Ruojin Cai

dblp:226/3958 · DBLP profile ↗
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11ranked-venue papers
4as first author
9since 2021 · last 2025
0009-0000-2963-2771ORCID · corroborated

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

Graphics, computer vision, multimedia, augmented reality and games · 11 · 4 first-author · 9 since 2021Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 10 · 4 first-author · 9 since 2021Applied, interdisciplinary, general and emerging computing · 1
YearPublicationVenuePosition
2025 Extreme Rotation Estimation in the Wild
abstract
We present a technique and benchmark dataset for estimating the relative 3D orientation between a pair of Internet images captured in an extreme setting, where the images have limited or non-overlapping field of views. Prior work targeting extreme rotation estimation assume constrained 3D environments and emulate perspective images by cropping regions from panoramic views. However, real images captured in the wild are highly diverse, exhibiting variation in both appearance and camera intrinsics. In this work, we propose a Transformer-based method for estimating relative rotations in extreme real-world settings, and contribute the ExtremeLandmarkPairs dataset, assembled from scene-level Internet photo collections. Our evaluation demonstrates that our approach succeeds in estimating the relative rotations in a wide variety of extreme-view Internet image pairs, outperforming various baselines, including dedicated rotation estimation techniques and contemporary 3D reconstruction methods.
Hana Bezalel, Dotan Ankri, Ruojin Cai, Hadar Averbuch-Elor
CVPR3
2025 Can Generative Video Models Help Pose Estimation?
abstract
Pairwise pose estimation from images with little or no overlap is an open challenge in computer vision. Existing methods, even those trained on large-scale datasets, struggle in these scenarios due to the lack of identifiable correspondences or visual overlap. Inspired by the human ability to infer spatial relationships from diverse scenes, we propose a novel approach, InterPose, that leverages the rich priors encoded within pre-trained generative video models. We propose to use a video model to hallucinate intermediate frames between two input images, effectively creating a dense, visual transition, which significantly simplifies the problem of pose estimation. Since current video models can still produce implausible motion or inconsistent geometry, we introduce a self-consistency score that evaluates the consistency of pose predictions from sampled videos. We demonstrate that our approach generalizes among three state-of-the-art video models and show consistent improvements over the state-of-the-art DUSt3R baseline on four diverse datasets encompassing indoor, outdoor, and object-centric scenes. Our findings suggest a promising avenue for improving pose estimation models by leveraging large generative models trained on vast amounts of video data, which is more readily available than 3D data. See our project page for results: Inter-Pose.github.io.
Ruojin Cai, Jason Y. Zhang 0004, Philipp Henzler, Zhengqi Li, Noah Snavely, Ricardo Martin-Brualla
CVPR1
2025 Doppelgangers++: Improved Visual Disambiguation with Geometric 3D Features
abstract
Accurate 3D reconstruction is frequently hindered by visual aliasing, where visually similar but distinct surfaces (aka, doppelgangers), are incorrectly matched. These spurious matches distort the structure-from-motion (SfM) process, leading to misplaced model elements and reduced accuracy. Prior efforts addressed this with CNN classifiers trained on curated datasets, but these approaches struggle to generalize across diverse real-world scenes and can require extensive parameter tuning. In this work, we present Doppelgangers++, a method to enhance doppelganger detection and improve 3D reconstruction accuracy. Our contributions include a diversified training dataset that incorporates geo-tagged images from everyday scenes to expand robustness beyond landmark-based datasets. We further propose a Transformer-based classifier that leverages 3D-aware features from the MASt3R model, achieving superior precision and recall across both in-domain and out-of-domain tests. Doppelgangers++ integrates seamlessly into standard SfM and MASt3R-SfM pipelines, offering efficiency and adaptability across varied scenes. To evaluate SfM accuracy, we introduce an automated, geotag-based method for validating reconstructed models, eliminating the need for manual inspection. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that Doppelgangers++ significantly enhances pairwise vi sual disambiguation and improves 3D reconstruction quality in complex and diverse scenarios.
Yuanbo Xiangli, Ruojin Cai, Hanyu Chen 0002, Jeffrey Byrne, Noah Snavely
CVPR2
2024 MegaScenes: Scene-Level View Synthesis at Scale
Joseph Tung, Gene Chou, Ruojin Cai, Guandao Yang, Kai Zhang 0045, Gordon Wetzstein, Bharath Hariharan, Noah Snavely
ECCV (29)3
2023 Neural Scene Chronology
abstract
In this work, we aim to reconstruct a time-varying 3D model, capable of rendering photo-realistic renderings with independent control of viewpoint, illumination, and time, from Internet photos of large-scale landmarks. The core challenges are twofold. First, different types of temporal changes, such as illumination and changes to the underlying scene itself (such as replacing one graffiti artwork with another) are entangled together in the imagery. Second, scene-level temporal changes are often discrete and sporadic over time, rather than continuous. To tackle these problems, we propose a new scene representation equipped with a novel temporal step function encoding method that can model discrete scene-level content changes as piece-wise constant functions over time. Specifically, we represent the scene as a space-time radiance field with a per-image illumination embedding, where temporally-varying scene changes are encoded using a set of learned step functions. To facilitate our task of chronology reconstruction from Internet imagery, we also collect a new dataset of four scenes that exhibit various changes over time. We demonstrate that our method exhibits state-of-the-art view synthesis results on this dataset, while achieving independent control of view-point, time, and illumination. Code and data are available at https://zju3dv.github.io/NeuSC/
