Michael Niemeyer

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29ranked-venue papers
8as first author
21since 2021 · last 2026
0009-0007-3605-873XORCID · corroborated

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

Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 19 · 6 first-author · 12 since 2021Graphics, computer vision, multimedia, augmented reality and games · 18 · 6 first-author · 12 since 2021Systems, architecture and hardware · 1 · 1 since 2021Databases, data management, data science and information retrieval · 1 · 1 first-authorTheory of computation · 1 · 1 first-author
YearPublicationVenuePosition
2026 GALA: Guided Attention with Language Alignment for Open Vocabulary Gaussian Splatting
abstract
3D scene reconstruction and understanding have gained increasing popularity, yet existing methods struggle to capture fine-grained, language-aware 3D representations from$2 D$images. In this paper, we present GALA, a novel framework for open-vocabulary 3D scene understanding with 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS). GALA distills a scenespecific 3D instance feature field via self-supervised contrastive learning. To further extend this to generalized language feature fields, we introduce a core contribution of GALA, a cross-attention module with two learnable codebooks that encode view-independent semantic embeddings. This design not only ensures intra-instance feature similarity but also supports seamless 2D and 3D open-vocabulary queries. It reduces memory consumption by avoiding perGaussian high-dimensional feature learning. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate GALA's remarkable open-vocabulary performance on both$2 D$and 3D.
Elena Alegret, Kunyi Li, Sen Wang 0016, Siyun Liang, Michael Niemeyer, Stefano Gasperini, Nassir Navab, Federico Tombari
3DV5
2026 SuperGSeg: Open-Vocabulary 3D Segmentation with Structured Super-Gaussians
abstract
3D Gaussian Splatting has recently gained traction for its efficient training and real-time rendering. While its vanilla representation is mainly designed for view synthesis, recent works extended it to scene understanding with language features. However, storing additional high-dimensional features per Gaussian for semantic information is memoryintensive, which limits their ability to segment and interpret challenging scenes. To this end, we introduce SuperGSeg, a novel approach that fosters cohesive, context-aware hierarchical scene representation by disentangling segmentation and language field distillation. SuperGSeg first employs neural 3D Gaussians to learn geometry, instance and hierarchical segmentation features from multi-view images with the aid of off-the-shelf$2 D$masks. These features are then leveraged to create a sparse set of Super-Gaussians. Super-Gaussians facilitate the lifting and distillation of$2 D$language features into 3D space. They enable hierarchical scene understanding with high-dimensional language feature rendering at moderate GPU memory costs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SuperGSeg achieves remarkable performance on both open-vocabulary object selection and semantic segmentation tasks. More results at supergseg.github.io.
Siyun Liang, Sen Wang 0016, Kunyi Li, Michael Niemeyer, Stefano Gasperini, Hendrik P. A. Lensch, Nassir Navab, Federico Tombari
3DV4
2026 OracleGS: Grounding Generative Priors for Sparse-View Gaussian Splatting
abstract
Sparse-view novel view synthesis is fundamentally ill-posed due to severe geometric ambiguity. Current methods are caught in a trade-off: regressive models are geometrically faithful but incomplete, whereas generative models can complete scenes but often introduce structural inconsistencies. We propose OracleGS, a novel framework that reconciles generative completeness with regressive fidelity for sparse view Gaussian Splatting. Instead of using generative models to patch incomplete reconstructions, our "propose-and-validate" framework first leverages a pre-trained 3D-aware diffusion model to synthesize novel views to propose a complete scene. We then repurpose a multi-view stereo (MVS) model as a 3D-aware oracle to validate the 3D uncertainties of generated views, using its attention maps to reveal regions where the generated views are well-supported by multi-view evidence versus where they fall into regions of high uncertainty due to occlusion, lack of texture, or direct inconsistency. This uncertainty signal directly guides the optimization of a 3D Gaussian Splatting model via an uncertainty-weighted loss. Our approach conditions the powerful generative prior on multi-view geometric evidence, filtering hallucinatory artifacts while preserving plausible completions in under-constrained regions, outperforming state-of-the-art methods on datasets including Mip-NeRF 360 and NeRF Synthetic.
