Ryan Fanello, Rahul Garg 0002
ECCV (1)2
2019 Wireless Software Synchronization of Multiple Distributed Cameras
abstract
We present a method for precisely time-synchronizing the capture of image sequences from a collection of smartphone cameras connected over WiFi. Our method is entirely software-based, has only modest hardware requirements, and achieves an accuracy of less than 250 µs on unmodified commodity hardware. It does not use image content and synchronizes cameras prior to capture. The algorithm operates in two stages. In the first stage, we designate one device as the leader and synchronize each client device’s clock to it by estimating network delay. Once clocks are synchronized, the second stage initiates continuous image streaming, estimates the relative phase of image timestamps between each client and the leader, and shifts the streams into alignment. We quantitatively validate our results on a multi-camera rig imaging a high-precision LED array and qualitatively demonstrate significant improvements to multi-view stereo depth estimation and stitching of dynamic scenes. We release as open source libsoftwaresync, an Android implementation of our system, to inspire new types of collective capture applications.
Sameer Ansari, Neal Wadhwa, Rahul Garg 0002, Jiawen Chen 0001
ICCP2
2019 Learning Single Camera Depth Estimation Using Dual-Pixels
abstract
Deep learning techniques have enabled rapid progress in monocular depth estimation, but their quality is limited by the ill-posed nature of the problem and the scarcity of high quality datasets. We estimate depth from a single cam-era by leveraging the dual-pixel auto-focus hardware that is increasingly common on modern camera sensors. Classic stereo algorithms and prior learning-based depth estimation techniques underperform when applied on this dual-pixel data, the former due to too-strong assumptions about RGB image matching, and the latter due to not leveraging the understanding of optics of dual-pixel image formation. To allow learning based methods to work well on dual-pixel imagery, we identify an inherent ambiguity in the depth estimated from dual-pixel cues, and develop an approach to estimate depth up to this ambiguity. Using our approach, existing monocular depth estimation techniques can be effectively applied to dual-pixel data, and much smaller models can be constructed that still infer high quality depth. To demonstrate this, we capture a large dataset of in-the-wild 5-viewpoint RGB images paired with corresponding dual-pixel data, and show how view supervision with this data can be used to learn depth up to the unknown ambiguities. On our new task, our model is 30% more accurate than any prior work on learning-based monocular or stereoscopic depth estimation.
Rahul Garg 0002, Neal Wadhwa, Sameer Ansari, Jonathan T. Barron
ICCV2
2018 Aperture Supervision for Monocular Depth Estimation
abstract
We present a novel method to train machine learning algorithms to estimate scene depths from a single image, by using the information provided by a camera's aperture as supervision. Prior works use a depth sensor's outputs or images of the same scene from alternate viewpoints as supervision, while our method instead uses images from the same viewpoint taken with a varying camera aperture. To enable learning algorithms to use aperture effects as supervision, we introduce two differentiable aperture rendering functions that use the input image and predicted depths to simulate the depth-of-field effects caused by real camera apertures. We train a monocular depth estimation network end-to-end to predict the scene depths that best explain these finite aperture images as defocus-blurred renderings of the input all-in-focus image.
Pratul P. Srinivasan, Rahul Garg 0002, Neal Wadhwa, Ren Ng, Jonathan T. Barron
CVPR3
2018 Depth from motion for smartphone AR
abstract
Augmented reality (AR) for smartphones has matured from a technology for earlier adopters, available only on select high-end phones, to one that is truly available to the general public. One of the key breakthroughs has been in low-compute methods for six degree of freedom (6DoF) tracking on phones using only the existing hardware (camera and inertial sensors). 6DoF tracking is the cornerstone of smartphone AR allowing virtual content to be precisely locked on top of the real world. However, to really give users the impression of believable AR, one requires mobile depth. Without depth, even simple effects such as a virtual object being correctly occluded by the real-world is impossible. However, requiring a mobile depth sensor would severely restrict the access to such features. In this article, we provide a novel pipeline for mobile depth that supports a wide array of mobile phones, and uses only the existing monocular color sensor. Through several technical contributions, we provide the ability to compute low latency dense depth maps using only a single CPU core of a wide range of (medium-high) mobile phones. We demonstrate the capabilities of our approach on high-level AR applications including real-time navigation and shopping.
Julien P. C. Valentin, Adarsh Kowdle, Jonathan T. Barron, Neal Wadhwa, Maksym Dzitsiuk, Michael Schoenberg, Ambrus Csaszar, Eric Turner 0001, Ivan Dryanovski, João Afonso, Jose Pascoal, Konstantine Tsotsos, Mira Leung, Mirko Schmidt, Onur G. Guleryuz, Sameh Khamis, Vladimir Tankovich, Sean Ryan Fanello, Shahram Izadi, Christoph Rhemann
ACM Trans. Graph.4
2018 Synthetic depth-of-field with a single-camera mobile phone
abstract
Shallow depth-of-field is commonly used by photographers to isolate a subject from a distracting background. However, standard cell phone cameras cannot produce such images optically, as their short focal lengths and small apertures capture nearly all-in-focus images. We present a system to computationally synthesize shallow depth-of-field images with a single mobile camera and a single button press. If the image is of a person, we use a person segmentation network to separate the person and their accessories from the background. If available, we also use dense dual-pixel auto-focus hardware, effectively a 2-sample light field with an approximately 1 millimeter baseline, to compute a dense depth map. These two signals are combined and used to render a defocused image. Our system can process a 5.4 megapixel image in 4 seconds on a mobile phone, is fully automatic, and is robust enough to be used by non-experts. The modular nature of our system allows it to degrade naturally in the absence of a dual-pixel sensor or a human subject.
