This paper focuses on the task of speech-driven 3D facial animation, which aims to generate realistic and synchronized facial motions driven by speech inputs. Recent methods have employed audio-conditioned diffusion models for 3D facial animation, achieving impressive results in generating expressive and natural animations. However, these methods process the whole audio sequences in a single pass, which poses two major challenges: they tend to perform poorly when handling audio sequences that exceed the training horizon and will suffer from significant latency when processing long audio inputs. To address these limitations, we propose a novel autoregressive diffusion model that outputs facial motions in a streaming manner. This design ensures flexibility with varying audio lengths and achieves low latency independent of audio duration. Specifically, we select a limited number of past frames as historical motion context and combine them with the audio input to create a dynamic condition. This condition guides a lightweight diffusion head to iteratively generate facial motion frames, enabling real-time synthesis with high-quality results. Experiments conducted on public datasets demonstrate that our approach outperforms recent baseline methods.

Depth estimation is a fundamental task in 3D computer vision, crucial for applications such as 3D reconstruction, free-viewpoint rendering, robotics, autonomous driving, and AR/VR technologies. Traditional methods relying on hardware sensors like LiDAR are often limited by their high costs, low resolution, and sensitivity to the environment, limiting their applicability to real-world scenarios. Recent advances in vision-based methods offer a promising alternative, yet they face challenges in generalization and stability due to either the low capacity of model architectures or reliance on domain-specific and small-scale datasets. The emergence of scaling laws and foundation models in other domains has inspired the development of “depth foundation models”: deep neural networks trained on large datasets with strong zeroshot generalization capabilities. This paper surveys the evolution of deep learning architectures and paradigms for depth estimation across monocular, stereo, multiview, and monocular video settings. We explore the potential of these models to address existing challenges and we also provide a comprehensive overview of large-scale datasets that can facilitate their development. By identifying key architectures and training strategies, we aim to highlight the path towards robust depth foundation models, offering insights for future research and applications.

This paper aims to recover object materials from posed images captured under an unknown static lighting condition. Recent methods solve this task by optimizing material parameters through differentiable physically based rendering. However, due to the coupling between object geometry, materials, and environment lighting, there is inherent ambiguity during the inverse rendering process, preventing previous methods from obtaining accurate results. To overcome this ill-posed problem, our key idea is to learn the material prior with a generative model for regularizing the optimization process. We observe that the general rendering equation can be split into diffuse and specular shading terms, and thus formulate the material prior as diffusion models of albedo and specular. Thanks to this design, our model can be trained using the existing abundant 3D object data, and naturally acts as a versatile tool to resolve the ambiguity when recovering material representations from RGB images. In addition, we develop a coarse-to-fine training strategy that leverages estimated materials to guide diffusion models to satisfy multi-view consistent constraints, leading to more stable and accurate results. Extensive experiments on real-world and synthetic datasets demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on material recovery.

This paper aims to tackle the problem of modeling dynamic urban streets for autonomous driving scenes. Recent methods extend NeRF by incorporating tracked vehicle poses to animate vehicles, enabling photo-realistic view synthesis of dynamic urban street scenes. However, significant limitations are their slow training and rendering speed. We introduce Street Gaussians, a new explicit scene representation that tackles these limitations. Specifically, the dynamic urban scene is represented as a set of point clouds equipped with semantic logits and Gaussian primitives, each associated with either a foreground object or the background. To model the dynamics of foreground objects, each object point cloud is optimized with optimizable tracked poses, along with a 4D spherical harmonics model for the dynamic appearance. The explicit representation allows easy composition of objects and background, which in turn allows for scene editing operations and rendering at 135 FPS (1066 * 1600 resolution) within half an hour of training. The proposed method is evaluated on multiple challenging benchmarks, including KITTI and Waymo Open datasets. Experiments show that the proposed method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods across all datasets.

This paper aims to reconstruct the scene geometry from multi-view images with strong robustness and high quality. Previous learning-based methods incorporate neural networks into the multi-view stereo matching and have shown impressive reconstruction results. However, due to the reliance on matching across input images, they typically suffer from high GPU memory consumption and tend to fail in sparse view scenarios. To overcome this problem, we develop a new pipeline, named Murre, for multi-view geometry reconstruction of 3D scenes based on SfM-guided monocular depth estimation. For input images, Murre first recovers the SfM point cloud that captures the global scene structure, and then use it to guide a conditional diffusion model to produce multi-view metric depth maps for the final TSDF fusion. By predicting the depth map from a single image, Murre bypasses the multi-view matching step and naturally resolves the issues of previous MVS-based methods. In addition, the diffusion-based model can easily leverage the powerful priors of 2D foundation models, achieving good generalization ability across diverse real-world scenes. To obtain multi-view consistent depth maps, our key design is providing effective guidance on the diffusion model through the SfM point cloud, which is a condensed form of multiview information, highlighting the scene’s salient structure, and can be readily transformed into sparse depth maps to drive the image-space estimation process. We evaluate the reconstruction quality of Murre in various types of real-world datasets including indoor, streetscapes, and aerial scenes, surpassing state-of-the-art MVS-based and implicit neural reconstruction-based methods. The code and supplementary materials are available at https://zju3dv.github.io/murre/.

Prompts play a critical role in unleashing the power of language and vision foundation models for specific tasks. For the first time, we introduce prompting into depth foundation models, creating a new paradigm for metric depth estimation termed Prompt Depth Anything. Specifically, we use a low-cost LiDAR as the prompt to guide the Depth Anything model for accurate metric depth output, achieving up to 4K resolution. Our approach centers on a concise prompt fusion design that integrates the LiDAR at multiple scales within the depth decoder. To address training challenges posed by limited datasets containing both LiDAR depth and precise GT depth, we propose a scalable data pipeline that includes synthetic data LiDAR simulation and real data pseudo GT depth generation. Our approach sets new state-of-the-arts on the ARKitScenes and ScanNet++ datasets and benefits downstream applications, including 3D reconstruction and generalized robotic grasping.

This paper addresses the challenge of reconstructing dynamic 3D scenes with complex motions. Some recent works define 3D Gaussian primitives in the canonical space and use deformation fields to map canonical primitives to observation spaces, achieving real-time dynamic view synthesis. However, these methods often struggle to handle scenes with complex motions due to the difficulty of optimizing deformation fields. To overcome this problem, we propose FreeTimeGS, a novel 4D representation that allows Gaussian primitives to appear at arbitrary time and locations. In contrast to canonical Gaussian primitives, our representation possesses the strong flexibility, thus improving the ability to model dynamic 3D scenes. In addition, we endow each Gaussian primitive with an motion function, allowing it to move to neighboring regions over time, which reduces the temporal redundancy. Experiments results on several datasets show that the rendering quality of our method outperforms recent methods by a large margin. The code will be released for reproducibility.

The challenge of image-based 3D reconstruction for glossy objects lies in separating diffuse and specular components on glossy surfaces from captured images, a task complicated by the ambiguity in discerning lighting conditions and material properties using RGB data alone. While state-of-the-art methods rely on tailored and/or high-end equipment for data acquisition, which can be cumbersome and time-consuming, this work introduces a scalable polarization-aided approach that employs cost-effective acquisition tools. By attaching a linear polarizer to readily available RGB cameras, multi-view polarization images can be captured without the need for advance calibration or precise measurements of the polarizer angle, substantially reducing system construction costs. The proposed approach represents polarimetric BRDF, Stokes vectors, and polarization states of object surfaces as neural implicit fields. These fields, combined with the polarizer angle, are retrieved by optimizing the rendering loss of input polarized images. By leveraging fundamental physical principles for the implicit representation of polarization rendering, our method demonstrates superiority over existing techniques through experiments in public datasets and real captured images on both reconstruction and novel view synthesis.

In this paper, we introduce a method for reconstructing 3D humans from a single image using a biomechanically accurate skeleton model. To achieve this, we train a transformer that takes an image as input and estimates the parameters of the model. Due to the lack of training data for this task, we build a pipeline to produce pseudo ground truth model parameters for single images and implement a training procedure that iteratively refines these pseudo labels. Compared to state-of-the-art methods for 3D human mesh recovery, our model achieves competitive performance on standard benchmarks, while it significantly outperforms them in settings with extreme 3D poses and viewpoints. Additionally, we show that previous reconstruction methods frequently violate joint angle limits, leading to unnatural rotations. In contrast, our approach leverages the biomechanically plausible degrees of freedom making more realistic joint rotation estimates. We validate our approach across multiple human pose estimation benchmarks. We make the code, models and data available at: https://isshikihugh.github.io/HSMR/

Reconstructing complex reflections in real-world scenes from 2D images is essential for achieving photorealistic novel view synthesis. Existing methods that utilize environment maps to model reflections from distant lighting often struggle with high-frequency reflection details and fail to account for near-field reflections. In this work, we introduce EnvGS, a novel approach that employs a set of Gaussian primitives as an explicit 3D representation for capturing reflections of environments. These environment Gaussian primitives are incorporated with base Gaussian primitives to model the appearance of the whole scene. To efficiently render these environment Gaussian primitives, we developed a ray-tracing-based renderer that leverages the GPU’s RT core for fast rendering. This allows us to jointly optimize our model for high-quality reconstruction while maintaining real-time rendering speeds. Results from multiple real-world and synthetic datasets demonstrate that our method produces significantly more detailed reflections, achieving the best rendering quality in real-time novel view synthesis. The code is available at https://zju3dv.github.io/envgs.

