EDBT 2026 Demo / reviewers in the wild / expert
Forrester Cole
dblp:00/2439
· DBLP profile ↗
37ranked-venue papers
8as first author
21since 2021 · last 2025
0009-0003-6166-4564ORCID · corroborated
Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several
Graphics, computer vision, multimedia, augmented reality and games · 31 · 8 first-author · 16 since 2021Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 25 · 3 first-author · 18 since 2021Human-computer interaction and ubiquitous computing · 2 · 1 first-author · 1 since 2021
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | Motion Prompting: Controlling Video Generation with Motion TrajectoriesabstractMotion control is crucial for generating expressive and compelling video content; however, most existing video generation models rely mainly on text prompts for control, which struggle to capture the nuances of dynamic actions and temporal compositions. To this end, we train a video generation model conditioned on spatiotemporally sparse or dense motion trajectories. In contrast to prior motion conditioning work, this flexible representation can encode any number of trajectories, object-specific or global scene motion, and temporally sparse motion; due to its flexibility we refer to this conditioning as motion prompts. While users may directly specify sparse trajectories, we also show how to translate high-level user requests into detailed, semi-dense motion prompts, a process we term motion prompt expansion. We demonstrate the versatility of our approach through various applications, including camera and object motion control, "interacting" with an image, motion transfer, and image editing. Our results showcase emergent behaviors, such as realistic physics, suggesting the potential of motion prompts for probing video models and interacting with future generative world models. Finally, we evaluate quantitatively, conduct a human study, and demonstrate strong performance. Daniel Geng, Charles Herrmann, Junhwa Hur, Forrester Cole, Serena Zhang, Tobias Pfaff, Tatiana Lopez-Guevara, Yusuf Aytar, Michael Rubinstein, Chen Sun 0002, Oliver Wang, Andrew Owens, Deqing Sun |
CVPR | 4 |
| 2025 | Generative Omnimatte: Learning to Decompose Video into LayersabstractGiven a video and a set of input object masks, an omnimatte method aims to decompose the video into semantically meaningful layers containing individual objects along with their associated effects, such as shadows and reflections. Existing omnimatte methods assume a static background or accurate pose and depth estimation and produce poor decompositions when these assumptions are violated. Furthermore, due to the lack of generative prior on natural videos, existing methods cannot complete dynamic occluded regions. We present a novel generative layered video decomposition framework to address the omnimatte problem. Our method does not assume a stationary scene or require camera pose or depth information and produces clean, complete layers, including convincing completions of occluded dynamic regions. Our core idea is to train a video diffusion model to identify and remove scene effects caused by a specific object. We show that this model can be finetuned from an existing video inpainting model with a small, carefully curated dataset, and demonstrate high-quality decompositions and editing results for a wide range of casually captured videos containing soft shadows, glossy reflections, splashing water, and more. Yao-Chih Lee, Erika Lu, Sarah Rumbley, Michal Geyer, Jia-Bin Huang 0001, Tali Dekel, Forrester Cole |
CVPR | 7 |
| 2025 | MegaSaM: Accurate, Fast and Robust Structure and Motion from Casual Dynamic VideosabstractWe present a system that allows for accurate, fast, and robust estimation of camera parameters and depth maps from casual monocular videos of dynamic scenes. Most conventional structure from motion and monocular SLAM techniques assume input videos that feature predominantly static scenes with large amounts of parallax. Such methods tend to produce erroneous estimates in the absence of these conditions. Recent neural network-based approaches attempt to overcome these challenges; however, such methods are either computationally expensive or brittle when run on dynamic videos with uncontrolled camera motion or unknown field of view. We demonstrate the surprising effectiveness of a deep visual SLAM framework: with careful modifications to its training and inference schemes, this system can scale to real-world videos of complex dynamic scenes with unconstrained camera paths, including videos with little camera parallax. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real videos demonstrate that our system is significantly more accurate and robust at camera pose and depth estimation when compared with prior and concurrent work, with faster or comparable running times. See interactive results on our project page: mega-sam.github.io. Zhengqi Li, Richard Tucker 0001, Forrester Cole, Qianqian Wang 0002, Linyi Jin, Vickie Ye, Angjoo Kanazawa, Aleksander Holynski, Noah Snavely |
CVPR | 3 |
| 2025 | MonST3R: A Simple Approach for Estimating Geometry in the Presence of MotionabstractEstimating geometry from dynamic scenes, where objects move and deform over time, remains a core challenge in computer vision. Current approaches often rely on multi-stage pipelines or global optimizations that decompose the problem into subtasks, like depth and flow, leading to complex systems prone to errors. In this paper, we present Motion DUSt3R (MonST3R), a novel geometry-first approach
