Rendering and inverse rendering are pivotal tasks in both computer vision and graphics. The rendering equation is the core of the two tasks, as an ideal conditional distribution transfer function from intrinsic properties to RGB images. Despite achieving promising results of existing rendering methods, they merely approximate the ideal estimation for a specific scene and come with a high computational cost. Additionally, the inverse conditional distribution transfer is intractable due to the inherent ambiguity. To address these challenges, we propose a data-driven method that jointly models rendering and inverse rendering as two conditional generation tasks within a single diffusion framework. Inspired by UniDiffuser, we utilize two distinct time schedules to model both tasks, and with a tailored dual streaming module, we achieve cross-conditioning of two pre-trained diffusion models. This unified approach, named Uni-Renderer, allows the two processes to facilitate each other through a cycle-consistent constrain, mitigating ambiguity by enforcing consistency between intrinsic properties and rendered images. Combined with a meticulously prepared dataset, our method effectively decomposition of intrinsic properties and demonstrating a strong capability to recognize changes during rendering.

We propose PRM, a novel photometric stereo based large reconstruction model to reconstruct high-quality meshes with fine-grained local details. Unlike previous large reconstruction models that prepare images under fixed and simple lighting as both input and supervision, PRM renders photometric stereo images by varying materials and lighting for the purposes, which not only improves the precise local details by providing rich photometric cues but also increases the model robustness to variations in the appearance of input images. To offer enhanced flexibility of images rendering, we incorporate a real-time physically-based rendering (PBR) method and mesh rasterization for online images rendering. Moreover, in employing an explicit mesh as our 3D representation, PRM ensures the application of differentiable PBR, which supports the utilization of multiple photometric supervisions and better models the specular color for high-quality geometry optimization. Our PRM leverages photometric stereo images to achieve high-quality reconstructions with fine-grained local details, even amidst sophisticated image appearances. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PRM significantly outperforms other models.

In this work, we introduce FlexGen, a flexible framework designed to generate controllable and consistent multi-view images, conditioned on a single-view image, or a text prompt, or both. FlexGen tackles the challenges of controllable multi-view synthesis through additional conditioning on 3D-aware text annotations. We utilize the strong reasoning capabilities of GPT-4V to generate 3D-aware text annotations. By analyzing four orthogonal views of an object arranged as tiled multi-view images, GPT-4V can produce text annotations that include 3D-aware information with spatial relationship. By integrating the control signal with proposed adaptive dual-control module, our model can generate multi-view images that correspond to the specified text. FlexGen supports multiple controllable capabilities, allowing users to modify text prompts to generate reasonable and corresponding unseen parts. Additionally, users can influence attributes such as appearance and material properties, including metallic and roughness. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach offers enhanced multiple controllability, marking a significant advancement over existing multi-view diffusion models. This work has substantial implications for fields requiring rapid and flexible 3D content creation, including game development, animation, and virtual reality. Project page: https://xxu068.github.io/flexgen.github.io/.

Estimating physical properties for visual data is a crucial task in computer vision, graphics, and robotics, underpinning applications such as augmented reality, physical simulation, and robotic grasping. However, this area remains under-explored due to the inherent ambiguities in physical property estimation. To address these challenges, we introduce GaussianProperty, a training-free framework that assigns physical properties of materials to 3D Gaussians. Specifically, we integrate the segmentation capability of SAM with the recognition capability of GPT-4V(ision) to formulate a global-local physical property reasoning module for 2D images. Then we project the physical properties from multi-view 2D images to 3D Gaussians using a voting strategy. We demonstrate that 3D Gaussians with physical property annotations enable applications in physics-based dynamic simulation and robotic grasping. For physics-based dynamic simulation, we leverage the Material Point Method (MPM) for realistic dynamic simulation. For robot grasping, we develop a grasping force prediction strategy that estimates a safe force range required for object grasping based on the estimated physical properties. Extensive experiments on material segmentation, physics-based dynamic simulation, and robotic grasping validate the effectiveness of our proposed method, highlighting its crucial role in understanding physical properties from visual data. Online demo, code, more cases and annotated datasets are available on \href{https://Gaussian-Property.github.io}{this https URL}.

In real-world underwater scene reconstruction, there are two inherent challenges: Firstly, failing to account for the impact of water on imaging often results in blurry artifacts in the reconstruction; Secondly, data in real-world scenarios is typically captured from sparse viewpoints, which leads to an under-constrained problem for scene reconstruction. Existing NeRF-based reconstruction methods are limited by high training costs, slow inference speeds, and their failure to account for underwater optical conditions, as well as the sparsity of input data. In contrast, 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) provides a more efficient alternative for reconstructing scenes in the wild. However, it still faces inherent challenges in underwater scene. To this end, we introduce PhD-GS, which integrates physics-based constraints and depth information into the 3DGS framework, thereby enhancing the optimization process for underwater scenes. Specifically, our physics-based constraints incorporate underwater imaging formation into the splatting process, while the depth priors provide geometric regularization to guide the optimization of 3DGS. We validate the proposed method on four real underwater scenes from the SeaThru-NeRF dataset with sparse input views. Experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art results, with significant improvements, especially compared to existing underwater reconstruction methods.