This paper aims to tackle the problem of photorealistic view synthesis from vehicle sensor data. Recent advancements in neural scene representation have achieved notable success in rendering high-quality autonomous driving scenes, but the performance significantly degrades as the viewpoint deviates from the training trajectory. To mitigate this problem, we introduce StreetCrafter, a novel controllable video diffusion model that utilizes LiDAR point cloud renderings as pixel-level conditions, which fully exploits the generative prior for novel view synthesis, while preserving precise camera control. Moreover, the utilization of pixel-level LiDAR conditions allows us to make accurate pixel-level edits to target scenes. In addition, the generative prior of StreetCrafter can be effectively incorporated into dynamic scene representations to achieve real-time rendering. Experiments on Waymo Open Dataset and PandaSet demonstrate that our model enables flexible control over viewpoint changes, enlarging the view synthesis regions for satisfying rendering, which outperforms existing methods. The code is available at https://zju3dv.github.io/streetcrafter.

We present FLARE, a feed-forward model designed to infer high-quality camera poses and 3D geometry from uncalibrated sparse-view images (i.e., as few as 2-8 inputs), which is a challenging yet practical setting in real-world applications. Our solution features a cascaded learning paradigm with camera pose serving as the critical bridge, recognizing its essential role in mapping 3D structures onto 2D image planes. Concretely, FLARE starts with camera pose estimation, whose results condition the subsequent learning of geometric structure and appearance, optimized through the objectives of geometry reconstruction and novel-view synthesis. Utilizing large-scale public datasets for training, our method delivers state-of-the-art performance in the tasks of pose estimation, geometry reconstruction, and novel view synthesis, while maintaining the inference efficiency (i.e., less than 0.5 seconds). The project page and code can be found at: https://zhanghe3z.github.io/FLARE/

This paper targets the challenge of real-time LiDAR re-simulation in dynamic driving scenarios. Recent approaches utilize neural radiance fields combined with the physical modeling of LiDAR sensors to achieve high-fidelity re-simulation results. Unfortunately, these methods face limitations due to high computational demands in large-scale scenes and cannot perform real-time LiDAR rendering. To overcome these constraints, we propose LiDAR-RT, a novel framework that supports real-time, physically accurate LiDAR re-simulation for driving scenes. Our primary contribution is the development of an efficient and effective rendering pipeline, which integrates Gaussian primitives and hardware-accelerated ray tracing technology. Specifically, we model the physical properties of LiDAR sensors using Gaussian primitives with learnable parameters and incorporate scene graphs to handle scene dynamics. Building upon this scene representation, our framework first constructs a bounding volume hierarchy (BVH), then casts rays for each pixel and generates novel LiDAR views through a differentiable rendering algorithm. Importantly, our framework supports realistic rendering with flexible scene editing operations and various sensor configurations. Extensive experiments across multiple public benchmarks demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of rendering quality and efficiency. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/zju3dv/LiDAR-RT.

This paper tackles the challenge of robust reconstruction, i.e., the task of reconstructing a 3D scene from a set of inconsistent multi-view images. Some recent works have attempted to simultaneously remove image inconsistencies and perform reconstruction by integrating image degradation modeling into neural 3D scene representations. However, these methods rely heavily on dense observations for robustly optimizing model parameters. To address this issue, we propose to decouple robust reconstruction into two subtasks: restoration and reconstruction, which naturally simplifies the optimization process. To this end, we introduce UniVerse, a unified framework for robust reconstruction based on a video diffusion model. Specifically, UniVerse first converts inconsistent images into initial videos, then uses a specially designed video diffusion model to restore them into consistent images, and finally reconstructs the 3D scenes from these restored images. Compared with case-by-case per-view degradation modeling, the diffusion model learns a general scene prior from large-scale data, making it applicable to diverse image inconsistencies. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate the strong generalization capability and superior performance of our method in robust reconstruction. Moreover, UniVerse can control the style of the reconstructed 3D scene. Project page: https://jin-cao-tma.github.io/UniVerse.github.io/

Registering an object shape to a sequence of point clouds undergoing non-rigid deformation is a long-standing challenge. The key difficulties stem from two factors: (i) the presence of local minima due to the non-convexity of registration objectives, especially under noisy or partial inputs, which hinders accurate and robust deformation estimation, and (ii) error accumulation over long sequences, leading to tracking failures. To address these challenges, we introduce to adopt a scalable data-driven approach and propose ERNet, an efficient feed-forward model trained on large deformation datasets. It is designed to handle noisy and partial inputs while effectively leveraging temporal information for accurate and consistent sequential registration. The key to our design is predicting a sequence of deformation graphs through a two-stage pipeline, which first estimates frame-wise coarse graph nodes for robust initialization, before refining their trajectories over time in a sliding-window fashion. Extensive experiments show that our proposed approach (i) outperforms previous state-of-the-art on both the DeformingThings4D and D-FAUST datasets, and (ii) achieves more than 4x speedup compared to the previous best, offering significant efficiency improvement.

This paper addresses the challenge of high-fidelity view synthesis of humans with sparse-view videos as input. Previous methods solve the issue of insufficient observation by leveraging 4D diffusion models to generate videos at novel viewpoints. However, the generated videos from these models often lack spatio-temporal consistency, thus degrading view synthesis quality. In this paper, we propose a novel sliding iterative denoising process to enhance the spatio-temporal consistency of the 4D diffusion model. Specifically, we define a latent grid in which each latent encodes the image, camera pose, and human pose for a certain viewpoint and timestamp, then alternately denoising the latent grid along spatial and temporal dimensions with a sliding window, and finally decode the videos at target viewpoints from the corresponding denoised latents. Through the iterative sliding, information flows sufficiently across the latent grid, allowing the diffusion model to obtain a large receptive field and thus enhance the 4D consistency of the output, while making the GPU memory consumption affordable. The experiments on the DNA-Rendering and ActorsHQ datasets demonstrate that our method is able to synthesize high-quality and consistent novel-view videos and significantly outperforms the existing approaches. See our project page for interactive demos and video results: https://diffuman4d.github.io/ .

We present visual action prompts, a unified action representation for action-to-video generation of complex high-DoF interactions while maintaining transferable visual dynamics across domains. Action-driven video generation faces a precision-generality trade-off: existing methods using text, primitive actions, or coarse masks offer generality but lack precision, while agent-centric action signals provide precision at the cost of cross-domain transferability. To balance action precision and dynamic transferability, we propose to "render" actions into precise visual prompts as domain-agnostic representations that preserve both geometric precision and cross-domain adaptability for complex actions; specifically, we choose visual skeletons for their generality and accessibility. We propose robust pipelines to construct skeletons from two interaction-rich data sources - human-object interactions (HOI) and dexterous robotic manipulation - enabling cross-domain training of action-driven generative models. By integrating visual skeletons into pretrained video generation models via lightweight fine-tuning, we enable precise action control of complex interaction while preserving the learning of cross-domain dynamics. Experiments on EgoVid, RT-1 and DROID demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach. Project page: https://zju3dv.github.io/VAP/.

This paper addresses the task of generating two-character online interactions. Previously, two main settings existed for two-character interaction generation: (1) generating one's motions based on the counterpart's complete motion sequence, and (2) jointly generating two-character motions based on specific conditions. We argue that these settings fail to model the process of real-life two-character interactions, where humans will react to their counterparts in real time and act as independent individuals. In contrast, we propose an online reaction policy, called Ready-to-React, to generate the next character pose based on past observed motions. Each character has its own reaction policy as its ``brain'', enabling them to interact like real humans in a streaming manner. Our policy is implemented by incorporating a diffusion head into an auto-regressive model, which can dynamically respond to the counterpart's motions while effectively mitigating the error accumulation throughout the generation process. We conduct comprehensive experiments using the challenging boxing task. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms existing baselines and can generate extended motion sequences. Additionally, we show that our approach can be controlled by sparse signals, making it well-suited for VR and other online interactive environments. Code and data will be made publicly available.

