Generating high-quality 3D objects from textual descriptions remains a challenging problem due to high computational costs, the scarcity of 3D data, and the complexity of 3D representations. We introduce Geometry Image Diffusion (GIMDiffusion), a novel Text-to-3D model that utilizes geometry images to efficiently represent 3D shapes using 2D images, thereby avoiding the need for complex 3D-aware architectures. By integrating a Collaborative Control mechanism, we exploit the rich 2D priors of existing Text-to-Image models, such as Stable Diffusion, to achieve strong generalization despite limited 3D training data. This allows us to use only high-quality training data while retaining compatibility with guidance techniques such as IPAdapter. GIMDiffusion enables the generation of 3D assets at speeds comparable to current Text-to-Image models, without being restricted to manifold meshes during either training or inference. We simultaneously generate a UV unwrapping for the objects, consisting of semantically meaningful parts as well as internal structures, enhancing both usability and versatility.

We present Stable Part Diffusion 4D (SP4D), a framework for generating paired RGB and kinematic part videos from monocular inputs. Unlike conventional part segmentation methods that rely on appearance-based semantic cues, SP4D learns to produce kinematic parts --- structural components aligned with object articulation and consistent across views and time. SP4D adopts a dual-branch diffusion model that jointly synthesizes RGB frames and corresponding part segmentation maps. To simplify architecture and flexibly enable different part counts, we introduce a spatial color encoding scheme that maps part masks to continuous RGB-like images. This encoding allows the segmentation branch to share the latents VAE from the RGB branch, while enabling part segmentation to be recovered via straightforward post-processing. A Bidirectional Diffusion Fusion (BiDiFuse) module enhances cross-branch consistency, supported by a contrastive part consistency loss to promote spatial and temporal alignment of part predictions. We demonstrate that the generated 2D part maps can be lifted to 3D to derive skeletal structures and harmonic skinning weights with few manual adjustments. To train and evaluate SP4D, we construct KinematicParts20K, a curated dataset of over 20K rigged objects selected and processed from Objaverse XL, each paired with multi-view RGB and part video sequences. Experiments show that SP4D generalizes strongly to diverse scenarios, including real-world videos, novel generated objects, and rare articulated poses, producing kinematic-aware outputs suitable for downstream animation and motion-related tasks.

We propose a novel formulation for joint recovery of camera pose, object geometry and spatially-varying BRDF. The input to our approach is a sequence of RGB-D images captured by a mobile, hand-held scanner that actively illuminates the scene with point light sources. Compared to previous works that jointly estimate geometry and materials from a hand-held scanner, we formulate this problem using a single objective function that can be minimized using off-the-shelf gradient-based solvers. By integrating material clustering as a differentiable operation into the optimization process, we avoid pre-processing heuristics and demonstrate that our model is able to determine the correct number of specular materials independently. We provide a study on the importance of each component in our formulation and on the requirements of the initial geometry. We show that optimizing over the poses is crucial for accurately recovering fine details and show that our approach naturally results in a semantically meaningful material segmentation.

Despite significant progress in image-based 3D scene flow estimation, the performance of such approaches has not yet reached the fidelity required by many applications. Simultaneously, these applications are often not restricted to image-based estimation: laser scanners provide a popular alternative to traditional cameras, for example in the context of self-driving cars, as they directly yield a 3D point cloud. In this paper, we propose to estimate 3D motion from such unstructured point clouds using a deep neural network. In a single forward pass, our model jointly predicts 3D scene flow as well as the 3D bounding box and rigid body motion of objects in the scene. While the prospect of estimating 3D scene flow from unstructured point clouds is promising, it is also a challenging task. We show that the traditional global representation of rigid body motion prohibits inference by CNNs, and propose a translation equivariant representation to circumvent this problem. For training our deep network, a large dataset is required. Because of this, we augment real scans from KITTI with virtual objects, realistically modeling occlusions and simulating sensor noise. A thorough comparison with classic and learning-based techniques highlights the robustness of the proposed approach.