that directly estimates per-timestep geometry from dynamic scenes. Our key insight is that by simply estimating a pointmap for each timestep, we can effectively adapt DUSt3R’s representation, previously only used for static scenes, to dynamic scenes. However, this approach presents a significant challenge: the scarcity of suitable training data, namely dynamic, posed videos with depth labels. Despite this, we show that by posing the problem as a fine-tuning task, identifying several suitable datasets, and strategically training the model on this limited data, we can surprisingly enable the model to handle dynamics, even without an explicit motion representation. Based on this, we introduce new optimizations for several downstream video-specific tasks and demonstrate strong performance on video depth and camera pose estimation, outperforming prior work in terms of robustness and efficiency. Moreover, MonST3R shows promising results for primarily feed-forward 4D reconstruction. Interactive 4D results, source code, and trained models are available at: https://monst3r-project.github.io/. Junyi Zhang 0004, Charles Herrmann, Junhwa Hur, Varun Jampani, Trevor Darrell, Forrester Cole, Deqing Sun, Ming-Hsuan Yang 0001 |
ICLR | 6 |
| 2024 | ExtraNeRF: Visibility-Aware View Extrapolation of Neural Radiance Fields with Diffusion ModelsabstractWe propose ExtraNeRF, a novel method for extrapolating the range of views handled by a Neural Radiance Field (NeRF). Our main idea is to leverage NeRFs to model scene-specific, fine-grained details, while capitalizing on diffusion models to extrapolate beyond our observed data. A key ingredient is to track visibility to determine what portions of the scene have not been observed, and focus on re-constructing those regions consistently with diffusion mod-els. Our primary contributions include a visibility-aware diffusion-based inpainting module that is fine-tuned on the input imagery, yielding an initial NeRF with moderate qual-ity (often blurry) inpainted regions, followed by a second diffusion model trained on the input imagery to consistently enhance, notably sharpen, the inpainted imagery from the first pass. We demonstrate high-quality results, extrapolating beyond a small number of (typically six or fewer) input views, effectively outpainting the NeRF as well as inpainting newly disoccluded regions inside the original viewing volume. We compare with related work both quantitatively and qualitatively and show significant gains over prior art. Meng-Li Shih, Wei-Chiu Ma, Lorenzo Boyice, Aleksander Holynski, Forrester Cole, Brian Curless, Janne Kontkanen |
CVPR | 5 |
| 2024 | WonderJourney: Going from Anywhere to EverywhereabstractWe introduce WonderJourney, a modular framework for perpetual 3D scene generation. Unlike prior work on view generation that focuses on a single type of scenes, we start at any user-provided location (by a text description or an image), and generate a journey through a long sequence of diverse yet coherently connected 3D scenes. We leverage an LLM to generate textual descriptions of the scenes in this journey, a text-driven point cloud generation pipeline to make a compelling and coherent sequence of 3D scenes, and a large VLM to verify the generated scenes. We show compelling, diverse visual results across various scene types and styles, forming imaginary “wonder journeys ”. Project website: https://kovenyu.com/WonderJourney/. “No, no! The adventures first, explanations take such a dreadful time.“ - Alice's Adventures in Wonderland Hong-Xing Yu, Haoyi Duan, Junhwa Hur, Kyle Sargent, Michael Rubinstein, William T. Freeman, Forrester Cole, Deqing Sun, Noah Snavely, Jiajun Wu 0001, Charles Herrmann |
CVPR | 7 |
| 2024 | ZipLoRA: Any Subject in Any Style by Effectively Merging LoRAs
Viraj Shah, Nataniel Ruiz, Forrester Cole, Erika Lu, Svetlana Lazebnik, Yuanzhen Li, Varun Jampani |
ECCV (1) | 3 |
| 2024 | VidPanos: Generative Panoramic Videos from Casual Panning Videos
Erika Lu, Roni Paiss, Shiran Zada, Aleksander Holynski, Tali Dekel, Brian Curless, Michael Rubinstein, Forrester Cole |
SIGGRAPH Asia | 9 |
| 2023 | SCOOP: Self-Supervised Correspondence and Optimization-Based Scene FlowabstractScene flow estimation is a long-standing problem in computer vision, where the goal is to find the 3D motion of a scene from its consecutive observations. Recently, there have been efforts to compute the scene flow from 3D point clouds. A common approach is to train a regression model that consumes source and target point clouds and outputs the per-point translation vector. An alternative is to learn point matches between the point clouds concurrently with regressing a refinement of the initial correspondence flow. In both cases, the learning task is very challenging since the flow regression is done in the free 3D space, and a typical solution is to resort to a large annotated synthetic dataset. We introduce SCOOP, a new method for scene flow estimation that can be learned on a small amount of data without employing ground-truth flow supervision. In contrast to previous work, we train a pure correspondence model focused on learning point feature representation and initialize the flow as the difference between a source point and its softly corresponding target point. Then, in the run-time phase, we directly optimize a flow refinement component with a self-supervised objective, which leads to a coherent and accurate flow field between the point clouds. Experiments on widespread datasets demonstrate the performance gains achieved by our method compared to existing leading techniques while using a fraction of the training data. Our code is publicly available11https://github.com/itailang/SCOOP . Itai Lang, Dror Aiger, Forrester Cole, Shai Avidan, Michael Rubinstein |