Shape restoration aims to recover intact 3D shapes from defective ones, such as those that are incomplete, noisy, and low-resolution. Previous works have achieved impressive results in shape restoration subtasks thanks to advanced generative models. While effective for specific shape defects, they are less applicable in real-world scenarios involving multiple defect types simultaneously. Additionally, training on limited subsets of defective shapes hinders knowledge transfer across restoration types and thus affects generalization. In this paper, we address the task of general shape restoration, which restores shapes with various types of defects through a unified model, thereby naturally improving the applicability and scalability. Our approach first standardizes the data representation across different restoration subtasks using high-resolution TSDF grids and constructs a large-scale dataset with diverse types of shape defects. Next, we design an efficient hierarchical shape generation model and a noise-robust defective shape encoder that enables effective impaired shape understanding and intact shape generation. Moreover, we propose a scalable training strategy for efficient model training. The capabilities of our proposed method are demonstrated across multiple shape restoration subtasks and validated on various datasets, including Objaverse, ShapeNet, GSO, and ABO.

Training perception systems for self-driving cars requires substantial 2D annotations that are labor-intensive to manual label. While existing datasets provide rich annotations on pre-recorded sequences, they fall short in labeling rarely encountered viewpoints, potentially hampering the generalization ability for perception models. In this paper, we present PanopticNeRF-360, a novel approach that combines coarse 3D annotations with noisy 2D semantic cues to generate high-quality panoptic labels and images from any viewpoint. Our key insight lies in exploiting the complementarity of 3D and 2D priors to mutually enhance geometry and semantics. Specifically, we propose to leverage coarse 3D bounding primitives and noisy 2D semantic and instance predictions to guide geometry optimization, by encouraging predicted labels to match panoptic pseudo ground truth. Simultaneously, the improved geometry assists in filtering 3D&2D annotation noise by fusing semantics in 3D space via a learned semantic field. To further enhance appearance, we combine MLP and hash grids to yield hybrid scene features, striking a balance between high-frequency appearance and contiguous semantics. Our experiments demonstrate PanopticNeRF-360's state-of-the-art performance over label transfer methods on the challenging urban scenes of the KITTI-360 dataset. Moreover, PanopticNeRF-360 enables omnidirectional rendering of high-fidelity, multi-view and spatiotemporally consistent appearance, semantic and instance labels.

This paper addresses the problem of decomposed 4D scene reconstruction from multi-view videos. Recent methods achieve this by lifting video segmentation results to a 4D representation through differentiable rendering techniques. Therefore, they heavily rely on the quality of video segmentation maps, which are often unstable, leading to unreliable reconstruction results. To overcome this challenge, our key idea is to represent the decomposed 4D scene with the Freetime FeatureGS and design a streaming feature learning strategy to accurately recover it from per-image segmentation maps, eliminating the need for video segmentation. Freetime FeatureGS models the dynamic scene as a set of Gaussian primitives with learnable features and linear motion ability, allowing them to move to neighboring regions over time. We apply a contrastive loss to Freetime FeatureGS, forcing primitive features to be close or far apart based on whether their projections belong to the same instance in the 2D segmentation map. As our Gaussian primitives can move across time, it naturally extends the feature learning to the temporal dimension, achieving 4D segmentation. Furthermore, we sample observations for training in a temporally ordered manner, enabling the streaming propagation of features over time and effectively avoiding local minima during the optimization process. Experimental results on several datasets show that the reconstruction quality of our method outperforms recent methods by a large margin.

This paper tackles the problem of creating relightable and animatable neural avatars from sparse-view (or monocular) videos of dynamic humans under unknown illumination. Previous neural human reconstruction methods produce animatable avatars from sparse views using deformed Signed Distance Fields (SDF) but are non-relightable. While differentiable inverse rendering methods have succeeded in the material recovery of static objects, it is not straightforward to extend them to dynamic humans since it is computationally intensive to compute pixel-surface intersection and light visibility on deformed SDFs for relighting. To solve this challenge, we propose a Hierarchical Distance Query (HDQ) algorithm to approximate the world space SDF under arbitrary human poses. Specifically, we estimate coarse SDF based on a parametric human model and compute fine SDF by exploiting the invariance of SDF w.r.t. local deformation. Based on HDQ, we leverage sphere tracing to efficiently estimate the surface intersection and light visibility. This allows us to develop the first system to recover relightable and animatable neural avatars from sparse or monocular inputs. Experiments show that our approach produces superior results compared to state-of-the-art methods. Our project page is available at https://zju3dv.github.io/relightable_avatar.

This paper targets high-fidelity and real-time view synthe-sis of dynamic 3D scenes at 4K resolution. Recent methods on dynamic view synthesis have shown impressive rendering quality. However, their speed is still limited when rendering high-resolution images. To overcome this problem, we propose 4K4D, a 4D point cloud representation that supports hardware rasterization and network pre-computation to enable unprecedented rendering speed with a high rendering quality. Our representation is built on a 4D feature grid so that the points are naturally regularized and can be robustly optimized. In addition, we design a novel hybrid appearance model that significantly boosts the rendering quality while preserving efficiency. Moreover, we develop a differentiable depth peeling algorithm to effectively learn the proposed model from RGB videos. Experiments show that our representation can be rendered at over 400 FPS on the DNA-Rendering dataset at 1080p resolution and 80 FPS on the ENeRF-Outdoor dataset at 4K resolution using an RTX 4090 GPU, which is 30× faster than previous methods and achieves the state-of-the-art rendering quality. Our project page is available at https://ziu3dv.github.io/4k4d.

Generating human motions from textual descriptions has gained growing research interest due to its wide range of applications. However, only a few works consider human- scene interactions together with text conditions, which is crucial for visual and physical realism. This paper fo-cuses on the task of generating human motions in 3D in-door scenes given text descriptions of the human-scene in-teractions. This task presents challenges due to the multi-modality nature of text, scene, and motion, as well as the need for spatial reasoning. To address these challenges, we propose a new approach that decomposes the complex prob-lem into two more manageable sub-problems: (1) language grounding of the target object and (2) object-centric motion generation. For language grounding of the target ob-ject, we leverage the power of large language models. For motion generation, we design an object-centric scene rep-resentation for the generative model to focus on the target object, thereby reducing the scene complexity and facilitating the modeling of the relationship between human motions and the object. Experiments demonstrate the better motion quality of our approach compared to baselines and validate our design choices. Code will be available at link.

We propose a structure-from-motion framework to recover accurate camera poses and point clouds from unordered images. Traditional SfM systems typically rely on the successful detection of repeatable keypoints across multiple views as the first step, which is difficult for texture-poor scenes, and poor keypoint detection may break down the whole SfM system. We propose a detector-free SfM framework to draw benefits from the recent success of detector-free matchers to avoid the early determination of keypoints, while solving the multi-view inconsistency issue of detector-free matchers. Specifically, our framework first reconstructs a coarse SfM model from quantized detector-free matches. Then, it refines the model by a novel iterative refinement pipeline, which iterates between an attention-based multi-view matching module to refine feature tracks and a geometry refinement module to improve the reconstruction accuracy. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed framework outperforms existing detector-based SfM systems on common benchmark datasets. We also collect a texture-poor SfM dataset to demonstrate the capa-bility of our framework to reconstruct texture-poor scenes. Based on this framework, we take the first place in Image Matching Challenge 2023 [9]. Project page: https://zju3dv.github.io/DetectorFreeSfM/.

While image diffusion models have made significant progress in text-driven 3D content creation, they often fail to accurately capture the intended meaning of text prompts, especially for view information. This limitation leads to the Janus problem, where multi-faced 3D models are generated under the guidance of such diffusion models. In this paper, we propose a robust high-quality 3D content generation pipeline by exploiting orthogonal-view image guidance. First, we introduce a novel 2D diffusion model that generates an image consisting of four orthogonal-view sub-images based on the given text prompt. Then, the 3D content is created using this diffusion model. Notably, the generated orthogonal-view image provides strong geometric structure priors and thus improves 3D consistency. As a result, it effectively resolves the Janus problem and significantly enhances the quality of 3D content creation. Additionally, we present a 3D synthesis fusion network that can further improve the details of the generated 3D contents. Both quantitative and qualitative evaluations demonstrate that our method surpasses previous text-to-3D techniques. Project page: https://efficientdreamer.github.io.