Atakan Topaloglu, Kunyi Li, Michael Niemeyer, Nassir Navab, A. Murat Tekalp, Federico Tombari
WACV3
2025 RadSplat: Radiance Field-Informed Gaussian Splatting for Robust Real- Time Rendering with 900+ FPS
abstract
Recent advances in view synthesis and real-time rendering have achieved photorealistic quality at impressive ren-dering speeds. While radiance field-based methods achieve state-of-the-art quality in challenging scenarios such as in-the-wild captures and large-scale scenes, they often suf-fer from excessively high compute requirements linked to volumetric rendering. Gaussian Splatting-based methods, on the other hand, rely on rasterization and naturally achieve real-time rendering but suffer from brittle opti-mization heuristics that underperform on more challenging scenes. In this work, we present RadSplat, a lightweight method for robust real-time rendering of complex scenes. Our main contributions are threefold. First, we use radi-ance fields as a prior and supervision signal for optimizing point-based scene representations, leading to improved quality and more robust optimization. Next, we develop a novel pruning technique reducing the overall point count while maintaining high quality, leading to smaller and more compact scene representations with faster inference speeds. Finally, we propose a novel test-time filtering approach that further accelerates rendering and allows to scale to larger, house-sized scenes. We find that our method enables state-of-the-art synthesis of complex captures at 900+ FPS.
Michael Niemeyer, Fabian Manhardt, Marie-Julie Rakotosaona, Michael Oechsle, Daniel Duckworth, Rama Gosula, Keisuke Tateno, John Bates, Dominik Kaeser, Federico Tombari
3DV1
2025 Gaussians-to-Life: Text-Driven Animation of 3D Gaussian Splatting Scenes
abstract
State-of-the-art novel view synthesis methods achieve impressive results for multi-view captures of static 3D scenes. However, the reconstructed scenes still lack “liveliness,“ a key component for creating engaging 3D experiences. Recently, novel video diffusion models generate realistic videos with complex motion and enable animations of 2D images, however they cannot naively be used to animate 3D scenes as they lack multi-view consistency. To breathe life into the static world, we propose Gaussians2Life, a method for animating parts of high-quality 3D scenes in a Gaussian Splatting representation. Our key idea is to leverage powerful video diffusion models as the generative component of our model and to combine these with a robust technique to lift 2D videos into meaningful 3D motion. We find that, in contrast to prior work, this enables realistic animations of complex, pre-existing 3D scenes and further enables the animation of a large variety of object classes, while related work is mostly focused on prior-based character animation, or single 3D objects. Our model enables the creation of consistent, immersive 3D experiences for arbitrary scenes.
Thomas Wimmer 0001, Michael Oechsle, Michael Niemeyer, Federico Tombari
3DV3
2025 LODGE: Level-of-Detail Large-Scale Gaussian Splatting with Efficient Rendering
abstract
In this work, we present a novel level-of-detail (LOD) method for 3D Gaussian Splatting that enables real-time rendering of large-scale scenes on memory-constrained devices. Our approach introduces a hierarchical LOD representation that iteratively selects optimal subsets of Gaussians based on camera distance, thus largely reducing both rendering time and GPU memory usage. We construct each LOD level by applying a depth-aware 3D smoothing filter, followed by importance-based pruning and fine-tuning to maintain visual fidelity. To further reduce memory overhead, we partition the scene into spatial chunks and dynamically load only relevant Gaussians during rendering, employing an opacity-blending mechanism to avoid visual artifacts at chunk boundaries. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on both outdoor (Hierarchical 3DGS) and indoor (Zip-NeRF) datasets, delivering high-quality renderings with reduced latency and memory requirements.
Jonas Kulhanek, Marie-Julie Rakotosaona, Fabian Manhardt, Christina Tsalicoglou, Michael Niemeyer, Torsten Sattler, Songyou Peng, Federico Tombari
NeurIPS5
2025 Learning Neural Exposure Fields for View Synthesis
abstract
Recent advances in neural scene representations have led to unprecedented quality in 3D reconstruction and view synthesis. Despite achieving high-quality results for common benchmarks with curated data, outputs often degrade for data that contain per image variations such as strong exposure changes, present, e.g., in most scenes with indoor and outdoor areas or rooms with windows. In this paper, we introduce Neural Exposure Fields (NExF), a novel technique for robustly reconstructing 3D scenes with high quality and 3D-consistent appearance from challenging real-world captures. In the core, we propose to learn a neural field predicting an optimal exposure value per 3D point, enabling us to optimize exposure along with the neural scene representation. While capture devices such as cameras select optimal exposure per image/pixel, we generalize this concept and perform optimization in 3D instead. This enables accurate view synthesis in high dynamic range scenarios, bypassing the need of post-processing steps or multi-exposure captures. Our contributions include a novel neural representation for exposure prediction, a system for joint optimization of the scene representation and the exposure field via a novel neural conditioning mechanism, and demonstrated superior performance on challenging real-world data. We find that our approach trains faster than prior works and produces state-of-the-art results on several benchmarks improving by over 55% over best-performing baselines.