Given a set of input views, multi-view stereopsis techniques estimate depth maps to represent the 3D reconstruction of the scene; these are fused into a single, consistent, reconstruction -- most often a point cloud. In this work we propose to learn an auto-regressive depth refinement directly from data. While deep learning has improved the accuracy and speed of depth estimation significantly, learned MVS techniques remain limited to the planesweeping paradigm. We refine a set of input depth maps by successively reprojecting information from neighbouring views to leverage multi-view constraints. Compared to learning-based volumetric fusion techniques, an image-based representation allows significantly more detailed reconstructions; compared to traditional point-based techniques, our method learns noise suppression and surface completion in a data-driven fashion. Due to the limited availability of high-quality reconstruction datasets with ground truth, we introduce two novel synthetic datasets to (pre-)train our network. Our approach is able to improve both the output depth maps and the reconstructed point cloud, for both learned and traditional depth estimation front-ends, on both synthetic and real data.

We propose a technique for depth estimation with a monocular structured-light camera, i.e., a calibrated stereo set-up with one camera and one laser projector. Instead of formulating the depth estimation via a correspondence search problem, we show that a simple convolutional architecture is sufficient for high-quality disparity estimates in this setting. As accurate ground-truth is hard to obtain, we train our model in a self-supervised fashion with a combination of photometric and geometric losses. Further, we demonstrate that the projected pattern of the structured light sensor can be reliably separated from the ambient information. This can then be used to improve depth boundaries in a weakly supervised fashion by modeling the joint statistics of image and depth edges. The model trained in this fashion compares favorably to the state-of-the-art on challenging synthetic and real-world datasets. In addition, we contribute a novel simulator, which allows to benchmark active depth prediction algorithms in controlled conditions.

Existing learning based solutions to 3D surface prediction cannot be trained end-to-end as they operate on intermediate representations (e.g., TSDF) from which 3D surface meshes must be extracted in a post-processing step (e.g., via the marching cubes algorithm). In this paper, we investigate the problem of end-to-end 3D surface prediction. We first demonstrate that the marching cubes algorithm is not differentiable and propose an alternative differentiable formulation which we insert as a final layer into a 3D convolutional neural network. We further propose a set of loss functions which allow for training our model with sparse point supervision. Our experiments demonstrate that the model allows for predicting sub-voxel accurate 3D shapes of arbitrary topology. Additionally, it learns to complete shapes and to separate an object's inside from its outside even in the presence of sparse and incomplete ground truth. We investigate the benefits of our approach on the task of inferring shapes from 3D point clouds. Our model is flexible and can be combined with a variety of shape encoder and shape inference techniques.

A linear, or 1D, camera is a type of camera that sweeps a linear sensor array over the scene, rather than capturing the scene using a single impression on a 2D sensor array. They are often used in satellite imagery, industrial inspection, or hyperspectral imaging. In satellite imaging calibration is often done through a collection of ground points for which the 3D locations are known. In other applications, e.g. hyperspectral imaging, such known points are not available and annotating many different points is onerous. Hence we will use a checkerboard for calibration. The state-of-the-art method for linear camera calibration with a checkerboard becomes unstable when the checkerboards are parallel to the image plane. Our proposed method1yields more accurate camera calibrations without suffering from this shortcoming.

Multi-camera triangulation of feature points based on a minimisation of the overall ℓ2reprojection error can get stuck in suboptimal local minima or require slow global optimisation. For this reason, researchers have proposed optimising the ℓ∞norm of the ℓ2single view reprojection errors, which avoids the problem of local minima entirely. In this paper we present a novel method for ℓ∞triangulation that minimizes the ℓ∞norm of the ℓ∞reprojection errors: this apparently small difference leads to a much faster but equally accurate solution which is related to the MLE under the assumption of uniform noise. The proposed method adopts a new optimisation strategy based on solving simple quadratic equations. This stands in contrast with the fastest existing methods, which solve a sequence of more complex auxiliary Linear Programming or Second Order Cone Problems. The proposed algorithm performs well: for triangulation, it achieves the same accuracy as existing techniques while executing faster and being straightforward to implement.

In two-view stereo matching, the disparity of occluded pixels cannot accurately be estimated directly: it needs to be inferred through, e.g., regularisation. When capturing scenes using a plenoptic camera or a camera dolly on a track, more than two input images are available, and - contrary to the two-view case - pixels in the central view will only very rarely be occluded in all of the other views. By explicitly handling occlusions, we can limit the depth estimation of pixel p to only use those cameras that actually observe p. We do this by extending variational stereo matching to multiple views, and by explicitly handling occlusion on a view-by-view basis. Resulting depth maps are illustrated to be sharper and less noisy than typical recent techniques working on light fields.