We present the content deformation field (CoDeF) as a new type of video representation, which consists of a canonical content field aggregating the static contents in the entire video and a temporal deformation field recording the transformations from the canonical image (i.e., rendered from the canonical content field) to each individual frame along the time axis. Given a target video, these two fields are jointly optimized to reconstruct it through a carefully tailored rendering pipeline. We advisedly introduce some regularizations into the optimization process, urging the canonical content field to inherit semantics (e.g., the object shape) from the video. With such a design, CoDeF naturally supports lifting image algorithms for video processing, in the sense that one can apply an image algorithm to the canonical image and effortlessly propagate the outcomes to the entire video with the aid of the temporal deformation field. We experimentally show that CoDeF is able to lift image-to-image translation to video-to-video translation and lift keypoint detection to keypoint tracking without any training. More importantly, thanks to our lifting strategy that deploys the algorithms on only one image, we achieve superior cross-frame consistency in processed videos compared to existing video-to-video translation approaches, and even manage to track non-rigid objects like water and smog. Code is made available at https: / /qiuyu96. github.io/CoDeF/

We present a novel method for efficiently producing semi-dense matches across images. Previous detector-free matcher LoFTR has shown remarkable matching capability in handling large-viewpoint change and texture-poor scenarios but suffers from low efficiency. We revisit its design choices and derive multiple improvements for both efficiency and accuracy. One key observation is that performing the transformer over the entire feature map is redundant due to shared local information, therefore we propose an aggregated attention mechanism with adaptive token selection for efficiency. Furthermore, we find spatial variance exists in LoFTR's fine correlation module, which is adverse to matching accuracy. A novel two-stage correlation layer is proposed to achieve accurate subpixel correspon-dences for accuracy improvement. Our efficiency optimized model is ~ 2.5 x faster than LoFTR which can even surpass state-of-the-art efficient sparse matching pipeline Super-Point + LightGlue. Moreover, extensive experiments show that our method can achieve higher accuracy compared with competitive semi-dense matchers, with considerable efficiency benefits. This opens up exciting prospects for large-scale or latency-sensitive applications such as image retrieval and 3D reconstruction. Project page: https://zju3dv.github.io/efficientloftr/.

Recovering dense and long-range pixel motion in videos is a challenging problem. Part of the difficulty arises from the 3D-to-2D projection process, leading to occlusions and discontinuities in the 2D motion domain. While 2D motion can be intricate, we posit that the underlying 3D motion can often be simple and low-dimensional. In this work, we propose to estimate point trajectories in 3D space to mitigate the issues caused by image projection. Our method, named SpatialTracker, lifts 2D pixels to 3D using monocular depth estimators, represents the 3D content of each frame efficiently using a triplane representation, and performs iterative updates using a transformer to estimate 3D trajectories. Tracking in 3D allows us to leverage asrigid-as-possible (ARAP) constraints while simultaneously learning a rigidity embedding that clusters pixels into different rigid parts. Extensive evaluation shows that our approach achieves state-of-the-art tracking performance both qualitatively and quantitatively, particularly in challenging scenarios such as out-of-plane rotation. And our project page is available at https://henry123-boy.github.io/SpaTracker/.

We study macro motion analysis, where macro motion refers to the collection of all visually observable motions in a dynamic scene. Traditional filtering-based methods on motion analysis typically focus only on local and tiny motions, yet fail to represent large motions or 3D scenes. Recent dynamic neural representations can faithfully represent motions using correspondences, but they cannot be directly used for motion analysis. In this work, we propose Phase-based neural polynomial Gabor fields (Phase-PGF), which learns to represent scene dynamics with low-dimensional time-varying phases. We theoretically show that Phase-PGF has several properties suitable for macro motion analysis. In our experiments, we collect diverse 2D and 3D dynamic scenes and show that Phase-PGF enables dynamic scene analysis and editing tasks including motion loop detection, motion factorization, motion smoothing, and motion magnification. Project page: https://chen-geng.com/phasepgf

We present a novel method for recovering world-grounded human motion from monocular video. The main challenge lies in the ambiguity of defining the world coordinate system, which varies between sequences. Previous approaches attempt to alleviate this issue by predicting relative motion in an autoregressive manner, but are prone to accumulating errors. Instead, we propose estimating human poses in a novel Gravity-View (GV) coordinate system, which is defined by the world gravity and the camera view direction. The proposed GV system is naturally gravity-aligned and uniquely defined for each video frame, largely reducing the ambiguity of learning image-pose mapping. The estimated poses can be transformed back to the world coordinate system using camera rotations, forming a global motion sequence. Additionally, the per-frame estimation avoids error accumulation in the autoregressive methods. Experiments on in-the-wild benchmarks demonstrate that our method recovers more realistic motion in both the camera space and world-grounded settings, outperforming state-of-the-art methods in both accuracy and speed. The code is available at https://zju3dv.github.io/gvhmr/.

We present a novel framework named NeuralRecon for real-time 3D scene reconstruction from a monocular video. Unlike previous methods that estimate single-view depth maps separately on each key-frame and fuse them later, we propose to directly reconstruct local surfaces represented as sparse TSDF volumes for each video fragment sequentially by a neural network. A learning-based TSDF fusion module based on gated recurrent units is used to guide the network to fuse features from previous fragments. This design allows the network to capture local smoothness prior and global shape prior of 3D surfaces when sequentially reconstructing the surfaces, resulting in accurate, coherent, and real-time surface reconstruction. The fused features can also be used to predict semantic labels, allowing our method to reconstruct and segment the 3D scene simultaneously. Furthermore, we purpose an efficient self-supervised fine-tuning scheme that refines scene geometry based on input images through differentiable volume rendering. This fine-tuning scheme improves reconstruction quality on the fine-tuned scenes, as well as the generalization to similar test scenes. The experiments on ScanNet, 7-Scenes and Replica datasets show that our system outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of both accuracy and speed.

This paper addresses the challenge of reconstructing 3D indoor scenes from multi-view images. Many previous works have shown impressive reconstruction results on textured objects, but they still have difficulty in handling low-textured planar regions, which are common in indoor scenes. An approach to solving this issue is to incorporate planar constraints into the depth map estimation in multi-view stereo-based methods, but the per-view plane estimation and depth optimization lack both efficiency and multi-view consistency. In this work, we show that the planar constraints can be conveniently integrated into the recent implicit neural representation-based reconstruction methods. Specifically, we use an MLP network to represent the signed distance function as the scene geometry. Based on the Manhattan-world assumption and the Atlanta-world assumption, planar constraints are employed to regularize the geometry in floor and wall regions predicted by a 2D semantic segmentation network. To resolve the inaccurate segmentation, we encode the semantics of 3D points with another MLP and design a novel loss that jointly optimizes the scene geometry and semantics in 3D space. Experiments on ScanNet and 7-Scenes datasets show that the proposed method outperforms previous methods by a large margin on 3D reconstruction quality.

This paper addresses the challenge of reconstructing an animatable human model from a multi-view video. Some recent works have proposed to decompose a non-rigidly deforming scene into a canonical neural radiance field and a set of deformation fields that map observation-space points to the canonical space, thereby enabling them to learn the dynamic scene from images. However, they represent the deformation field as translational vector field or SE(3) field, which makes the optimization highly under-constrained. Moreover, these representations cannot be explicitly controlled by input motions. Instead, we introduce blend weight fields to produce the deformation fields. Based on the skeleton-driven deformation, blend weight fields are used with 3D human skeletons to generate observation-to-canonical and canonical-to-observation correspondences. Since 3D human skeletons are more observable, they can regularize the learning of deformation fields. Moreover, the blend weight fields can be combined with input skeletal motions to generate new deformation fields to animate the human model. To improve the quality of human modeling, we further represent the human geometry as a signed distance field in the canonical space. Additionally, a neural point displacement field is introduced to enhance the capability of the blend weight field on modeling detailed human motions. Experiments show that our approach significantly outperforms recent human modeling methods.

This paper aims to address the challenge of reconstructing long volumetric videos from multi-view RGB videos. Recent dynamic view synthesis methods leverage powerful 4D representations, like feature grids or point cloud sequences, to achieve high-quality rendering results. However, they are typically limited to short (1~2s) video clips and often suffer from large memory footprints when dealing with longer videos. To solve this issue, we propose a novel 4D representation, named Temporal Gaussian Hierarchy, to compactly model long volumetric videos. Our key observation is that there are generally various degrees of temporal redundancy in dynamic scenes, which consist of areas changing at different speeds. Motivated by this, our approach builds a multi-level hierarchy of 4D Gaussian primitives, where each level separately describes scene regions with different degrees of content change, and adaptively shares Gaussian primitives to represent unchanged scene content over different temporal segments, thus effectively reducing the number of Gaussian primitives. In addition, the tree-like structure of the Gaussian hierarchy allows us to efficiently represent the scene at a particular moment with a subset of Gaussian primitives, leading to nearly constant GPU memory usage during the training or rendering regardless of the video length. Moreover, we design a Compact Appearance Model that mixes diffuse and view-dependent Gaussians to further minimize the model size while maintaining the rendering quality. We also develop a rasterization pipeline of Gaussian primitives based on the hardware-accelerated technique to improve rendering speed. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our method over alternative methods in terms of training cost, rendering speed, and storage usage. To our knowledge, this work is the first approach capable of efficiently handling hours of volumetric video data while maintaining state-of-the-art rendering quality.

