Wide field-of-view (FoV) cameras efficiently capture large portions of the scene, which makes them attractive in multiple domains, such as automotive and robotics. For such applications, estimating depth from multiple images is a critical task, and therefore, a large amount of ground truth (GT) data is available. Unfortunately, most of the GT data is for pinhole cameras, making it impossible to properly train depth estimation models for large-FoV cameras. We propose the first method to train a stereo depth estimation model on the widely available pinhole data, and to generalize it to data captured with larger FoVs. Our intuition is simple: We warp the training data to a canonical, large-FoV representation and augment it to allow a single network to reason about diverse types of distortions that otherwise would prevent generalization. We show strong generalization ability of our approach on both indoor and outdoor datasets, which was not possible with previous methods.

We propose a fast and generalizable solution to Multiview Photometric Stereo (MVPS), called MVPSNet. The key to our approach is a feature extraction network that effectively combines images from the same view captured under multiple lighting conditions to extract geometric features from shading cues for stereo matching. We demonstrate these features, termed ‘Light Aggregated Feature Maps’ (LAFM), are effective for feature matching even in textureless regions, where traditional multi-view stereo methods often fail. Our method produces similar reconstruction results to PS-NeRF, a state-of-the-art MVPS method that optimizes a neural network per-scene, while being 411× faster (105 seconds vs. 12 hours) in inference. Additionally, we introduce a new synthetic dataset for MVPS, sMVPS, which is shown to be effective for training a generalizable MVPS method.

We introduce the first end-to-end learning-based solution to near-field Photometric Stereo (PS), where the light sources are close to the object of interest. This setup is especially useful for reconstructing large immobile objects. Our method is fast, producing a mesh from 52 512x384 resolution images in about 1 second on a commodity GPU, thus potentially unlocking several AR/VR applications. Existing approaches rely on optimization coupled with a far-field PS network operating on pixels or small patches. Using optimization makes these approaches slow and memory intensive (requiring 17GB GPU and 27GB of CPU memory) while using only pixels or patches makes them highly sus-ceptible to noise and calibration errors. To address these issues, we develop a recursive multi-resolution scheme to estimate surface normal and depth maps of the whole image at each step. The predicted depth map at each scale is then used to estimate 'per-pixel lighting, for the next scale. This design makes our approach almost 45x faster and 2° more accurate (11.3° vs. 13.3° Mean Angular Error) than the state-of-the-art near-field PS reconstruction technique, which uses iterative optimization.

We present SfSNet, an end-to-end learning framework for producing an accurate decomposition of an unconstrained human face image into shape, reflectance and illuminance. SfSNet is designed to reflect a physical lambertian rendering model. SfSNet learns from a mixture of labeled synthetic and unlabeled real-world images. This allows the network to capture low-frequency variations from synthetic and high-frequency details from real images through the photometric reconstruction loss. SfSNet consists of a new decomposition architecture with residual blocks that learns a complete separation of albedo and normal. This is used along with the original image to predict lighting. SfSNet produces significantly better quantitative and qualitative results than state-of-the-art methods for inverse rendering and independent normal and illumination estimation. We also introduce a companion network, SfSMesh, that utilizes normals estimated by SfSNet to reconstruct a 3D face mesh. We demonstrate that SfSMesh produces face meshes with greater accuracy than state-of-the-art methods on real-world images.

In this paper, we present a technique for estimating the geometry and reflectance of objects using only a camera, flashlight, and optionally a tripod. We propose a simple data capture technique in which the user goes around the object, illuminating it with a flashlight and capturing only a few images. Our main technical contribution is the introduction of a recursive neural architecture, which can predict geometry and reflectance at 2k×2kresolution given an input image at 2k×2kand estimated geometry and reflectance from the previous step at 2k−1×2k−1. This recursive architecture, termed RecNet, is trained with 256×256 resolution but can easily operate on 1024×1024 images during inference. We show that our method produces more accurate surface normal and albedo, especially in regions of specular highlights and cast shadows, compared to previous approaches, given three or fewer input images.