We present a novel neural algorithm for performing high-quality, highresolution, real-time novel view synthesis. From a sparse set of input RGB images or videos streams, our network both reconstructs the 3D scene and renders novel views at 1080p resolution at 30fps on an NVIDIA A100. Our feed-forward network generalizes across a wide variety of datasets and scenes and produces state-of-the-art quality for a real-time method. Our quality approaches, and in some cases surpasses, the quality of some of the top offline methods. In order to achieve these results we use a novel combination of several key concepts, and tie them together into a cohesive and effective algorithm. We build on previous works that represent the scene using semi-transparent layers and use an iterative learned render-and-refine approach to improve those layers. Instead of flat layers, our method reconstructs layered depth maps (LDMs) that efficiently represent scenes with complex depth and occlusions. The iterative update steps are embedded in a multi-scale, UNet-style architecture to perform as much compute as possible at reduced resolution. Within each update step, to better aggregate the information from multiple input views, we use a specialized Transformer-based network component. This allows the majority of the per-input image processing to be performed in the input image space, as opposed to layer space, further increasing efficiency. Finally, due to the real-time nature of our reconstruction and rendering, we dynamically create and discard the internal 3D geometry for each frame, generating the LDM for each view. Taken together, this produces a novel and effective algorithm for view synthesis. Through extensive evaluation, we demonstrate that we achieve state-of-the-art quality at real-time rates.

3D scene reconstruction from a sequence of posed RGB images is a cornerstone task for computer vision and augmented reality (AR). While depth-based fusion is the foundation of most real-time approaches for 3D reconstruction, recent learning based methods that operate directly on RGB images can achieve higher quality reconstructions, but at the cost of increased runtime and memory requirements, making them unsuitable for AR applications. We propose an efficient learning-based method that refines the 3D reconstruction obtained by a traditional fusion approach. By leveraging a top-down heightfield representation, our method remains real-time while approaching the quality of other learning-based methods. Despite being a simplification, our heightfield is perfectly appropriate for robotic path planning or augmented reality character placement. We outline several innovations that push the performance beyond existing top-down prediction baselines, and we present an evaluation framework on the challenging ScanNetV2 dataset, targeting AR tasks.

Per-pixel ground-truth depth data is challenging to acquire at scale. To overcome this limitation, self-supervised learning has emerged as a promising alternative for training models to perform monocular depth estimation. In this paper, we propose a set of improvements, which together result in both quantitatively and qualitatively improved depth maps compared to competing self-supervised methods. Research on self-supervised monocular training usually explores increasingly complex architectures, loss functions, and image formation models, all of which have recently helped to close the gap with fully-supervised methods. We show that a surprisingly simple model, and associated design choices, lead to superior predictions. In particular, we propose (i) a minimum reprojection loss, designed to robustly handle occlusions, (ii) a full-resolution multi-scale sampling method that reduces visual artifacts, and (iii) an auto-masking loss to ignore training pixels that violate camera motion assumptions. We demonstrate the effectiveness of each component in isolation, and show high quality, state-of-the-art results on the KITTI benchmark.

Learning based methods have shown very promising results for the task of depth estimation in single images. However, most existing approaches treat depth prediction as a supervised regression problem and as a result, require vast quantities of corresponding ground truth depth data for training. Just recording quality depth data in a range of environments is a challenging problem. In this paper, we innovate beyond existing approaches, replacing the use of explicit depth data during training with easier-to-obtain binocular stereo footage. We propose a novel training objective that enables our convolutional neural network to learn to perform single image depth estimation, despite the absence of ground truth depth data. Ex-ploiting epipolar geometry constraints, we generate disparity images by training our network with an image reconstruction loss. We show that solving for image reconstruction alone results in poor quality depth images. To overcome this problem, we propose a novel training loss that enforces consistency between the disparities produced relative to both the left and right images, leading to improved performance and robustness compared to existing approaches. Our method produces state of the art results for monocular depth estimation on the KITTI driving dataset, even outperforming supervised methods that have been trained with ground truth depth.

Reconstructing the surface of highly specular objects is a challenging task. The shapes of diffuse and rough specular objects can be captured in an uncontrolled setting using consumer equipment. In contrast, highly specular objects have previously deterred capture in uncontrolled environments and have only been reconstructed using tailor-made hardware. We propose a method to reconstruct such objects in uncontrolled environments using only commodity hardware. As input, our method expects multi-view photographs of the specular object, its silhouettes and an environment map of its surroundings. We compare the reflected colors in the photographs with the ones in the environment to form probability distributions over the surface normals. As the effect of inter-reflections cannot be ignored for highly specular objects, we explicitly model them when forming the probability distributions. We recover the shape of the object in an iterative process where we alternate between estimating normals and updating the shape of the object to better explain these normals. We run experiments on both synthetic and real-world data, that show our method is robust and produces accurate reconstructions with as few as 25 input photographs.