This paper addresses the challenge of efficiently reconstructing volumetric videos of dynamic humans from sparse multi-view videos. Some recent works represent a dynamic human as a canonical neural radiance field (NeRF) and a motion field, which are learned from input videos through differentiable rendering. But the per-scene optimization generally requires hours. Other generalizable NeRF models leverage learned prior from datasets to reduce the optimization time by only finetuning on new scenes at the cost of visual fidelity. In this paper, we propose a novel method for learning neural volumetric representations of dynamic humans in minutes with competitive visual quality. Specifically, we define a novel part-based voxelized human representation to better distribute the representational power of the network to different human parts. Furthermore, we propose a novel 2D motion parameterization scheme to increase the convergence rate of deformation field learning. Experiments demonstrate that our model can be learned 100 times faster than previous per-scene optimization methods while being competitive in the rendering quality. Training our model on a 512 × 512 video with 100 frames typically takes about 5 minutes on a single RTX 3090 GPU. The code is available on our project page: https://zju3dv.github.io/instant_nvr.

We propose TensoIR, a novel inverse rendering approach based on tensor factorization and neural fields. Unlike previous works that use purely MLP-based neural fields, thus suffering from low capacity and high computation costs, we extend TensoRF, a state-of-the-art approach for radiance field modeling, to estimate scene geometry, surface reflectance, and environment illumination from multi-view images captured under unknown lighting conditions. Our approach jointly achieves radiance field reconstruction and physically-based model estimation, leading to photo-realistic novel view synthesis and relighting results. Benefiting from the efficiency and extensibility of the TensoRF-based representation, our method can accurately model secondary shading effects (like shadows and indirect lighting) and generally support input images captured under single or multiple unknown lighting conditions. The low-rank tensor representation allows us to not only achieve fast and compact reconstruction but also better exploit shared information under an arbitrary number of capturing lighting conditions. We demonstrate the superiority of our method to baseline methods qualitatively and quantitatively on various challenging synthetic and real-world scenes.

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/

This paper introduces a novel representation of volumetric videos for real-time view synthesis of dynamic scenes. Recent advances in neural scene representations demonstrate their remarkable capability to model and render complex static scenes, but extending them to represent dynamic scenes is not straightforward due to their slow rendering speed or high storage cost. To solve this problem, our key idea is to represent the radiance field of each frame as a set of shallow MLP networks whose parameters are stored in 2D grids, called MLP maps, and dynamically predicted by a 2D CNN decoder shared by all frames. Representing 3D scenes with shallow MLPs significantly improves the rendering speed, while dynamically predicting MLP parameters with a shared 2D CNN instead of explicitly storing them leads to low storage cost. Experiments show that the proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art rendering quality on the NHR and ZJU-MoCap datasets, while being efficient for real-time rendering with a speed of 41.7 fps for$512\times 512$images on an RTX 3090 GPU. The code is available at https://zju3dv.github.io/mlp_maps/.

We present a novel method for recovering the absolute pose and shape of a human in a pre-scanned scene given a single image. Unlike previous methods that perform scene-aware mesh optimization, we propose to first estimate absolute position and dense scene contacts with a sparse 3D CNN, and later enhance a pretrained human mesh recovery network by cross-attention with the derived 3D scene cues. Joint learning on images and scene geometry enables our method to reduce the ambiguity caused by depth and occlusion, resulting in more reasonable global postures and contacts. Encoding scene-aware cues in the network also allows the proposed method to be optimization-free, and opens up the opportunity for real-time applications. The experiments show that the proposed network is capable of recovering accurate and physically-plausible meshes by a single forward pass and outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of both accuracy and speed. Code is available on our project page: https://zju3dv.github.io/sahmr/.

A fully automated object reconstruction pipeline is crucial for digital content creation. While the area of 3D reconstruction has witnessed profound developments, the removal of background to obtain a clean object model still relies on different forms of manual labor, such as bounding box labeling, mask annotations, and mesh manipulations. In this paper, we propose a novel framework named AutoRecon for the automated discovery and reconstruction of an object from multi-view images. We demonstrate that foreground objects can be robustly located and segmented from SfM point clouds by leveraging self-supervised 2D vision transformer features. Then, we reconstruct decomposed neural scene representations with dense supervision provided by the decomposed point clouds, resulting in accurate object reconstruction and segmentation. Experiments on the DTU, BlendedMVS and CO3D-V2 datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of AutoRecon. The code and supplementary material are available on the project page: https://zju3dv.github.io/autorecon/.

Despite the remarkable advances in image matching and pose estimation, image-based localization of a camera in a temporally-varying outdoor environment is still a challenging problem due to huge appearance disparity between query and reference images caused by illumination, seasonal and structural changes. In this work, we propose to leverage additional sensors on a mobile phone, mainly GPS, compass, and gravity sensor, to solve this challenging problem. We show that these mobile sensors provide decent initial poses and effective constraints to reduce the searching space in image matching and final pose estimation. With the initial pose, we are also able to devise a direct 2D-3D matching network to efficiently establish 2D-3D correspondences instead of tedious 2D-2D matching in existing systems. As no public dataset exists for the studied problem, we collect a new dataset that provides a variety of mobile sensor data and significant scene appearance variations, and develop a system to acquire ground-truth poses for query images. We benchmark our method as well as several state-of-the-art baselines and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Our code and dataset are available on the project page: https://zju3dv.github.io/sensloc/

We introduce a novel approach that takes a single semantic mask as input to synthesize multi-view consistent color images of natural scenes, trained with a collection of single images from the Internet. Prior works on 3D-aware image synthesis either require multi-view supervision or learning category-level prior for specific classes of objects, which are inapplicable to natural scenes. Our key idea to solve this challenge is to use a semantic field as the intermediate representation, which is easier to reconstruct from an input semantic mask and then translated to a radiance field with the assistance of off-the-shelf semantic image synthesis models. Experiments show that our method outperforms baseline methods and produces photorealistic and multi-view consistent videos of a variety of natural scenes. The project website is https://zju3dv.github.io/paintingnature/.

We propose a novel approach to self-supervised learning of point cloud representations by differentiable neural rendering. Motivated by the fact that informative point cloud features should be able to encode rich geometry and appearance cues and render realistic images, we train a point-cloud encoder within a devised point-based neural renderer by comparing the rendered images with real images on massive RGB-D data. The learned point-cloud encoder can be easily integrated into various downstream tasks, including not only high-level tasks like 3D detection and segmentation but also low-level tasks like 3D reconstruction and image synthesis. Extensive experiments on various tasks demonstrate the superiority of our approach compared to existing pre-training methods.

This paper presents a novel approach to generating the 3D motion of a human interacting with a target object, with a focus on solving the challenge of synthesizing long-range and diverse motions, which could not be fulfilled by existing auto-regressive models or path planning-based methods. We propose a hierarchical generation framework to solve this challenge. Specifically, our framework first generates a set of milestones and then synthesizes the motion along them. Therefore, the long-range motion generation could be reduced to synthesizing several short motion sequences guided by milestones. The experiments on the NSM, COUCH, and SAMP datasets show that our approach outperforms previous methods by a large margin in both quality and diversity. The source code is available on our project page https://zju3dv.github.io/hghoi.

This paper solves the problem of real-time 6-DoF object tracking from an RGB video. Prior optimization-based methods optimize the object pose by aligning the projected model to the image based on handcrafted features, which are prone to suboptimal solutions. Recent learning-based methods use neural networks to predict the pose, which suffer from limited generalizability or computational efficiency. We propose a learning-based active contour model to make the best use of both worlds. Specifically, given an initial pose, we project the object model to the image plane to obtain the initial contour and use a lightweight network to predict how the contour should move to match the true object boundary, which provides the gradients to optimize the object pose. We also devise an efficient optimization algorithm to train our model end-to-end with pose supervision. Experimental results on semi-synthetic and real-world 6-DoF object tracking datasets demonstrate that our model outperforms state-of-the-art methods by a substantial margin in pose accuracy, while achieving real-time performance on mobile devices. Code is available on our project page: https://zju3dv.github.io/deep_ac/.