Michael Niemeyer, Fabian Manhardt, Marie-Julie Rakotosaona, Michael Oechsle, Christina Tsalicoglou, Keisuke Tateno, Jonathan T. Barron, Federico Tombari
NeurIPS1
2025 Learning Efficient Fuse-and-Refine for Feed-Forward 3D Gaussian Splatting
abstract
Recent advances in feed-forward 3D Gaussian Splatting have led to rapid improvements in efficient scene reconstruction from sparse views. However, most existing approaches construct Gaussian primitives directly aligned with the pixels in one or more of the input images. This leads to redundancies in the representation when input views overlap and constrains the position of the primitives to lie along the input rays without full flexibility in 3D space. Moreover, these pixel-aligned approaches do not naturally generalize to dynamic scenes, where effectively leveraging temporal information requires resolving both redundant and newly appearing content across frames. To address these limitations, we introduce a novel Fuse-and-Refine module that enhances existing feed-forward models by merging and refining the primitives in a canonical 3D space. At the core of our method is an efficient hybrid Splat-Voxel representation – from an initial set of pixel-aligned Gaussian primitives, we aggregate local features into a coarse-to-fine voxel hierarchy, and then use a sparse voxel transformer to process these voxel features and generate refined Gaussian primitives. By fusing and refining an arbitrary number of inputs into a consistent set of primitives, our representation effectively reduces redundancy and naturally adapts to temporal frames, enabling history-aware online reconstruction of dynamic scenes. Trained on large-scale static scene datasets, our model learns an effective global strategy to process around 200k primitives within 15ms and significantly enhances reconstruction quality compared to pixel-aligned reconstruction approaches. Without additional training, our model generalizes to video by fusing primitives across time, yielding a more temporally coherent result compared to baseline methods with graceful handling of occluded content. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance in both static and streaming scene reconstructions while running at interactive rates (15 fps with 350ms delay) on a single H100 GPU.
Lucy Chai, Michael Niemeyer, Manuel Lagunas, Stephen Lombardi, Tiancheng Sun
NeurIPS4
2024 NeRFMeshing: Distilling Neural Radiance Fields into Geometrically-Accurate 3D Meshes
abstract
With the introduction of Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs), novel view synthesis has recently made a big leap forward. At the core, NeRF proposes that each 3D point can emit radiance, allowing to conduct view synthesis using differentiable volumetric rendering. While neural radiance fields can accurately represent 3D scenes for computing the image rendering, 3D meshes are still the main scene representation supported by most computer graphics and simulation pipelines, enabling tasks such as real time rendering and physics-based simulations. Obtaining 3D meshes from neural radiance fields still remains an open challenge since NeRFs are optimized for view synthesis, not enforcing an accurate underlying geometry on the radiance field. We thus propose a novel compact and flexible architecture that enables easy 3D surface reconstruction from any NeRF-driven approach. Upon having trained the radiance field, we distill the volumetric 3D representation into a Signed Surface Approximation Network, allowing easy extraction of the 3D mesh and appearance. Our final 3D mesh is physically accurate and can be rendered in real time on an array of devices.
Marie-Julie Rakotosaona, Fabian Manhardt, Diego Martín Arroyo, Michael Niemeyer, Abhijit Kundu, Federico Tombari
3DV4
2024 TextMesh: Generation of Realistic 3D Meshes From Text Prompts
abstract
The ability to generate highly realistic 2D images from mere text prompts has recently made huge progress in terms of speed and quality, thanks to the advent of image diffusion models. Naturally, the question arises if this can be also achieved in the generation of 3D content from such text prompts. To this end, a new line of methods recently emerged trying to harness diffusion models, trained on 2D images, for supervision of 3D model generation using view dependent prompts. While achieving impressive results, these methods, however, have two major drawbacks. First, rather than commonly used 3D meshes, they instead generate neural radiance fields (NeRFs), making them impractical for most real applications. Second, these approaches tend to produce over-saturated models, giving the output a cartoonish looking effect. Therefore, in this work we propose a novel method for generation of highly realistic-looking 3D meshes. To this end, we extend NeRF to employ an SDF backbone, leading to improved 3D mesh extraction. In addition, we propose a novel way to finetune the mesh texture, removing the effect of high saturation and improving the details of the output 3D mesh.