CVPR | 3 |
| 2023 | DynIBaR: Neural Dynamic Image-Based RenderingabstractWe address the problem of synthesizing novel views from a monocular video depicting a complex dynamic scene. State-of-the-art methods based on temporally varying Neural Radiance Fields (aka dynamic NeRFs) have shown impressive results on this task. However, for long videos with complex object motions and uncontrolled camera trajectories, these methods can produce blurry or inaccurate renderings, hampering their use in real-world applications. Instead of encoding the entire dynamic scene within the weights of MLPs, we present a new approach that addresses these limitations by adopting a volumetric image-based rendering framework that synthesizes new viewpoints by aggregating features from nearby views in a scene motion-aware manner. Our system retains the advantages of prior methods in its ability to model complex scenes and view-dependent effects, but also enables synthesizing photo-realistic novel views from long videos featuring complex scene dynamics with unconstrained camera trajectories. We demonstrate significant improvements over state-of-the-art methods on dynamic scene datasets, and also apply our approach to in-the-wild videos with challenging camera and object motion, where prior methods fail to produce high-quality renderings. Zhengqi Li, Qianqian Wang 0002, Forrester Cole, Richard Tucker 0001, Noah Snavely |
CVPR | 3 |
| 2023 | Omnimatte3D: Associating Objects and Their Effects in Unconstrained Monocular VideoabstractWe propose a method to decompose a video into a background and a set of foreground layers, where the background captures stationary elements while the foreground layers capture moving objects along with their associated effects (e.g. shadows and reflections). Our approach is designed for unconstrained monocular videos, with an arbitrary camera and object motion. Prior work that tackles this problem assumes that the video can be mapped onto a fixed 2D canvas, severely limiting the possible space of camera motion. Instead, our method applies recent progress in monocular camera pose and depth estimation to create a full, RGBD video layer for the background, along with a video layer for each foreground object. To solve the underconstrained decomposition problem, we propose a new loss formulation based on multi-view consistency. We test our method on challenging videos with complex camera motion and show significant qualitative improvement over current approaches. Mohammed Suhail, Erika Lu, Zhengqi Li, Noah Snavely, Leonid Sigal, Forrester Cole |
CVPR | 6 |
| 2022 | Structure and Motion from Casual Videos
Zhoutong Zhang, Forrester Cole, Zhengqi Li, Michael Rubinstein, Noah Snavely, William T. Freeman |
ECCV (33) | 2 |
| 2022 | Associating Objects and Their Effects in Video through Coordination GamesabstractWe explore a feed-forward approach for decomposing a video into layers, where each layer contains an object of interest along with its associated shadows, reflections, and other visual effects. This problem is challenging since associated effects vary widely with the 3D geometry and lighting conditions in the scene, and ground-truth labels for visual effects are difficult (and in some cases impractical) to collect. We take a self-supervised approach and train a neural network to produce a foreground image and alpha matte from a rough object segmentation mask under a reconstruction and sparsity loss. Under reconstruction loss, the layer decomposition problem is underdetermined: many combinations of layers may reconstruct the input video.Inspired by the game theory concept of focal points---or \emph{Schelling points}---we pose the problem as a coordination game, where each player (network) predicts the effects for a single object without knowledge of the other players' choices. The players learn to converge on the ``natural'' layer decomposition in order to maximize the likelihood of their choices aligning with the other players'. We train the network to play this game with itself, and show how to design the rules of this game so that the focal point lies at the correct layer decomposition. We demonstrate feed-forward results on a challenging synthetic dataset, then show that pretraining on this dataset significantly reduces optimization time for real videos. Erika Lu, Forrester Cole, Weidi Xie, Tali Dekel, William T. Freeman, Andrew Zisserman, Michael Rubinstein |
NeurIPS | 2 |