We present a novel approach to interactive 3D object perception for robots. Unlike previous perception algorithms that rely on known object models or a large amount of annotated training data, we propose a poking-based approach that automatically discovers and reconstructs 3D objects. The poking process not only enables the robot to discover unseen 3D objects but also produces multi-view observations for 3D reconstruction of the objects. The reconstructed objects are then memorized by neural networks with regular supervised learning and can be recognized in new test images. The experiments on real-world data show that our approach could unsupervisedly discover and reconstruct unseen 3D objects with high quality, and facilitate real-world applications such as robotic grasping. The code and supplementary materials are available at the project page: https://zju3dv.github.io/poking_perception/.

This paper addresses the challenge of representing high-fidelity volumetric videos with low storage cost. Some recent feature grid-based methods have shown superior performance of fast learning implicit neural representations from input 2D images. However, such explicit representations easily lead to large model sizes when modeling dynamic scenes. To solve this problem, our key idea is reducing the spatial and temporal redundancy of feature grids, which intrinsically exist due to the self-similarity of scenes. To this end, we propose a novel neural representation, named dynamic codebook, which first merges similar features for the model compression and then compensates for the potential decline in rendering quality by a set of dynamic codes. Experiments on the NHR and DyNeRF datasets demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art rendering quality, while being able to achieve more storage efficiency. The source code is available at https://github.com/zju3dv/compact_vv.

This paper aims to tackle the challenge of dynamic view synthesis from multi-view videos. The key observation is that while previous grid-based methods offer consistent rendering, they fall short in capturing appearance details of a complex dynamic scene, a domain where multi-view image-based rendering methods demonstrate the opposite properties. To combine the best of two worlds, we introduce Im4D, a hybrid scene representation that consists of a grid-based geometry representation and a multi-view image-based appearance representation. Specifically, the dynamic geometry is encoded as a 4D density function composed of spatiotemporal feature planes and a small MLP network, which globally models the scene structure and facilitates the rendering consistency. We represent the scene appearance by the original multi-view videos and a network that learns to predict the color of a 3D point from image features, instead of memorizing detailed appearance totally with networks, thereby naturally making the learning of networks easier. Our method is evaluated on five dynamic view synthesis datasets including DyNeRF, ZJU-MoCap, NHR, DNA-Rendering and ENeRF-Outdoor datasets. The results show that Im4D exhibits state-of-the-art performance in rendering quality and can be trained efficiently, while realizing real-time rendering with a speed of 79.8 FPS for 512x512 images, on a single RTX 3090 GPU. The code is available at https://zju3dv.github.io/im4d.

This paper addresses the challenge of novel view synthesis for a human performer from a very sparse set of camera views. Some recent works have shown that learning implicit neural representations of 3D scenes achieves remarkable view synthesis quality given dense input views. However, the representation learning will be ill-posed if the views are highly sparse. To solve this ill-posed problem, our key idea is to integrate observations over video frames. To this end, we propose Neural Body, a new human body representation which assumes that the learned neural representations at different frames share the same set of latent codes anchored to a deformable mesh, so that the observations across frames can be naturally integrated. The deformable mesh also provides geometric guidance for the network to learn 3D representations more efficiently. Furthermore, we combine Neural Body with implicit surface models to improve the learned geometry. To evaluate our approach, we perform experiments on both synthetic and real-world data, which show that our approach outperforms prior works by a large margin on novel view synthesis and 3D reconstruction. We also demonstrate the capability of our approach to reconstruct a moving person from a monocular video on the People-Snapshot dataset.

We present a novel method for local image feature matching. Instead of performing image feature detection, description, and matching sequentially, we propose to first establish pixel-wise dense matches at a coarse level and later refine the good matches at a fine level. In contrast to dense methods that use a cost volume to search correspondences, we use self and cross attention layers in Transformer to obtain feature descriptors that are conditioned on both images. The global receptive field provided by Transformer enables our method to produce dense matches in low-texture areas, where feature detectors usually struggle to produce repeatable interest points. The experiments on indoor and outdoor datasets show that LoFTR outperforms state-of-the-art methods by a large margin. We further adapt LoFTR to modern SfM systems and illustrate its application in multiple-view geometry. The proposed method demonstrates superior performance in Image Matching Challenge 2021 and ranks first on two public benchmarks of visual localization among the published methods. The code is available at https://zju3dv.github.io/loftr.

This paper addresses the challenging task of reconstructing the poses of multiple individuals engaged in close interactions, captured by multiple calibrated cameras. The difficulty arises from the noisy or false 2D keypoint detections due to inter-person occlusion, the heavy ambiguity in associating keypoints to individuals due to the close interactions, and the scarcity of training data as collecting and annotating motion data in crowded scenes is resource-intensive. We introduce a novel system to address these challenges. Our system integrates a learning-based pose estimation component and its corresponding training and inference strategies. The pose estimation component takes multi-view 2D keypoint heatmaps as input and reconstructs the pose of each individual using a 3D conditional volumetric network. As the network doesn't need images as input, we can leverage known camera parameters from test scenes and a large quantity of existing motion capture data to synthesize massive training data that mimics the real data distribution in test scenes. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach significantly surpasses previous approaches in terms of pose accuracy and is generalizable across various camera setups and population sizes. The code is available on our project page: https://github.com/zju3dv/CloseMoCap.

This paper addresses the challenge of human performance capture from sparse multi-view or monocular videos. Given a template mesh of the performer, previous methods capture the human motion by non-rigidly registering the template mesh to images with 2D silhouettes or dense photometric alignment. However, the detailed surface deformation cannot be recovered from the silhouettes, while the photometric alignment suffers from instability caused by appearance variation in the videos. To solve these problems, we propose NerfCap, a novel performance capture method based on the dynamic neural radiance field (NeRF) representation of the performer. Specifically, a canonical NeRF is initialized from the template geometry and registered to the video frames by optimizing the deformation field and the appearance model of the canonical NeRF. To capture both large body motion and detailed surface deformation, NerfCap combines linear blend skinning with embedded graph deformation. In contrast to the mesh-based methods that suffer from fixed topology and texture, NerfCap is able to flexibly capture complex geometry and appearance variation across the videos, and synthesize more photo-realistic images. In addition, NerfCap can be pre-trained end to end in a self-supervised manner by matching the synthesized videos with the input videos. Experimental results on various datasets show that NerfCap outperforms prior works in terms of both surface reconstruction accuracy and novel-view synthesis quality.

Large-scale training data with high-quality annotations is critical for training semantic and instance segmentation models. Unfortunately, pixel-wise annotation is labor-intensive and costly, raising the demand for more efficient labeling strategies. In this work, we present a novel 3D-to-2D label transfer method, Panoptic NeRF1, which aims for obtaining per-pixel 2D semantic and instance labels from easy-to-obtain coarse 3D bounding primitives. Our method utilizes NeRF as a differentiable tool to unify coarse 3D annotations and 2D semantic cues transferred from existing datasets. We demonstrate that this combination allows for improved geometry guided by semantic information, enabling rendering of accurate semantic maps across multiple views. Furthermore, this fusion process resolves label ambiguity of the coarse 3D annotations and filters noise in the 2D predictions. By inferring in 3D space and rendering to 2D labels, our 2D semantic and instance labels are multiview consistent by design. Experimental results show that Panoptic NeRF outperforms existing label transfer methods in terms of accuracy and multi-view consistency on challenging urban scenes of the KITTI-360 dataset.

The task of audiovisual sound source localization has been well studied under constrained scenes, where the audio recordings are clean. However, in real world scenarios, audios are usually contaminated by off screen sound and background noise. They will interfere with the procedure of identifying desired sources and building visual sound connections, making previous studies nonapplicable. In this work, we propose the Interference Eraser (IEr) framework, which tackles the problem of audiovisual sound source localization in the wild. The key idea is to eliminate the interference by redefining and carving discriminative audio representations. Specifically, we observe that the previous practice of learning only a single audio representation is insufficient due to the additive nature of audio signals. We thus extend the audio representation with our Audio Instance Identifier module, which clearly distinguishes sounding instances when audio signals of different volumes are unevenly mixed. Then we erase the influence of the audible but off screen sounds and the silent but visible objects by a Cross modal Referrer module with cross modality distillation. Quantitative and qualitative evaluations demonstrate that our framework achieves superior results on sound localization tasks, especially under real world scenarios.

This paper addresses the challenge of reconstructing 3D indoor scenes from multi-view images. Many previous works have shown impressive reconstruction results on textured objects, but they still have difficulty in handling low-textured planar regions, which are common in indoor scenes. An approach to solving this issue is to incorporate planer constraints into the depth map estimation in multiview stereo-based methods, but the per-view plane estimation and depth optimization lack both efficiency and multiview consistency. In this work, we show that the planar constraints can be conveniently integrated into the recent implicit neural representation-based reconstruction methods. Specifically, we use an MLP network to represent the signed distance function as the scene geometry. Based on the Manhattan-world assumption, planar constraints are employed to regularize the geometry in floor and wall regions predicted by a 2D semantic segmentation network. To resolve the inaccurate segmentation, we encode the semantics of 3D points with another MLP and design a novel loss that jointly optimizes the scene geometry and semantics in 3D space. Experiments on ScanNet and 7-Scenes datasets show that the proposed method outperforms previous methods by a large margin on 3D reconstruction quality. The code and supplementary materials are available at https://zju3dv.github.io/manhattan_sdf.