Christina Tsalicoglou, Fabian Manhardt, Alessio Tonioni, Michael Niemeyer, Federico Tombari
3DV4
2024 OpenNeRF: Open Set 3D Neural Scene Segmentation with Pixel-Wise Features and Rendered Novel Views
abstract
Large visual-language models (VLMs), like CLIP, enable open-set image segmentation to segment arbitrary concepts from an image in a zero-shot manner. This goes beyond the traditional closed-set assumption, i.e., where models can only segment classes from a pre-defined training set. More recently, first works on open-set segmentation in 3D scenes have appeared in the literature. These methods are heavily influenced by closed-set 3D convolutional approaches that process point clouds or polygon meshes. However, these 3D scene representations do not align well with the image-based nature of the visual-language models. Indeed, point cloud and 3D meshes typically have a lower resolution than images and the reconstructed 3D scene geometry might not project well to the underlying 2D image sequences used to compute pixel-aligned CLIP features. To address these challenges, we propose OpenNeRF which naturally operates on posed images and directly encodes the VLM features within the NeRF. This is similar in spirit to LERF, however our work shows that using pixel-wise VLM features (instead of global CLIP features) results in an overall less complex architecture without the need for additional DINO regularization. Our OpenNeRF further leverages NeRF’s ability to render novel views and extract open-set VLM features from areas that are not well observed in the initial posed images. For 3D point cloud segmentation on the Replica dataset, OpenNeRF outperforms recent open-vocabulary methods such as LERF and OpenScene by at least +4.9 mIoU.
Francis Engelmann, Fabian Manhardt, Michael Niemeyer, Keisuke Tateno, Federico Tombari
ICLR3
2024 DNS-SLAM: Dense Neural Semantic-Informed SLAM
abstract
In recent years, coordinate-based neural implicit representations have shown promising results for the task of Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM). While achieving impressive performance on small synthetic scenes, these methods often suffer from losing details, especially for complex real-world scenes. In this work, we introduce DNS SLAM, a novel neural RGB-D semantic SLAM approach featuring a hybrid representation. Relying only on 2D semantic priors, we propose the first semantic neural SLAM method that trains class-wise scene representations while providing stable camera tracking at the same time. Our method integrates multi-view geometry constraints with image-based feature extraction to improve appearance details and to output color, occupancy, and semantic class information, enabling many downstream applications. To further enable fast tracking, we introduce a lightweight coarse scene representation which is trained in a self-supervised manner in latent space. Our experimental results achieve state-of-the-art performance on both synthetic data and real-world data tracking while maintaining a commendable operational speed on off-the-shelf hardware. Further, our method outputs class-wise decomposed reconstructions with better texture, capturing appearance and geometric details.
Kunyi Li, Michael Niemeyer, Nassir Navab, Federico Tombari
IROS2
2024 UniSDF: Unifying Neural Representations for High-Fidelity 3D Reconstruction of Complex Scenes with Reflections
abstract
Neural 3D scene representations have shown great potential for 3D reconstruction from 2D images. However, reconstructing real-world captures of complex scenes still remains a challenge. Existing generic 3D reconstruction methods often struggle to represent fine geometric details and do not adequately model reflective surfaces of large-scale scenes. Techniques that explicitly focus on reflective surfaces can model complex and detailed reflections by exploiting better reflection parameterizations. However, we observe that these methods are often not robust in real scenarios where non-reflective as well as reflective components are present. In this work, we propose UniSDF, a general purpose 3D reconstruction method that can reconstruct large complex scenes with reflections. We investigate both camera view as well as reflected view-based color parameterization techniques and find that explicitly blending these representations in 3D space enables reconstruction of surfaces that are more geometrically accurate, especially for reflective surfaces. We further combine this representation with a multi-resolution grid backbone that is trained in a coarse-to-fine manner, enabling faster reconstructions than prior methods. Extensive experiments on object-level datasets DTU, Shiny Blender as well as unbounded datasets Mip-NeRF 360 and Ref-NeRF real demonstrate that our method is able to robustly reconstruct complex large-scale scenes with fine details and reflective surfaces, leading to the best overall performance. Project page: https://fangjinhuawang.github.io/UniSDF.