| 2022 | D^2NeRF: Self-Supervised Decoupling of Dynamic and Static Objects from a Monocular VideoabstractGiven a monocular video, segmenting and decoupling dynamic objects while recovering the static environment is a widely studied problem in machine intelligence. Existing solutions usually approach this problem in the image domain, limiting their performance and understanding of the environment. We introduce Decoupled Dynamic Neural Radiance Field (D^2NeRF), a self-supervised approach that takes a monocular video and learns a 3D scene representation which decouples moving objects, including their shadows, from the static background. Our method represents the moving objects and the static background by two separate neural radiance fields with only one allowing for temporal changes. A naive implementation of this approach leads to the dynamic component taking over the static one as the representation of the former is inherently more general and prone to overfitting. To this end, we propose a novel loss to promote correct separation of phenomena. We further propose a shadow field network to detect and decouple dynamically moving shadows. We introduce a new dataset containing various dynamic objects and shadows and demonstrate that our method can achieve better performance than state-of-the-art approaches in decoupling dynamic and static 3D objects, occlusion and shadow removal, and image segmentation for moving objects. Project page: https://d2nerf.github.io/ Tianhao Wu 0003, Fangcheng Zhong, Andrea Tagliasacchi, Forrester Cole, A. Cengiz Öztireli |
NeurIPS | 4 |
| 2021 | Learning 3D Semantic Segmentation with only 2D Image SupervisionabstractWith the recent growth of urban mapping and autonomous driving efforts, there has been an explosion of raw 3D data collected from terrestrial platforms with lidar scanners and color cameras. However, due to high labeling costs, ground-truth 3D semantic segmentation annotations are limited in both quantity and geographic diversity, while also being difficult to transfer across sensors. In contrast, large image collections with ground-truth semantic segmentations are readily available for diverse sets of scenes. In this paper, we investigate how to use only those labeled 2D image collections to supervise training 3D semantic segmentation models. Our approach is to train a 3D model from pseudo-labels derived from 2D semantic image segmentations using multi-view fusion. We address several novel issues with this approach, including how to select trusted pseudo-labels, how to sample 3D scenes with rare object categories, and how to decouple input features from 2D images from pseudo-labels during training. The proposed network architecture, 2D3DNet, achieves significantly better performance (+6.2-11.4 mIoU) than baselines during experiments on a new urban dataset with lidar and images captured in 20 cities across 5 continents. Kyle Genova, Xiaoqi Yin, Abhijit Kundu, Caroline Pantofaru, Forrester Cole, Avneesh Sud, Brian Brewington, Brian Shucker, Thomas A. Funkhouser |
3DV | 5 |
| 2021 | Omnimatte: Associating Objects and Their Effects in VideoabstractComputer vision is increasingly effective at segmenting objects in images and videos; however, scene effects related to the objects—shadows, reflections, generated smoke, etc.—are typically overlooked. Identifying such scene effects and associating them with the objects producing them is important for improving our fundamental understanding of visual scenes, and can also assist a variety of applications such as removing, duplicating, or enhancing objects in video. In this work, we take a step towards solving this novel problem of automatically associating objects with their effects in video. Given an ordinary video and a rough segmentation mask over time of one or more subjects of interest, we estimate an omnimatte for each subject—an alpha matte and color image that includes the subject along with all its related time-varying scene elements. Our model is trained only on the input video in a self-supervised manner, without any manual labels, and is generic—it produces omnimattes automatically for arbitrary objects and a variety of effects. We show results on real-world videos containing interactions between different types of subjects (cars, animals, people) and complex effects, ranging from semitransparent elements such as smoke and reflections, to fully opaque effects such as objects attached to the subject.1 Erika Lu, Forrester Cole, Tali Dekel, Andrew Zisserman, William T. Freeman, Michael Rubinstein |
CVPR | 2 |
| 2021 | LASR: Learning Articulated Shape Reconstruction From a Monocular VideoabstractRemarkable progress has been made in 3D reconstruction of rigid structures from a video or a collection of images. However, it is still challenging to reconstruct nonrigid structures from RGB inputs, due to its under-constrained nature. While template-based approaches, such as parametric shape models, have achieved great success in modeling the "closed world" of known object categories, they cannot well handle the "open-world" of novel object categories or outlier shapes. In this work, we introduce a template-free approach to learn 3D shapes from a single video. It adopts an analysis-by-synthesis strategy that forward-renders object silhouette, optical flow, and pixel values to compare with video observations, which generates gradients to adjust the camera, shape and motion parameters. Without using a category-specific shape template, our method faithfully reconstructs nonrigid 3D structures from videos of human, animals, and objects of unknown classes. Our code is available at lasr-google.github.io. Gengshan Yang, Deqing Sun, Varun Jampani, Daniel Vlasic, Forrester Cole, Huiwen Chang, Deva Ramanan, William T. Freeman, Ce Liu 0001 |