We present a new neural representation, called Neural Ray (NeuRay), for the novel view synthesis task. Recent works construct radiance fields from image features of input views to render novel view images, which enables the generalization to new scenes. However, due to occlusions, a 3D point may be invisible to some input views. On such a 3D point, these generalization methods will include inconsistent image features from invisible views, which interfere with the radiance field construction. To solve this problem, we predict the visibility of 3D points to input views within our NeuRay representation. This visibility enables the radiance field construction to focus on visible image features, which significantly improves its rendering quality. Meanwhile, a novel consistency loss is proposed to refine the visibility in NeuRay when finetuning on a specific scene. Experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on the novel view synthesis task when generalizing to unseen scenes and outperforms perscene optimization methods after finetuning. Project page:https://liuyuan-pal.github.io/NeuRay/

Generating speech-consistent body and gesture movements is a long-standing problem in virtual avatar creation. Previous studies often synthesize pose movement in a holistic manner, where poses of all joints are generated simultaneously. Such a straightforward pipeline fails to generate fine-grained co-speech gestures. One observation is that the hierarchical semantics in speech and the hierarchical structures of human gestures can be naturally described into multiple granularities and associated together. To fully utilize the rich connections between speech audio and human gestures, we propose a novel framework named Hierarchical Audio-to-Gesture (HA2G) for co-speech gesture generation. In HA2G, a Hierarchical Audio Learner extracts audio representations across semantic granularities. A Hierarchical Pose Inferer subsequently renders the entire human pose gradually in a hierarchical manner. To enhance the quality of synthesized gestures, we develop a contrastive learning strategy based on audio-text alignment for better audio representations. Extensive experiments and human evaluation demonstrate that the proposed method renders realistic co-speech gestures and out-performs previous methods in a clear margin. Project page: https://alvinliu0.github.io/projects/HA2G.

We propose a new method named OnePose for object pose estimation. Unlike existing instance-level or category-level methods, OnePose does not rely on CAD models and can handle objects in arbitrary categories without instance-or category-specific network training. OnePose draws the idea from visual localization and only requires a simple RGB video scan of the object to build a sparse SfM model of the object. Then, this model is registered to new query images with a generic feature matching network. To mitigate the slow runtime of existing visual localization methods, we propose a new graph attention network that directly matches 2D interest points in the query image with the 3D points in the SfM model, resulting in efficient and robust pose estimation. Combined with a feature-based pose tracker, OnePose is able to stably detect and track 6D poses of everyday household objects in real-time. We also collected a large-scale dataset that consists of 450 sequences of 150 objects. Code and data are available at the project page: https://zju3dv.github.io/onepose/.

We present PlanarRecon - a novel framework for globally coherent detection and reconstruction of 3D planes from a posed monocular video. Unlike previous works that detect planes in 2D from a single image, PlanarRecon incrementally detects planes in 3D for each video fragment, which consists of a set of key frames, from a volumetric representation of the scene using neural networks. A learning-based tracking and fusion module is designed to merge planes from previous fragments to form a coherent global plane reconstruction. Such design allows Planar-Recon to integrate observations from multiple views within each fragment and temporal information across different ones, resulting in an accurate and coherent reconstruction of the scene abstraction with low-polygonal geometry. Experiments show that the proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art performances on the ScanNet dataset while being real-time. Code is available at the project page: https://neu-vi.github.io/planarrecon/.

Recent advances in implicit neural representations and differentiable rendering make it possible to simultaneously recover the geometry and materials of an object from multi-view RGB images captured under unknown static illumination. Despite the promising results achieved, indirect illumination is rarely modeled in previous methods, as it requires expensive recursive path tracing which makes the inverse rendering computationally intractable. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to efficiently recovering spatially-varying indirect illumination. The key insight is that indirect illumination can be conveniently derived from the neural radiance field learned from input images instead of being estimated jointly with direct illumination and materials. By properly modeling the indirect illumination and visibility of direct illumination, interreflection- and shadow-free albedo can be recovered. The experiments on both synthetic and real data demonstrate the superior performance of our approach compared to previous work and its capambility to synthesize realistic renderings under novel view-points and illumination. Our code and data are available at https://zju3dv.github.io/invrender/.

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) [22] have emerged as a potent paradigm for representing scenes and synthesizing photo-realistic images. A main limitation of conventional NeRFs is that they often fail to produce high-quality renderings under novel viewpoints that are significantly different from the training viewpoints. In this paper, instead of ex-ploiting few-shot image synthesis, we study the novel view extrapolation setting that (1) the training images can well describe an object, and (2) there is a notable discrepancy between the training and test viewpoints' distributions. We present RapNeRF (RAy Priors) as a solution. Our insight is that the inherent appearances of a 3D surface's arbitrary visible projections should be consistent. We thus propose a random ray casting policy that allows training unseen views using seen views. Furthermore, we show that a ray atlas pre-computed from the observed rays' viewing directions could further enhance the rendering quality for ex-trapolated views. A main limitation is that RapNeRF would remove the strong view-dependent effects because it lever-ages the multi-view consistency property.

This paper presents a simple yet effective approach for learning 6DoF object poses without real image annotations. Previous methods have attempted to train pose estimators on synthetic data, but they do not generalize well to real images due to the sim-to-real domain gap and produce inaccurate pose estimates. We find that, in most cases, the synthetically trained pose estimators are able to provide reasonable initialization for depth-based pose refinement methods which yield accurate pose estimates. Motivated by this, we propose a novel learning framework, which utilizes the accurate results of depth-based pose refinement methods to supervise the RGB-based pose estimator. Our method significantly outperforms previous self-supervised methods on several benchmarks. Even compared with fully-supervised methods that use real annotated data, we achieve competitive results without using any real annotation. The code is available at https://github.com/zju3dv/pvnet-depth-sup.

Recent advances in implicit neural representations make it possible to reconstruct a human-body model from a monocular self-rotation video. While previous works present impressive results of human body reconstruction, the quality of reconstructed face and hands are relatively low. The main reason is that the image region occupied by these parts is very small compared to the body. To solve this problem, we propose a new approach named TotalSelfScan, which reconstructs the full-body model from several monocular self-rotation videos that focus on the face, hands, and body, respectively. Compared to recording a single video, this setting has almost no additional cost but provides more details of essential parts. To learn the full-body model, instead of encoding the whole body in a single network, we propose a multi-part representation to model separate parts and then fuse the part-specific observations into a single unified human model. Once learned, the full-body model enables rendering photorealistic free-viewpoint videos under novel human poses. Experiments show that TotalSelfScan can significantly improve the reconstruction and rendering quality on the face and hands compared to the existing methods. The code is available at \url{https://zju3dv.github.io/TotalSelfScan}.

We propose a new method for object pose estimation without CAD models. The previous feature-matching-based method OnePose has shown promising results under a one-shot setting which eliminates the need for CAD models or object-specific training. However, OnePose relies on detecting repeatable image keypoints and is thus prone to failure on low-textured objects. We propose a keypoint-free pose estimation pipeline to remove the need for repeatable keypoint detection. Built upon the detector-free feature matching method LoFTR, we devise a new keypoint-free SfM method to reconstruct a semi-dense point-cloud model for the object. Given a query image for object pose estimation, a 2D-3D matching network directly establishes 2D-3D correspondences between the query image and the reconstructed point-cloud model without first detecting keypoints in the image. Experiments show that the proposed pipeline outperforms existing one-shot CAD-model-free methods by a large margin and is comparable to CAD-model-based methods on LINEMOD even for low-textured objects. We also collect a new dataset composed of 80 sequences of 40 low-textured objects to facilitate future research on one-shot object pose estimation. The supplementary material, code and dataset are available on the project page: https://zju3dv.github.io/oneposeplusplus/.

This paper presents an approach that reconstructs a hand-held object from a monocular video. In contrast to many recent methods that directly predict object geometry by a trained network, the proposed approach does not require any learned prior about the object and is able to recover more accurate and detailed object geometry. The key idea is that the hand motion naturally provides multiple views of the object and the motion can be reliably estimated by a hand pose tracker. Then, the object geometry can be recovered by solving a multi-view reconstruction problem. We devise an implicit neural representation-based method to solve the reconstruction problem and address the issues of imprecise hand pose estimation, relative hand-object motion, and insufficient geometry optimization for small objects. We also provide a newly collected dataset with 3D ground truth to validate the proposed approach. The dataset and code will be released at https://dihuangdh.github.io/hhor.

