The goal of this paper is to encode a 3D scene into an extremely compact representation from$2 D$images and to enable its transmittance, decoding and rendering in real-time across various platforms. Despite the progress in NeRFs and Gaussian Splats, their large model size and specialized renderers make it challenging to distribute free-viewpoint 3D content as easily as images. To address this, we have designed a novel 3D representation that encodes the plenoptic function into sinusoidal function indexed dense volumes. This approach facilitates feature sharing across different locations, improving compactness over traditional spatial voxels. The memory footprint of the dense 3D feature grid can be further reduced using spatial decomposition techniques. This design combines the strengths of spatial hashing functions and voxel decomposition, resulting in a model size as small as 150 KB for each 3D scene. Moreover, PPNG features a lightweight rendering pipeline with only 300 lines of code that decodes its representation into standard GL textures and fragment shaders. This enables realtime rendering using the traditional GL pipeline, ensuring universal compatibility and efficiency across various platforms without additional dependencies. Our results are available at: https://jyl.kr/ppng

Current image-to-3D approaches suffer from high computational costs and lack scalability for high-resolution outputs. In contrast, we introduce a novel framework to directly generate explicit surface geometry and texture using multi-view 2D depth and RGB images along with 3D Gaussian features using a repurposed Stable Diffusion model. We introduce a depth branch into U-Net for efficient and high quality multi-view, cross-domain generation and incorporate epipolar attention into the latent-to-pixel decoder for pixel-level multi-view consistency. By back-projecting the generated depth pixels into 3D space, we create a structured 3D representation that can be either rendered via Gaussian splatting or extracted to high-quality meshes, thereby leveraging additional novel view synthesis loss to further improve our performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method surpasses existing baselines in geometry and texture quality while achieving significantly faster generation time.

The latest regularized Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) approaches produce poor geometry and view extrapolation for large scale sparse view scenes, such as ETH3D. Density-based approaches tend to be under-constrained, while surface-based approaches tend to miss details. In this paper, we take a density-based approach, sampling patches instead of individual rays to better incorporate monocular depth and normal estimates and patch-based photometric consistency constraints between training views and sampled virtual views. Loosely constraining densities based on estimated depth aligned to sparse points further improves geometric accuracy. While maintaining similar view synthesis quality, our approach significantly improves geometric accuracy on the ETH3D benchmark, e.g. increasing the F1@2cm score by 4x-8x compared to other regularized density-based approaches, with much lower training and inference time than other approaches.

Recent learning-based multi-view stereo (MVS) methods show excellent performance with dense cameras and small depth ranges. However, non-learning based approaches still outperform for scenes with large depth ranges and sparser wide-baseline views, in part due to their PatchMatch optimization over pixelwise estimates of depth, normals, and visibility. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end trainable PatchMatch-based MVS approach that combines advantages of trainable costs and regularizations with pixelwise estimates. To overcome the challenge of the non-differentiable PatchMatch optimization that involves iterative sampling and hard decisions, we use reinforcement learning to minimize expected photometric cost and maximize likelihood of ground truth depth and normals. We incorporate normal estimation by using dilated patch kernels and propose a recurrent cost regularization that applies beyond frontal plane-sweep algorithms to our pixelwise depth/normal estimates. We evaluate our method on widely used MVS benchmarks, ETH3D and Tanks and Temples (TnT). On ETH3D, our method outperforms other recent learning-based approaches and performs comparably on advanced TnT.

Style transfer produces a transferred image which is a rendering of a content image in the manner of a style image. We seek to understand how to improve style transfer.To do so requires quantitative evaluation procedures, but current evaluation is qualitative, mostly involving user studies. We describe a novel quantitative evaluation procedure. Our procedure relies on two statistics: the Effectiveness (E) statistic measures the extent that a given style has been transferred to the target, and the Coherence (C) statistic measures the extent to which the original image's content is preserved. Our statistics are calibrated to human preference: targets with larger values of E and C will reliably be preferred by human subjects in comparisons of style and content, respectively.We use these statistics to investigate relative performance of a number of Neural Style Transfer (NST) methods, revealing a number of intriguing properties. Admissible methods lie on a Pareto frontier (i.e. improving E reduces C, or vice versa). Three methods are admissible: Universal style transfer produces very good C but weak E; modifying the optimization used for Gatys' loss produces a method with strong E and strong C; and a modified cross-layer method has slightly better E at strong cost in C. While the histogram loss improves the E statistics of Gatys' method, it does not make the method admissible. Surprisingly, style weights have relatively little effect in improving EC scores, and most variability in transfer is explained by the style itself (meaning experimenters can be misguided by selecting styles). Our GitHub Link is available1.

One major challenge in 3D reconstruction is to infer the complete shape geometry from partial foreground occlusions. In this paper, we propose a method to reconstruct the complete 3D shape of an object from a single RGB image, with robustness to occlusion. Given the image and a silhouette of the visible region, our approach completes the silhouette of the occluded region and then generates a point cloud. We show improvements for reconstruction of non-occluded and partially occluded objects by providing the predicted complete silhouette as guidance. We also improve state-of-the-art for 3D shape prediction with a 2D reprojection loss from multiple synthetic views and a surface-based smoothing and refinement step. Experiments demonstrate the efficacy of our approach both quantitatively and qualitatively on synthetic and real scene datasets.

We propose an algorithm to predict room layout from a single image that generalizes across panoramas and perspective images, cuboid layouts and more general layouts (e.g. "L"-shape room). Our method operates directly on the panoramic image, rather than decomposing into perspective images as do recent works. Our network architecture is similar to that of RoomNet [15], but we show improvements due to aligning the image based on vanishing points, predicting multiple layout elements (corners, boundaries, size and translation), and fitting a constrained Manhattan layout to the resulting predictions. Our method compares well in speed and accuracy to other existing work on panoramas, achieves among the best accuracy for perspective images, and can handle both cuboid-shaped and more general Manhattan layouts.

The success of various applications including robotics, digital content creation, and visualization demand a structured and abstract representation of the 3D world from limited sensor data. Inspired by the nature of human perception of 3D shapes as a collection of simple parts, we explore such an abstract shape representation based on primitives. Given a single depth image of an object, we present 3DPRNN, a generative recurrent neural network that synthesizes multiple plausible shapes composed of a set of primitives. Our generative model encodes symmetry characteristics of common man-made objects, preserves long-range structural coherence, and describes objects of varying complexity with a compact representation. We also propose a method based on Gaussian Fields to generate a large scale dataset of primitive-based shape representations to train our network. We evaluate our approach on a wide range of examples and show that it outperforms nearest-neighbor based shape retrieval methods and is on-par with voxelbased generative models while using a significantly reduced parameter space.