CVPR | 5 |
| 2021 | Differentiable Surface Rendering via Non-Differentiable SamplingabstractWe present a method for differentiable rendering of 3D surfaces that supports both explicit and implicit representations, provides derivatives at occlusion boundaries, and is fast and simple to implement. The method first samples the surface using non-differentiable rasterization, then applies differentiable, depth-aware point splatting to produce the final image. Our approach requires no differentiable meshing or rasterization steps, making it efficient for large 3D models and applicable to isosurfaces extracted from implicit surface definitions. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method for implicit-, mesh-, and parametric-surface-based inverse rendering and neural-network training applications. In particular, we show for the first time efficient, differentiable rendering of an isosurface extracted from a neural radiance field (NeRF), and demonstrate surface-based, rather than volume-based, rendering of a NeRF. Forrester Cole, Kyle Genova, Avneesh Sud, Daniel Vlasic, Zhoutong Zhang |
ICCV | 1 |
| 2021 | ViSER: Video-Specific Surface Embeddings for Articulated 3D Shape ReconstructionabstractWe introduce ViSER, a method for recovering articulated 3D shapes and dense3D trajectories from monocular videos. Previous work on high-quality reconstruction of dynamic 3D shapes typically relies on multiple camera views, strong category-specific priors, or 2D keypoint supervision. We show that none of these are required if one can reliably estimate long-range correspondences in a video, making use of only 2D object masks and two-frame optical flow as inputs. ViSER infers correspondences by matching 2D pixels to a canonical, deformable 3D mesh via video-specific surface embeddings that capture the pixel appearance of each surface point. These embeddings behave as a continuous set of keypoint descriptors defined over the mesh surface, which can be used to establish dense long-range correspondences across pixels. The surface embeddings are implemented as coordinate-based MLPs that are fit to each video via self-supervised losses.Experimental results show that ViSER compares favorably against prior work on challenging videos of humans with loose clothing and unusual poses as well as animals videos from DAVIS and YTVOS. Project page: viser-shape.github.io. Gengshan Yang, Deqing Sun, Varun Jampani, Daniel Vlasic, Forrester Cole, Ce Liu 0001, Deva Ramanan |
NeurIPS | 5 |
| 2021 | MannequinChallenge: Learning the Depths of Moving People by Watching Frozen PeopleabstractWe present a method for predicting dense depth in scenarios where both a monocular camera and people in the scene are freely moving (right). Existing methods for recovering depth for dynamic, non-rigid objects from monocular video impose strong assumptions on the objects' motion and may only recover sparse depth. In this paper, we take a data-driven approach and learn human depth priors from a new source of data: thousands of Internet videos of people imitating mannequins, i.e., freezing in diverse, natural poses, while a hand-held camera tours the scene (left). Because people are stationary, geometric constraints hold, thus training data can be generated using multi-view stereo reconstruction. At inference time, our method uses motion parallax cues from the static areas of the scenes to guide the depth prediction. We evaluate our method on real-world sequences of complex human actions captured by a moving hand-held camera, show improvement over state-of-the-art monocular depth prediction methods, and demonstrate various 3D effects produced using our predicted depth. Zhengqi Li, Tali Dekel, Forrester Cole, Richard Tucker 0001, Noah Snavely, Ce Liu 0001, William T. Freeman |
IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell. | 3 |
| 2021 | Consistent depth of moving objects in videoabstractWe present a method to estimate depth of a dynamic scene, containing arbitrary moving objects, from an ordinary video captured with a moving camera. We seek a geometrically and temporally consistent solution to this under-constrained problem: the depth predictions of corresponding points across frames should induce plausible, smooth motion in 3D. We formulate this objective in a new test-time training framework where a depth-prediction CNN is trained in tandem with an auxiliary scene-flow prediction MLP over the entire input video. By recursively unrolling the scene-flow prediction MLP over varying time steps, we compute both short-range scene flow to impose local smooth motion priors directly in 3D, and long-range scene flow to impose multi-view consistency constraints with wide baselines. We demonstrate accurate and temporally coherent results on a variety of challenging videos containing diverse moving objects (pets, people, cars), as well as camera motion. Our depth maps give rise to a number of depth-and-motion aware video editing effects such as object and lighting insertion. Zhoutong Zhang, Forrester Cole, Richard Tucker 0001, William T. Freeman, Tali Dekel |
ACM Trans. Graph. | 2 |