Neal Wadhwa, Rahul Garg 0002, David E. Jacobs, Bryan E. Feldman, Nori Kanazawa, Robert Carroll, Yair Movshovitz-Attias, Jonathan T. Barron, Yael Pritch, Marc Levoy
ACM Trans. Graph.1
2016 Bilateral guided upsampling
abstract
We present an algorithm to accelerate a large class of image processing operators. Given a low-resolution reference input and output pair, we model the operator by fitting local curves that map the input to the output. We can then produce a full-resolution output by evaluating these low-resolution curves on the full-resolution input. We demonstrate that this faithfully models state-of-the-art operators for tone mapping, style transfer, and recoloring. The curves are computed by lifting the input into a bilateral grid and then solving for the 3D array of affine matrices that best maps input color to output color per x, y , intensity bin. We enforce a smoothness term on the matrices which prevents false edges and noise amplification. We can either globally optimize this energy, or quickly approximate a solution by locally fitting matrices and then enforcing smoothness by blurring in grid space. This latter option reduces to joint bilateral upsampling [Kopf et al. 2007] or the guided filter [He et al. 2013], depending on the choice of parameters. The cost of running the algorithm is reduced to the cost of running the original algorithm at greatly reduced resolution, as fitting the curves takes about 10 ms on mobile devices, and 1--2 ms on desktop CPUs, and evaluating the curves can be done with a simple GPU shader.
Jiawen Chen 0001, Andrew Adams, Neal Wadhwa, Samuel W. Hasinoff
ACM Trans. Graph.3
2015 Deviation magnification: revealing departures from ideal geometries
abstract
Structures and objects are often supposed to have idealized geometries such as straight lines or circles. Although not always visible to the naked eye, in reality, these objects deviate from their idealized models. Our goal is to reveal and visualize such subtle geometric deviations, which can contain useful, surprising information about our world. Our framework, termed Deviation Magnification , takes a still image as input, fits parametric models to objects of interest, computes the geometric deviations, and renders an output image in which the departures from ideal geometries are exaggerated. We demonstrate the correctness and usefulness of our method through quantitative evaluation on a synthetic dataset and by application to challenging natural images.
Neal Wadhwa, Tali Dekel, Donglai Wei 0001, Frédo Durand, William T. Freeman
ACM Trans. Graph.1
2014 Refraction Wiggles for Measuring Fluid Depth and Velocity from Video
Tianfan Xue, Michael Rubinstein, Neal Wadhwa, Anat Levin, Frédo Durand, William T. Freeman
ECCV (3)3
2014 Riesz pyramids for fast phase-based video magnification
abstract
We present a new compact image pyramid representation, the Riesz pyramid, that can be used for real-time phase-based motion magnification. Our new representation is less overcomplete than even the smallest two orientation, octave-bandwidth complex steerable pyramid, and can be implemented using compact, efficient linear filters in the spatial domain. Motion-magnified videos produced with this new representation are of comparable quality to those produced with the complex steerable pyramid. When used with phase-based video magnification, the Riesz pyramid phase-shifts image features along only their dominant orientation rather than every orientation like the complex steerable pyramid.
Neal Wadhwa, Michael Rubinstein, Frédo Durand, William T. Freeman
ICCP1
2014 The visual microphone: passive recovery of sound from video
abstract
When sound hits an object, it causes small vibrations of the object's surface. We show how, using only high-speed video of the object, we can extract those minute vibrations and partially recover the sound that produced them, allowing us to turn everyday objects---a glass of water, a potted plant, a box of tissues, or a bag of chips---into visual microphones. We recover sounds from high-speed footage of a variety of objects with different properties, and use both real and simulated data to examine some of the factors that affect our ability to visually recover sound. We evaluate the quality of recovered sounds using intelligibility and SNR metrics and provide input and recovered audio samples for direct comparison. We also explore how to leverage the rolling shutter in regular consumer cameras to recover audio from standard frame-rate videos, and use the spatial resolution of our method to visualize how sound-related vibrations vary over an object's surface, which we can use to recover the vibration modes of an object.
Abe Davis, Michael Rubinstein, Neal Wadhwa, Gautham J. Mysore, Frédo Durand, William T. Freeman
ACM Trans. Graph.3
2013 Phase-based video motion processing
abstract
We introduce a technique to manipulate small movements in videos based on an analysis of motion in complex-valued image pyramids. Phase variations of the coefficients of a complex-valued steerable pyramid over time correspond to motion, and can be temporally processed and amplified to reveal imperceptible motions, or attenuated to remove distracting changes. This processing does not involve the computation of optical flow, and in comparison to the previous Eulerian Video Magnification method it supports larger amplification factors and is significantly less sensitive to noise. These improved capabilities broaden the set of applications for motion processing in videos. We demonstrate the advantages of this approach on synthetic and natural video sequences, and explore applications in scientific analysis, visualization and video enhancement.
Neal Wadhwa, Michael Rubinstein, Frédo Durand, William T. Freeman
ACM Trans. Graph.1
2007 Separating Models of Learning with Faulty Teachers
Vitaly Feldman, Shrenik Shah, Neal Wadhwa
ALT3