Fangjinhua Wang, Marie-Julie Rakotosaona, Michael Niemeyer, Richard Szeliski, Marc Pollefeys, Federico Tombari
NeurIPS3
2024 Recent Trends in 3D Reconstruction of General Non-Rigid Scenes
abstract
Abstract Reconstructing models of the real world, including 3D geometry, appearance, and motion of real scenes, is essential for computer graphics and computer vision. It enables the synthesizing of photorealistic novel views, useful for the movie industry and AR/VR applications. It also facilitates the content creation necessary in computer games and AR/VR by avoiding laborious manual design processes. Further, such models are fundamental for intelligent computing systems that need to interpret real‐world scenes and actions to act and interact safely with the human world. Notably, the world surrounding us is dynamic, and reconstructing models of dynamic, non‐rigidly moving scenes is a severely underconstrained and challenging problem. This state‐of‐the‐art report (STAR) offers the reader a comprehensive summary of state‐of‐the‐art techniques with monocular and multi‐view inputs such as data from RGB and RGB‐D sensors, among others, conveying an understanding of different approaches, their potential applications, and promising further research directions. The report covers 3D reconstruction of general non‐rigid scenes and further addresses the techniques for scene decomposition, editing and controlling, and generalizable and generative modeling. More specifically, we first review the common and fundamental concepts necessary to understand and navigate the field and then discuss the state‐of‐the‐art techniques by reviewing recent approaches that use traditional and machine‐learning‐based neural representations, including a discussion on the newly enabled applications. The STAR is concluded with a discussion of the remaining limitations and open challenges.
Raza Yunus, Jan Eric Lenssen, Michael Niemeyer, Yiyi Liao, Christian Rupprecht 0001, Christian Theobalt, Gerard Pons-Moll, Jia-Bin Huang 0001, Vladislav Golyanik, Eddy Ilg
Comput. Graph. Forum3
2023 DreamBooth3D: Subject-Driven Text-to-3D Generation
abstract
We present DreamBooth3D, an approach to personalize text-to-3D generative models from as few as 3-6 casually captured images of a subject. Our approach combines recent advances in personalizing text-to-image models (DreamBooth) with text-to-3D generation (DreamFusion). We find that naïvely combining these methods fails to yield satisfactory subject-specific 3D assets due to personalized text-to-image models overfitting to the input viewpoints of the subject. We overcome this through a 3-stage optimization strategy where we jointly leverage the 3D consistency of neural radiance fields together with the personalization capability of text-to-image models. Our method can produce high-quality, subject-specific 3D assets with text-driven modifications such as novel poses, colors and attributes that are not seen in any of the input images of the subject. More results are available at our project page: https://dreambooth3d.github.io
Amit Raj, Srinivas Kaza, Ben Poole, Michael Niemeyer, Nataniel Ruiz, Ben Mildenhall, Shiran Zada, Kfir Aberman, Michael Rubinstein, Jonathan T. Barron, Yuanzhen Li, Varun Jampani
ICCV4
2022 RegNeRF: Regularizing Neural Radiance Fields for View Synthesis from Sparse Inputs
abstract
Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) have emerged as a powerful representation for the task of novel view synthesis due to their simplicity and state-of-the-art performance. Though NeRF can produce photorealistic renderings of unseen viewpoints when many input views are available, its performance drops significantly when this number is reduced. We observe that the majority of artifacts in sparse input scenarios are caused by errors in the estimated scene geometry, and by divergent behavior at the start of training. We address this by regularizing the geometry and appearance of patches rendered from unobserved viewpoints, and annealing the ray sampling space during training. We additionally use a normalizing flow model to regularize the color of unobserved viewpoints. Our model outperforms not only other methods that optimize over a single scene, but in many cases also conditional models that are extensively pre-trained on large multi-view datasets.
Michael Niemeyer, Jonathan T. Barron, Ben Mildenhall, Mehdi S. M. Sajjadi, Andreas Geiger 0001, Noha Radwan
CVPR1
2022 VoxGRAF: Fast 3D-Aware Image Synthesis with Sparse Voxel Grids
abstract
State-of-the-art 3D-aware generative models rely on coordinate-based MLPs to parameterize 3D radiance fields. While demonstrating impressive results, querying an MLP for every sample along each ray leads to slow rendering.Therefore, existing approaches often render low-resolution feature maps and process them with an upsampling network to obtain the final image. Albeit efficient, neural rendering often entangles viewpoint and content such that changing the camera pose results in unwanted changes of geometry or appearance.Motivated by recent results in voxel-based novel view synthesis, we investigate the utility of sparse voxel grid representations for fast and 3D-consistent generative modeling in this paper.Our results demonstrate that monolithic MLPs can indeed be replaced by 3D convolutions when combining sparse voxel grids with progressive growing, free space pruning and appropriate regularization.To obtain a compact representation of the scene and allow for scaling to higher voxel resolutions, our model disentangles the foreground object (modeled in 3D) from the background (modeled in 2D).In contrast to existing approaches, our method requires only a single forward pass to generate a full 3D scene. It hence allows for efficient rendering from arbitrary viewpoints while yielding 3D consistent results with high visual fidelity. Code and models are available at https://github.com/autonomousvision/voxgraf.