| 2020 | Local Deep Implicit Functions for 3D ShapeabstractThe goal of this project is to learn a 3D shape representation that enables accurate surface reconstruction, compact storage, efficient computation, consistency for similar shapes, generalization across diverse shape categories, and inference from depth camera observations. Towards this end, we introduce Local Deep Implicit Functions (LDIF), a 3D shape representation that decomposes space into a structured set of learned implicit functions. We provide networks that infer the space decomposition and local deep implicit functions from a 3D mesh or posed depth image. During experiments, we find that it provides 10.3 points higher surface reconstruction accuracy (F-Score) than the state-of-the-art (OccNet), while requiring fewer than 1\% of the network parameters. Experiments on posed depth image completion and generalization to unseen classes show 15.8 and 17.8 point improvements over the state-of-the-art, while producing a structured 3D representation for each input with consistency across diverse shape collections. Kyle Genova, Forrester Cole, Avneesh Sud, Aaron Sarna, Thomas A. Funkhouser |
CVPR | 2 |
| 2020 | Layered neural rendering for retiming people in videoabstractWe present a method for retiming people in an ordinary, natural video --- manipulating and editing the time in which different motions of individuals in the video occur. We can temporally align different motions, change the speed of certain actions (speeding up/slowing down, or entirely "freezing" people), or "erase" selected people from the video altogether. We achieve these effects computationally via a dedicated learning-based layered video representation, where each frame in the video is decomposed into separate RGBA layers, representing the appearance of different people in the video. A key property of our model is that it not only disentangles the direct motions of each person in the input video, but also correlates each person automatically with the scene changes they generate---e.g., shadows, reflections, and motion of loose clothing. The layers can be individually retimed and recombined into a new video, allowing us to achieve realistic, high-quality renderings of retiming effects for real-world videos depicting complex actions and involving multiple individuals, including dancing, trampoline jumping, or group running. Erika Lu, Forrester Cole, Tali Dekel, Weidi Xie, Andrew Zisserman, David Salesin, William T. Freeman, Michael Rubinstein |
ACM Trans. Graph. | 2 |
| 2019 | Learning the Depths of Moving People by Watching Frozen PeopleabstractWe present a method for predicting dense depth in scenarios where both a monocular camera and people in the scene are freely moving. Existing methods for recovering depth for dynamic, non-rigid objects from monocular video impose strong assumptions on the objects’ motion and may only recover sparse depth. In this paper, we take a data-driven approach and learn human depth priors from a new source of data: thousands of Internet videos of people imitating mannequins, i.e., freezing in diverse, natural poses, while a hand-held camera tours the scene. Since the people are stationary, training data can be created from these videos using multi-view stereo reconstruction. At inference time, our method uses motion parallax cues from the static areas of the scenes, and shows clear improvement over state-of-the-art monocular depth prediction methods. We demonstrate our method on real-world sequences of complex human actions captured by a moving hand-held camera, and show various 3D effects produced using our predicted depth. Zhengqi Li, Tali Dekel, Forrester Cole, Richard Tucker 0001, Noah Snavely, Ce Liu 0001, William T. Freeman |
CVPR | 3 |
| 2019 | Learning Shape Templates With Structured Implicit FunctionsabstractTemplate 3D shapes are useful for many tasks in graphics and vision, including fitting observation data, analyzing shape collections, and transferring shape attributes. Because of the variety of geometry and topology of real-world shapes, previous methods generally use a library of hand-made templates. In this paper, we investigate learning a general shape template from data. To allow for widely varying geometry and topology, we choose an implicit surface representation based on composition of local shape elements. While long known to computer graphics, this representation has not yet been explored in the context of machine learning for vision. We show that structured implicit functions are suitable for learning and allow a network to smoothly and simultaneously fit multiple classes of shapes. The learned shape template supports applications such as shape exploration, correspondence, abstraction, interpolation, and semantic segmentation from an RGB image. Kyle Genova, Forrester Cole, Daniel Vlasic, Aaron Sarna, William T. Freeman, Thomas A. Funkhouser |
ICCV | 2 |