We introduce X-Ray, a novel 3D sequential representation inspired by the penetrability of x-ray scans. X-Ray transforms a 3D object into a series of surface frames at different layers, making it suitable for generating 3D models from images. Our method utilizes ray casting from the camera center to capture geometric and textured details, including depth, normal, and color, across all intersected surfaces. This process efficiently condenses the whole 3D object into a multi-frame video format, motivating the utilize of a network architecture similar to those in video diffusion models. This design ensures an efficient 3D representation by focusing solely on surface information. Also, we propose a two-stage pipeline to generate 3D objects from X-Ray Diffusion Model and Upsampler. We demonstrate the practicality and adaptability of our X-Ray representation by synthesizing the complete visible and hidden surfaces of a 3D object from a single input image. Experimental results reveal the state-of-the-art superiority of our representation in enhancing the accuracy of 3D generation, paving the way for new 3D representation research and practical applications. Our project page is in \url{https://tau-yihouxiang.github.io/projects/X-Ray/X-Ray.html}.

Task-incremental person re-identification aims to train a model with consecutively available cross-camera annotated data in the current task and a small number of saved data in preceding tasks, which may lead to individual privacy disclosure due to data storage and annotation. In this work, we investigate a more realistic online privacy preservation scenario for camera-incremental person re-identification, where data storage in preceding cameras is not allowed, while data in the current camera are intra-camera annotated online by a pedestrian tracking algorithm without cross-camera annotation. In this setup, the missing data of previous cameras not only results in catastrophic forgetting as task-incremental learning, but also makes the cross-camera association infeasible, which further leads to the incapability of person matching across cameras due to the camera-wise domain gap. To solve these problems, we propose an Online Privacy Preservation (OPP) framework based on the generated exemplars of previous cameras by DeepInversion, where generated exemplars used as supplements to alleviate forgetting and enable cross-camera association to be feasible for camera-wise domain shift mitigation, meanwhile further improving the cross-camera matching capability. Specifically, we propose to mine underlying cross-camera positive pairs between samples of the current camera and exemplars of previous cameras by similarity cues. Furthermore, we introduce a mixup learning strategy to handle the domain gap with mixed samples and labels. Finally, intra-camera incremental learning and cross-camera incremental learning are aggregated into the OPP framework. Extensive experiments on Re-ID benchmarks validate the superiority of the OPP framework as compared with state-of-the-art methods.

Neural implicit surface learning has shown significant progress in multi-view 3D reconstruction, where an object is represented by multilayer perceptrons that provide continuous implicit surface representation and view-dependent radiance. However, current methods often fail to accurately reconstruct reflective surfaces, leading to severe ambiguity. To overcome this issue, we propose Ref-NeuS, which aims to reduce ambiguity by attenuating the effect of reflective surfaces. Specifically, we utilize an anomaly detector to estimate an explicit reflection score with the guidance of multiview context to localize reflective surfaces. Afterward, we design a reflection-aware photometric loss that adaptively reduces ambiguity by modeling rendered color as a Gaussian distribution, with the reflection score representing the variance. We show that together with a reflection direction-dependent radiance, our model achieves high-quality surface reconstruction on reflective surfaces and outperforms the state-of-the-arts by a large margin. Besides, our model is also comparable on general surfaces.

Semi-supervised person re-identification (Re-ID) is an important approach for alleviating annotation costs when learning to match person images across camera views. Most existing works assume that training data contains abundant identities crossing camera views. However, this assumption is not true in many real-world applications, especially when images are captured in nonadjacent scenes for Re-ID in wider areas, where the identities rarely cross camera views. In this work, we operate semi-supervised Re-ID under a relaxed assumption of identities rarely crossing camera views, which is still largely ignored in existing methods. Since the identities rarely cross camera views, the underlying sample relations across camera views become much more uncertain, and deteriorate the noise accumulation problem in many advanced Re-ID methods that apply pseudo labeling for associating visually similar samples. To quantify such uncertainty, we parameterize the probabilistic relations between samples in a relation discovery objective for pseudo label training. Then, we introduce reward quantified by identification performance on a few labeled data to guide learning dynamic relations between samples for reducing uncertainty. Our strategy is called the Rewarded Relation Discovery (R$^{2}$D), of which the rewarded learning paradigm is under-explored in existing pseudo labeling methods. To further reduce the uncertainty in sample relations, we perform multiple relation discovery objectives learning to discover probabilistic relations based on different prior knowledge of intra-camera affinity and cross-camera style variation, and fuse the complementary knowledge of different probabilistic relations by similarity distillation. To better evaluate semi-supervised Re-ID on identities rarely crossing camera views, we collect a new real-world dataset called REID-CBD, and perform simulation on benchmark datasets. Experiment results show that our method outperforms a wide range of semi-supervised and unsupervised learning methods.