Katja Schwarz, Axel Sauer, Michael Niemeyer, Yiyi Liao, Andreas Geiger 0001
NeurIPS3
2022 MonoSDF: Exploring Monocular Geometric Cues for Neural Implicit Surface Reconstruction
abstract
In recent years, neural implicit surface reconstruction methods have become popular for multi-view 3D reconstruction. In contrast to traditional multi-view stereo methods, these approaches tend to produce smoother and more complete reconstructions due to the inductive smoothness bias of neural networks. State-of-the-art neural implicit methods allow for high-quality reconstructions of simple scenes from many input views. Yet, their performance drops significantly for larger and more complex scenes and scenes captured from sparse viewpoints. This is caused primarily by the inherent ambiguity in the RGB reconstruction loss that does not provide enough constraints, in particular in less-observed and textureless areas. Motivated by recent advances in the area of monocular geometry prediction, we systematically explore the utility these cues provide for improving neural implicit surface reconstruction. We demonstrate that depth and normal cues, predicted by general-purpose monocular estimators, significantly improve reconstruction quality and optimization time. Further, we analyse and investigate multiple design choices for representing neural implicit surfaces, ranging from monolithic MLP models over single-grid to multi-resolution grid representations. We observe that geometric monocular priors improve performance both for small-scale single-object as well as large-scale multi-object scenes, independent of the choice of representation.
Zehao Yu 0002, Songyou Peng, Michael Niemeyer, Torsten Sattler, Andreas Geiger 0001
NeurIPS3
2021 CAMPARI: Camera-Aware Decomposed Generative Neural Radiance Fields
abstract
Tremendous progress in deep generative models has led to photorealistic image synthesis. While achieving compelling results, most approaches operate in the two-dimensional image domain, ignoring the three-dimensional nature of our world. Several recent works therefore propose generative models which are 3D-aware, i.e., scenes are modeled in 3D and then rendered differentiably to the image plane. While this leads to impressive 3D consistency, the camera needs to be modelled as well and we show in this work that these methods are sensitive to the choice of prior camera distributions. Current approaches assume fixed intrinsics and predefined priors over camera pose ranges, and parameter tuning is typically required for real-world data. If the data distribution is not matched, results degrade significantly. Our key hypothesis is that learning a camera generator jointly with the image generator leads to a more principled approach to 3D-aware image synthesis. Further, we propose to decompose the scene into a background and foreground model, leading to more efficient and disentangled scene representations. While training from raw, unposed image collections, we learn a 3D- and camera-aware generative model which faithfully recovers not only the image but also the camera data distribution. At test time, our model generates images with explicit control over the camera as well as the shape and appearance of the scene.
Michael Niemeyer, Andreas Geiger 0001
3DV1
2021 GIRAFFE: Representing Scenes As Compositional Generative Neural Feature Fields
abstract
Deep generative models allow for photorealistic image synthesis at high resolutions. But for many applications, this is not enough: content creation also needs to be controllable. While several recent works investigate how to disentangle underlying factors of variation in the data, most of them operate in 2D and hence ignore that our world is three-dimensional. Further, only few works consider the compositional nature of scenes. Our key hypothesis is that incorporating a compositional 3D scene representation into the generative model leads to more controllable image synthesis. Representing scenes as compositional generative neural feature fields allows us to disentangle one or multiple objects from the background as well as individual objects’ shapes and appearances while learning from unstructured and unposed image collections without any additional supervision. Combining this scene representation with a neural rendering pipeline yields a fast and realistic image synthesis model. As evidenced by our experiments, our model is able to disentangle individual objects and allows for translating and rotating them in the scene as well as changing the camera pose.
Michael Niemeyer, Andreas Geiger 0001
CVPR1
2021 Shape As Points: A Differentiable Poisson Solver
abstract
In recent years, neural implicit representations gained popularity in 3D reconstruction due to their expressiveness and flexibility. However, the implicit nature of neural implicit representations results in slow inference times and requires careful initialization. In this paper, we revisit the classic yet ubiquitous point cloud representation and introduce a differentiable point-to-mesh layer using a differentiable formulation of Poisson Surface Reconstruction (PSR) which allows for a GPU-accelerated fast solution of the indicator function given an oriented point cloud. The differentiable PSR layer allows us to efficiently and differentiably bridge the explicit 3D point representation with the 3D mesh via the implicit indicator field, enabling end-to-end optimization of surface reconstruction metrics such as Chamfer distance. This duality between points and meshes hence allows us to represent shapes as oriented point clouds, which are explicit, lightweight and expressive. Compared to neural implicit representations, our Shape-As-Points (SAP) model is more interpretable, lightweight, and accelerates inference time by one order of magnitude. Compared to other explicit representations such as points, patches, and meshes, SAP produces topology-agnostic, watertight manifold surfaces. We demonstrate the effectiveness of SAP on the task of surface reconstruction from unoriented point clouds and learning-based reconstruction.