| 2019 | Unsupervised learning of object structure and dynamics from videosabstractExtracting and predicting object structure and dynamics from videos without supervision is a major challenge in machine learning. To address this challenge, we adopt a keypoint-based image representation and learn a stochastic dynamics model of the keypoints. Future frames are reconstructed from the keypoints and a reference frame. By modeling dynamics in the keypoint coordinate space, we achieve stable learning and avoid compounding of errors in pixel space. Our method improves upon unstructured representations both for pixel-level video prediction and for downstream tasks requiring object-level understanding of motion dynamics. We evaluate our model on diverse datasets: a multi-agent sports dataset, the Human3.6M dataset, and datasets based on continuous control tasks from the DeepMind Control Suite. The spatially structured representation outperforms unstructured representations on a range of motion-related tasks such as object tracking, action recognition and reward prediction. Matthias Minderer, Chen Sun 0002, Ruben Villegas, Forrester Cole, Kevin Murphy 0002, Honglak Lee |
NeurIPS | 4 |
| 2018 | Unsupervised Training for 3D Morphable Model RegressionabstractWe present a method for training a regression network from image pixels to 3D morphable model coordinates using only unlabeled photographs. The training loss is based on features from a facial recognition network, computed on-the-fly by rendering the predicted faces with a differentiable renderer. To make training from features feasible and avoid network fooling effects, we introduce three objectives: a batch distribution loss that encourages the output distribution to match the distribution of the morphable model, a loopback loss that ensures the network can correctly reinterpret its own output, and a multi-view identity loss that compares the features of the predicted 3D face and the input photograph from multiple viewing angles. We train a regression network using these objectives, a set of unlabeled photographs, and the morphable model itself, and demonstrate state-of-the-art results. Kyle Genova, Forrester Cole, Aaron Maschinot, Aaron Sarna, Daniel Vlasic, William T. Freeman |
CVPR | 2 |
| 2017 | Synthesizing Normalized Faces from Facial Identity FeaturesabstractWe present a method for synthesizing a frontal, neutral-expression image of a person's face given an input face photograph. This is achieved by learning to generate facial landmarks and textures from features extracted from a facial-recognition network. Unlike previous generative approaches, our encoding feature vector is largely invariant to lighting, pose, and facial expression. Exploiting this invariance, we train our decoder network using only frontal, neutral-expression photographs. Since these photographs are well aligned, we can decompose them into a sparse set of landmark points and aligned texture maps. The decoder then predicts landmarks and textures independently and combines them using a differentiable image warping operation. The resulting images can be usedfor a number of applications, such as analyzing facial attributes, exposure and white balance adjustment, or creating a 3-D avatar. Forrester Cole, David Belanger 0002, Dilip Krishnan, Aaron Sarna, Inbar Mosseri, William T. Freeman |
CVPR | 1 |
| 2014 | Subspace clothing simulation using adaptive basesabstractWe present a new approach to clothing simulation using low-dimensional linear subspaces with temporally adaptive bases. Our method exploits full-space simulation training data in order to construct a pool of low-dimensional bases distributed across pose space. For this purpose, we interpret the simulation data as offsets from a kinematic deformation model that captures the global shape of clothing due to body pose. During subspace simulation, we select low-dimensional sets of basis vectors according to the current pose of the character and the state of its clothing. Thanks to this adaptive basis selection scheme, our method is able to reproduce diverse and detailed folding patterns with only a few basis vectors. Our experiments demonstrate the feasibility of subspace clothing simulation and indicate its potential in terms of quality and computational efficiency. Fabian Hahn, Bernhard Thomaszewski, Stelian Coros, Robert W. Sumner, Forrester Cole, Mark Meyer, Tony DeRose, Markus Gross 0001 |
ACM Trans. Graph. | 5 |
| 2013 | Stylizing animation by exampleabstractSkilled artists, using traditional media or modern computer painting tools, can create a variety of expressive styles that are very appealing in still images, but have been unsuitable for animation. The key difficulty is that existing techniques lack adequate temporal coherence to animate these styles effectively. Here we augment the range of practical animation styles by extending the guided texture synthesis method of Image Analogies [Hertzmann et al. 2001] to create temporally coherent animation sequences. To make the method art directable, we allow artists to paint portions of keyframes that are used as constraints. The in-betweens calculated by our method maintain stylistic continuity and yet change no more than necessary over time. Pierre Bénard, Forrester Cole, Michael Kass, Igor Mordatch, James Hegarty, Martin Sebastian Senn, Kurt W. Fleischer, Davide Pesare, Katherine Breeden |
ACM Trans. Graph. | 2 |
| 2012 | Shapecollage: Occlusion-Aware, Example-Based Shape Interpretation
Forrester Cole, Phillip Isola, William T. Freeman, Frédo Durand, Edward H. Adelson |
ECCV (3) | 1 |