In real world, training data for person re-identification (Re-ID) is collected discretely with spatial and temporal variations, which requires a model to incrementally learn new knowledge without forgetting old knowledge. This problem is called lifelong person re-identification (LReID). Variations of illumination and background for images of each task exhibit task-specific image style and lead to task-wise domain gap. In addition to missing data from the old tasks, task-wise domain gap is a key factor for catastrophic forgetting in LReID, which is ignored in existing approaches for LReID. The model tends to learn task-specific knowledge with task-wise domain gap, which results in stability and plasticity dilemma. To overcome this problem, we cast LReID as a domain adaptation problem and propose a pseudo task knowledge preservation framework to alleviate the domain gap. Our framework is based on a pseudo task transformation module which maps the features of the new task into the feature space of the old tasks to complement the limited saved exemplars of the old tasks. With extra transformed features in the task-specific feature space, we propose a task-specific domain consistency loss to implicitly alleviate the task-wise domain gap for learning task-shared knowledge instead of task-specific one. Furthermore, to guide knowledge preservation with the feature distributions of the old tasks, we propose to preserve knowledge on extra pseudo tasks which jointly distills knowledge and discriminates identity, in order to achieve a better trade-off between stability and plasticity for lifelong learning with task-wise domain gap. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method as compared with the state-of-the-art lifelong learning and LReID methods.

To learn camera-view invariant features for person Re-IDentification (Re-ID), the cross-camera image pairs of each person play an important role. However, such cross-view training samples could be unavailable under the ISo-lated Camera Supervised (ISCS) setting, e.g., a surveillance system deployed across distant scenes. To handle this challenging problem, a new pipeline is introduced by synthesizing the cross-camera samples in the feature space for model training. Specifically, the feature encoder and generator are end-to-end optimized under a novel method, Camera-Conditioned Stable Feature Generation (CCSFG). Its joint learning procedure raises concern on the stability of generative model training. Therefore, a new feature generator, σ-Regularized Conditional Variational Autoencoder (σ-Reg. CVAE), is proposed with theoretical and experimental analysis on its robustness. Extensive experiments on two ISCS person Re-ID datasets demonstrate the superiority of our CCSFG to the competitors.11https://github.com/ftd-Wuchao/CCSFG

Cross-modal retrieval between videos and texts has gained increasing interest because of the rapid emergence of videos on the web. Generally, a video contains rich instance and event information and the query text only describes a part of the information. Thus, a video can have multiple different text descriptions and queries. We call it the Video-Text Correspondence Ambiguity problem. Current techniques mostly concentrate on mining local or multi-level alignment between contents of video and text (e.g., object to entity and action to verb). It is difficult for these methods to alleviate video-text correspondence ambiguity by describing a video using only one feature, which is required to be matched with multiple different text features at the same time. To address this problem, we propose a Text-Adaptive Multiple Visual Prototype Matching Model. It automatically captures multiple prototypes to describe a video by adaptive aggregation on video token features. Given a query text, the similarity is determined by the most similar prototype to find correspondence in the video, which is called text-adaptive matching. To learn diverse prototypes for representing the rich information in videos, we propose a variance loss to encourage different prototypes to attend to different contents of the video. Our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on four public video retrieval datasets.

Person re-identification (Re-ID) aims to match person images across non-overlapping camera views. The majority of Re-ID methods focus on small-scale surveillance systems in which each pedestrian is captured in different camera views of adjacent scenes. However, in large-scale surveillance systems that cover larger areas, it is required to track a pedestrian of interest across distant scenes (e.g., a criminal suspect escapes from one city to another). Since most pedestrians appear in limited local areas, it is difficult to collect training data with cross-camera pairs of the same person. In this work, we study intra-camera supervised person re-identification across distant scenes (ICS-DS Re-ID), which uses cross-camera unpaired data with intra-camera identity labels for training. It is challenging as cross-camera paired data plays a crucial role for learning camera-invariant features in most existing Re-ID methods. To learn camera-invariant representation from cross-camera unpaired training data, we propose a cross-camera feature prediction method to mine cross-camera self supervision information from camera-specific feature distribution by transforming fake cross-camera positive feature pairs and minimize the distances of the fake pairs. Furthermore, we automatically localize and extract local-level feature by a transformer. Joint learning of global-level and local-level features forms a global-local cross-camera feature prediction scheme for mining fine-grained cross-camera self supervision information. Finally, cross-camera self supervision and intra-camera supervision are aggregated in a framework. The experiments are conducted in the ICS-DS setting on Market-SCT, Duke-SCT and MSMT17-SCT datasets. The evaluation results demonstrate the superiority of our method, which gains significant improvements of 15.4 Rank-1 and 22.3 mAP on Market-SCT as compared to the second best method. Our code is available at https://github.com/g3956/CCFP.