Songyou Peng, Chiyu Max Jiang, Yiyi Liao, Michael Niemeyer, Marc Pollefeys, Andreas Geiger 0001
NeurIPS4
2020 Learning Implicit Surface Light Fields
abstract
Implicit representations of 3D objects have recently achieved impressive results on learning-based 3D reconstruction tasks. While existing works use simple texture models to represent object appearance, photo-realistic image synthesis requires reasoning about the complex interplay of light, geometry and surface properties. In this work, we propose a novel implicit representation for capturing the visual appearance of an object in terms of its surface light field. In contrast to existing representations, our implicit model represents surface light fields in a continuous fashion and independent of the geometry. Moreover, we condition the surface light field with respect to the location and color of a small light source. Compared to traditional surface light field models, this allows us to manipulate the light source and relight the object using environment maps. We further demonstrate the capabilities of our model to predict the visual appearance of an unseen object from a single real RGB image and corresponding 3D shape information. As evidenced by our experiments, our model is able to infer rich visual appearance including shadows and specular reflections. Finally, we show that the proposed representation can be embedded into a variational auto-encoder for generating novel appearances that conform to the specified illumination conditions.
Michael Oechsle, Michael Niemeyer, Christian Reiser, Lars M. Mescheder, Thilo Strauss, Andreas Geiger 0001
3DV2
2020 Differentiable Volumetric Rendering: Learning Implicit 3D Representations Without 3D Supervision
abstract
Learning-based 3D reconstruction methods have shown impressive results. However, most methods require 3D supervision which is often hard to obtain for real-world datasets. Recently, several works have proposed differentiable rendering techniques to train reconstruction models from RGB images. Unfortunately, these approaches are currently restricted to voxel- and mesh-based representations, suffering from discretization or low resolution. In this work, we propose a differentiable rendering formulation for implicit shape and texture representations. Implicit representations have recently gained popularity as they represent shape and texture continuously. Our key insight is that depth gradients can be derived analytically using the concept of implicit differentiation. This allows us to learn implicit shape and texture representations directly from RGB images. We experimentally show that our single-view reconstructions rival those learned with full 3D supervision. Moreover, we find that our method can be used for multi-view 3D reconstruction, directly resulting in watertight meshes.
Michael Niemeyer, Lars M. Mescheder, Michael Oechsle, Andreas Geiger 0001
CVPR1
2020 Convolutional Occupancy Networks
Songyou Peng, Michael Niemeyer, Lars M. Mescheder, Marc Pollefeys, Andreas Geiger 0001
ECCV (3)2
2020 GRAF: Generative Radiance Fields for 3D-Aware Image Synthesis
abstract
While 2D generative adversarial networks have enabled high-resolution image synthesis, they largely lack an understanding of the 3D world and the image formation process. Thus, they do not provide precise control over camera viewpoint or object pose. To address this problem, several recent approaches leverage intermediate voxel-based representations in combination with differentiable rendering. However, existing methods either produce low image resolution or fall short in disentangling camera and scene properties, e.g., the object identity may vary with the viewpoint. In this paper, we propose a generative model for radiance fields which have recently proven successful for novel view synthesis of a single scene. In contrast to voxel-based representations, radiance fields are not confined to a coarse discretization of the 3D space, yet allow for disentangling camera and scene properties while degrading gracefully in the presence of reconstruction ambiguity. By introducing a multi-scale patch-based discriminator, we demonstrate synthesis of high-resolution images while training our model from unposed 2D images alone. We systematically analyze our approach on several challenging synthetic and real-world datasets. Our experiments reveal that radiance fields are a powerful representation for generative image synthesis, leading to 3D consistent models that render with high fidelity.