Haotong Lin, Qianqian Wang 0002, Ruojin Cai, Sida Peng, Hadar Averbuch-Elor, Xiaowei Zhou 0001, Noah Snavely
CVPR3
2023 Doppelgangers: Learning to Disambiguate Images of Similar Structures
abstract
We consider the visual disambiguation task of determining whether a pair of visually similar images depict the same or distinct 3D surfaces (e.g., the same or opposite sides of a symmetric building). Illusory image matches, where two images observe distinct but visually similar 3D surfaces, can be challenging for humans to differentiate, and can also lead 3D reconstruction algorithms to produce erroneous results. We propose a learning-based approach to visual disambiguation, formulating it as a binary classification task on image pairs. To that end, we introduce a new dataset for this problem, Doppelgangers, which includes image pairs of similar structures with ground truth labels. We also design a network architecture that takes the spatial distribution of local keypoints and matches as input, allowing for better reasoning about both local and global cues. Our evaluation shows that our method can distinguish illusory matches in difficult cases, and can be integrated into SfM pipelines to produce correct, disambiguated 3D reconstructions. See our project page for our code, datasets, and more results: doppelgangers-3d.github.io.
Ruojin Cai, Joseph Tung, Qianqian Wang 0002, Hadar Averbuch-Elor, Bharath Hariharan, Noah Snavely
ICCV1
2023 Tracking Everything Everywhere All at Once
abstract
We present a new test-time optimization method for estimating dense and long-range motion from a video sequence. Prior optical flow or particle video tracking algorithms typically operate within limited temporal windows, struggling to track through occlusions and maintain global consistency of estimated motion trajectories. We propose a complete and globally consistent motion representation, dubbed OmniMotion, that allows for accurate, full-length motion estimation of every pixel in a video. OmniMotion represents a video using a quasi-3D canonical volume and performs pixel-wise tracking via bijections between local and canonical space. This representation allows us to ensure global consistency, track through occlusions, and model any combination of camera and object motion. Extensive evaluations on the TAP-Vid benchmark and real-world footage show that our approach outperforms prior state-of-the-art methods by a large margin both quantitatively and qualitatively. See our project page for more results: omnimotion.github.io.
Qianqian Wang 0002, Yen-Yu Chang, Ruojin Cai, Zhengqi Li, Bharath Hariharan, Aleksander Holynski, Noah Snavely
ICCV3
2021 Extreme Rotation Estimation Using Dense Correlation Volumes
abstract
We present a technique for estimating the relative 3D rotation of an RGB image pair in an extreme setting, where the images have little or no overlap. We observe that, even when images do not overlap, there may be rich hidden cues as to their geometric relationship, such as light source directions, vanishing points, and symmetries present in the scene. We propose a network design that can automatically learn such implicit cues by comparing all pairs of points between the two input images. Our method therefore constructs dense feature correlation volumes and processes these to predict relative 3D rotations. Our predictions are formed over a fine-grained discretization of rotations, bypassing difficulties associated with regressing 3D rotations. We demonstrate our approach on a large variety of extreme RGB image pairs, including indoor and outdoor images captured under different lighting conditions and geographic locations. Our evaluation shows that our model can successfully estimate relative rotations among non-overlapping images without compromising performance over overlapping image pairs.1
Ruojin Cai, Bharath Hariharan, Noah Snavely, Hadar Averbuch-Elor
CVPR1
2021 CondenseNet V2: Sparse Feature Reactivation for Deep Networks
abstract
Reusing features in deep networks through dense connectivity is an effective way to achieve high computational efficiency. The recent proposed CondenseNet [14] has shown that this mechanism can be further improved if redundant features are removed. In this paper, we propose an alternative approach named sparse feature reactivation (SFR), aiming at actively increasing the utility of features for reusing. In the proposed network, named CondenseNetV2, each layer can simultaneously learn to 1) selectively reuse a set of most important features from preceding layers; and 2) actively update a set of preceding features to increase their utility for later layers. Our experiments show that the proposed models achieve promising performance on image classification (ImageNet and CIFAR) and object detection (MS COCO) in terms of both theoretical efficiency and practical speed.
Le Yang 0007, Haojun Jiang, Ruojin Cai, Yulin Wang 0002, Shiji Song, Gao Huang 0001, Qi Tian 0001
CVPR3
2020 Learning Gradient Fields for Shape Generation
Ruojin Cai, Guandao Yang, Hadar Averbuch-Elor, Zekun Hao, Serge J. Belongie, Noah Snavely, Bharath Hariharan
ECCV (3)1
2018 Order-Sensitive Deep Hashing for Multimorbidity Medical Image Retrieval
Zhixiang Chen 0003, Ruojin Cai, Jiwen Lu, Jianjiang Feng, Jie Zhou 0001
MICCAI (1)2