| 2011 | Microgeometry capture using an elastomeric sensorabstractWe describe a system for capturing microscopic surface geometry. The system extends the retrographic sensor [Johnson and Adelson 2009] to the microscopic domain, demonstrating spatial resolution as small as 2 microns. In contrast to existing microgeometry capture techniques, the system is not affected by the optical characteristics of the surface being measured---it captures the same geometry whether the object is matte, glossy, or transparent. In addition, the hardware design allows for a variety of form factors, including a hand-held device that can be used to capture high-resolution surface geometry in the field. We achieve these results with a combination of improved sensor materials, illumination design, and reconstruction algorithm, as compared to the original sensor of Johnson and Adelson [2009]. Micah K. Johnson, Forrester Cole, Alvin Raj, Edward H. Adelson |
ACM Trans. Graph. | 2 |
| 2010 | Two Fast Methods for High-Quality Line VisibilityabstractLines drawn over or in place of shaded 3D models can often provide greater comprehensibility and stylistic freedom than shading alone. A substantial challenge for making stylized line drawings from 3D models is the visibility computation. Current algorithms for computing line visibility in models of moderate complexity are either too slow for interactive rendering, or too brittle for coherent animation. We introduce two methods that exploit graphics hardware to provide fast and robust line visibility. First, we present a simple shader that performs a visibility test for high-quality, simple lines drawn with the conventional implementation. Next, we offer a full optimized pipeline that supports line visibility and a broad range of stylization options. Forrester Cole, Adam Finkelstein |
IEEE Trans. Vis. Comput. Graph. | 1 |
| 2009 | Fast high-quality line visibilityabstractLines drawn over or in place of shaded 3D models can often provide greater comprehensibility and stylistic freedom that shading alone. A substantial challenge for making stylized line drawings from 3D models is the visibility computation. Current algorithms for computing line visibility in models of moderate complexity are either too slow for interactive rendering, or too brittle for coherent animation. We present a method that exploits graphics hardware to provide fast and robust line visibility. Rendering speed for our system is usually within a factor of two of an optimized rendering pipeline using conventional lines, and our system provides much higher visual quality and flexibility for stylization. Forrester Cole, Adam Finkelstein |
SI3D | 1 |
| 2009 | How well do line drawings depict shape?abstractThis paper investigates the ability of sparse line drawings to depict 3D shape. We perform a study in which people are shown an image of one of twelve 3D objects depicted with one of six styles and asked to orient a gauge to coincide with the surface normal at many positions on the object's surface. The normal estimates are compared with each other and with ground truth data provided by a registered 3D surface model to analyze accuracy and precision. The paper describes the design decisions made in collecting a large data set (275,000 gauge measurements) and provides analysis to answer questions about how well people interpret shapes from drawings. Our findings suggest that people interpret certain shapes almost as well from a line drawing as from a shaded image, that current computer graphics line drawing techniques can effectively depict shape and even match the effectiveness of artist's drawings, and that errors in depiction are often localized and can be traced to particular properties of the lines used. The data collected for this study will become a publicly available resource for further studies of this type. Forrester Cole, Kevin Sanik, Douglas DeCarlo, Adam Finkelstein, Thomas A. Funkhouser, Szymon Rusinkiewicz, Manish Singh 0001 |
ACM Trans. Graph. | 1 |
| 2008 | Where do people draw lines?abstractThis paper presents the results of a study in which artists made line drawings intended to convey specific 3D shapes. The study was designed so that drawings could be registered with rendered images of 3D models, supporting an analysis of how well the locations of the artists' lines correlate with other artists', with current computer graphics line definitions, and with the underlying differential properties of the 3D surface. Lines drawn by artists in this study largely overlapped one another (75% are within 1mm of another line), particularly along the occluding contours of the object. Most lines that do not overlap contours overlap large gradients of the image intensity, and correlate strongly with predictions made by recent line drawing algorithms in computer graphics. 14% were not well described by any of the local properties considered in this study. The result of our work is a publicly available data set of aligned drawings, an analysis of where lines appear in that data set based on local properties of 3D models, and algorithms to predict where artists will draw lines for new scenes. Forrester Cole, Aleksey Golovinskiy, Alex Limpaecher, Heather Stoddart Barros, Adam Finkelstein, Thomas A. Funkhouser, Szymon Rusinkiewicz |
ACM Trans. Graph. | 1 |
| 2006 | Directing Gaze in 3D Models with Stylized Focus
Forrester Cole, Douglas DeCarlo, Adam Finkelstein, Kenrick Kin, R. Keith Morley, Anthony Santella |
Rendering Techniques | 1 |