Katja Schwarz, Yiyi Liao, Michael Niemeyer, Andreas Geiger 0001
NeurIPS3
2019 Occupancy Networks: Learning 3D Reconstruction in Function Space
abstract
With the advent of deep neural networks, learning-based approaches for 3D reconstruction have gained popularity. However, unlike for images, in 3D there is no canonical representation which is both computationally and memory efficient yet allows for representing high-resolution geometry of arbitrary topology. Many of the state-of-the-art learning-based 3D reconstruction approaches can hence only represent very coarse 3D geometry or are limited to a restricted domain. In this paper, we propose Occupancy Networks, a new representation for learning-based 3D reconstruction methods. Occupancy networks implicitly represent the 3D surface as the continuous decision boundary of a deep neural network classifier. In contrast to existing approaches, our representation encodes a description of the 3D output at infinite resolution without excessive memory footprint. We validate that our representation can efficiently encode 3D structure and can be inferred from various kinds of input. Our experiments demonstrate competitive results, both qualitatively and quantitatively, for the challenging tasks of 3D reconstruction from single images, noisy point clouds and coarse discrete voxel grids. We believe that occupancy networks will become a useful tool in a wide variety of learning-based 3D tasks.
Lars M. Mescheder, Michael Oechsle, Michael Niemeyer, Sebastian Nowozin, Andreas Geiger 0001
CVPR3
2019 Occupancy Flow: 4D Reconstruction by Learning Particle Dynamics
abstract
Deep learning based 3D reconstruction techniques have recently achieved impressive results. However, while state-of-the-art methods are able to output complex 3D geometry, it is not clear how to extend these results to time-varying topologies. Approaches treating each time step individually lack continuity and exhibit slow inference, while traditional 4D reconstruction methods often utilize a template model or discretize the 4D space at fixed resolution. In this work, we present Occupancy Flow, a novel spatio-temporal representation of time-varying 3D geometry with implicit correspondences. Towards this goal, we learn a temporally and spatially continuous vector field which assigns a motion vector to every point in space and time. In order to perform dense 4D reconstruction from images or sparse point clouds, we combine our method with a continuous 3D representation. Implicitly, our model yields correspondences over time, thus enabling fast inference while providing a sound physical description of the temporal dynamics. We show that our method can be used for interpolation and reconstruction tasks, and demonstrate the accuracy of the learned correspondences. We believe that Occupancy Flow is a promising new 4D representation which will be useful for a variety of spatio-temporal reconstruction tasks.
Michael Niemeyer, Lars M. Mescheder, Michael Oechsle, Andreas Geiger 0001
ICCV1
2019 Texture Fields: Learning Texture Representations in Function Space
abstract
In recent years, substantial progress has been achieved in learning-based reconstruction of 3D objects. At the same time, generative models were proposed that can generate highly realistic images. However, despite this success in these closely related tasks, texture reconstruction of 3D objects has received little attention from the research community and state-of-the-art methods are either limited to comparably low resolution or constrained experimental setups. A major reason for these limitations is that common representations of texture are inefficient or hard to interface for modern deep learning techniques. In this paper, we propose Texture Fields, a novel texture representation which is based on regressing a continuous 3D function parameterized with a neural network. Our approach circumvents limiting factors like shape discretization and parameterization, as the proposed texture representation is independent of the shape representation of the 3D object. We show that Texture Fields are able to represent high frequency texture and naturally blend with modern deep learning techniques. Experimentally, we find that Texture Fields compare favorably to state-of-the-art methods for conditional texture reconstruction of 3D objects and enable learning of probabilistic generative models for texturing unseen 3D models. We believe that Texture Fields will become an important building block for the next generation of generative 3D models.
Michael Oechsle, Lars M. Mescheder, Michael Niemeyer, Thilo Strauss, Andreas Geiger 0001
ICCV3
2018 Automatic Semantic Labelling of Images by Their Content Using Non-Parametric Bayesian Machine Learning and Image Search Using Synthetically Generated Image Collages
abstract
In this paper, we describe a novel algorithm for fully unsupervised discovery of meaningful object categories in images, and their semantic labelling. Our approach works bottom-up, starting with superpixel segmentation and the representation of images as bags of quantized superpixel based visual words. Inference over these is achieved automatically using hierarchical non-parametric Bayesian learning. This visual learning process is built upon by the association of class labels using two complementary methods. The first of these is primarily suited for conventional object categories, whereas the second one, which employs a reverse image search using synthetically generated superpixel collages, is used for amorphous image content (such as 'grass', 'sky', etc.). The proposed algorithm does not rely on any dataset specific parameter tuning and (by exploiting auxiliary Google retrievable "big data"' in the wild) can be applied on any kind of corpora (no labelling, weak labelling, or fully annotated images).
Michael Niemeyer, Ognjen Arandjelovic
DSAA1