This paper aims to tackle the challenge of efficiently producing interactive free-viewpoint videos. Some recent works equip neural radiance fields with image encoders, enabling them to generalize across scenes. When processing dynamic scenes, they can simply treat each video frame as an individual scene and perform novel view synthesis to generate free-viewpoint videos. However, their rendering process is slow and cannot support interactive applications. A major factor is that they sample lots of points in empty space when inferring radiance fields. We propose a novel scene representation, called ENeRF, for the fast creation of interactive free-viewpoint videos. Specifically, given multi-view images at one frame, we first build the cascade cost volume to predict the coarse geometry of the scene. The coarse geometry allows us to sample few points near the scene surface, thereby significantly improving the rendering speed. This process is fully differentiable, enabling us to jointly learn the depth prediction and radiance field networks from RGB images. Experiments on multiple benchmarks show that our approach exhibits competitive performance while being at least 60 times faster than previous generalizable radiance field methods.

In this paper, we propose a novel system named Disp R-CNN for 3D object detection from stereo images. Many recent works solve this problem by first recovering point clouds with disparity estimation and then apply a 3D detector. The disparity map is computed for the entire image, which is costly and fails to leverage category-specific prior. In contrast, we design an instance disparity estimation network (iDispNet) that predicts disparity only for pixels on objects of interest and learns a category-specific shape prior for more accurate disparity estimation. To address the challenge from scarcity of disparity annotation in training, we propose to use a statistical shape model to generate dense disparity pseudo-ground-truth without the need of LiDAR point clouds, which makes our system more widely applicable. Experiments on the KITTI dataset show that, when LiDAR ground-truth is not used at training time, Disp R-CNN outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods based on stereo input by 20 percent in terms of average precision for all categories. The code and pseudo-ground-truth data are available at the project page: https://github.com/zju3dv/disprcnn.

This paper addresses the problem of reconstructing 3D poses of multiple people from a few calibrated camera views. The main challenge of this problem is to find the cross-view correspondences among noisy and incomplete 2D pose predictions. Most previous methods address this challenge by directly reasoning in 3D using a pictorial structure model, which is inefficient due to the huge state space. We propose a fast and robust approach to solve this problem. Our key idea is to use a multi-way matching algorithm to cluster the detected 2D poses in all views. Each resulting cluster encodes 2D poses of the same person across different views and consistent correspondences across the keypoints, from which the 3D pose of each person can be effectively inferred. The proposed convex optimization based multi-way matching algorithm is efficient and robust against missing and false detections, without knowing the number of people in the scene. Moreover, we propose to combine geometric and appearance cues for cross-view matching. Finally, an efficient tracking method is proposed to track the detected 3D poses across the multi-view video. The proposed approach achieves the state-of-the-art performance on the Campus and Shelf datasets, while being efficient for real-time applications.

This paper addresses the problem of instance-level 6DoF object pose estimation from a single RGB image. Many recent works have shown that a two-stage approach, which first detects keypoints and then solves a Perspective-n-Point (PnP) problem for pose estimation, achieves remarkable performance. However, most of these methods only localize a set of sparse keypoints by regressing their image coordinates or heatmaps, which are sensitive to occlusion and truncation. Instead, we introduce a Pixel-wise Voting Network (PVNet) to regress pixel-wise vectors pointing to the keypoints and use these vectors to vote for keypoint locations. This creates a flexible representation for localizing occluded or truncated keypoints. Another important feature of this representation is that it provides uncertainties of keypoint locations that can be further leveraged by the PnP solver. Experiments show that the proposed approach outperforms the state of the art on the LINEMOD, Occluded LINEMOD, YCB-Video, and Tless datasets, while being efficient for real-time pose estimation. We further create a Truncated LINEMOD dataset to validate the robustness of our approach against truncation. The code is available at https://github.com/zju3dv/pvnet.

In this paper, we introduce the new task of reconstructing 3D human pose from a single image in which we can see the person and the person’s image through a mirror. Compared to general scenarios of 3D pose estimation from a single view, the mirror reflection provides an additional view for resolving the depth ambiguity. We develop an optimization-based approach that exploits mirror symmetry constraints for accurate 3D pose reconstruction. We also provide a method to estimate the surface normal of the mirror from vanishing points in the single image. To validate the proposed approach, we collect a large-scale dataset named Mirrored-Human, which covers a large variety of human subjects, poses and backgrounds. The experiments demonstrate that, when trained on Mirrored-Human with our reconstructed 3D poses as pseudo ground-truth, the accuracy and generalizability of existing single-view 3D pose estimators can be largely improved. The code and dataset are available at https://zju3dv.github.io/Mirrored-Human/.

Visual localization is of great importance in robotics and computer vision. Recently, scene coordinate regression based methods have shown good performance in visual localization in small static scenes. However, it still estimates camera poses from many inferior scene coordinates. To address this problem, we propose a novel visual localization framework that establishes 2D-to-3D correspondences between the query image and the 3D map with a series of learnable scene-specific landmarks. In the landmark generation stage, the 3D surfaces of the target scene are over-segmented into mosaic patches whose centers are regarded as the scene-specific landmarks. To robustly and accurately recover the scene-specific landmarks, we propose the Voting with Segmentation Network (VS-Net) to segment the pixels into different landmark patches with a segmentation branch and estimate the landmark locations within each patch with a landmark location voting branch. Since the number of landmarks in a scene may reach up to 5000, training a segmentation network with such a large number of classes is both computation and memory costly for the commonly used cross-entropy loss. We propose a novel prototype-based triplet loss with hard negative mining, which is able to train semantic segmentation networks with a large number of labels efficiently. Our proposed VS-Net is extensively tested on multiple public benchmarks and can outperform stateof-the-art visual localization methods. Code and models are available at https://github.com/zju3dv/VS-Net.

This paper addresses the challenge of novel view synthesis for a human performer from a very sparse set of camera views. Some recent works have shown that learning implicit neural representations of 3D scenes achieves remarkable view synthesis quality given dense input views. However, the representation learning will be ill-posed if the views are highly sparse. To solve this ill-posed problem, our key idea is to integrate observations over video frames. To this end, we propose Neural Body, a new human body representation which assumes that the learned neural representations at different frames share the same set of latent codes anchored to a deformable mesh, so that the observations across frames can be naturally integrated. The deformable mesh also provides geometric guidance for the network to learn 3D representations more efficiently. To evaluate our approach, we create a multi-view dataset named ZJU-MoCap that captures performers with complex motions. Experiments on ZJU-MoCap show that our approach outperforms prior works by a large margin in terms of novel view synthesis quality. We also demonstrate the capability of our approach to reconstruct a moving person from a monocular video on the People-Snapshot dataset.

We present a novel method for local image feature matching. Instead of performing image feature detection, description, and matching sequentially, we propose to first establish pixel-wise dense matches at a coarse level and later refine the good matches at a fine level. In contrast to dense methods that use a cost volume to search correspondences, we use self and cross attention layers in Transformer to obtain feature descriptors that are conditioned on both images. The global receptive field provided by Transformer enables our method to produce dense matches in low-texture areas, where feature detectors usually struggle to produce repeatable interest points. The experiments on indoor and outdoor datasets show that LoFTR outperforms state-of-the-art methods by a large margin. LoFTR also ranks first on two public benchmarks of visual localization among the published methods. Code is available at our project page: https://zju3dv.github.io/loftr/.

We present a novel framework named NeuralRecon for real-time 3D scene reconstruction from a monocular video. Unlike previous methods that estimate single-view depth maps separately on each key-frame and fuse them later, we propose to directly reconstruct local surfaces represented as sparse TSDF volumes for each video fragment sequentially by a neural network. A learning-based TSDF fusion module based on gated recurrent units is used to guide the network to fuse features from previous fragments. This de-sign allows the network to capture local smoothness prior and global shape prior of 3D surfaces when sequentially reconstructing the surfaces, resulting in accurate, coherent, and real-time surface reconstruction. The experiments on ScanNet and 7-Scenes datasets show that our system outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of both ac-curacy and speed. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first learning-based system that is able to reconstruct dense coherent 3D geometry in real-time. Code is available at the project page: https://zju3dv.github.io/neuralrecon/.

This paper addresses the challenge of reconstructing an animatable human model from a multi-view video. Some recent works have proposed to decompose a non-rigidly deforming scene into a canonical neural radiance field and a set of deformation fields that map observation-space points to the canonical space, thereby enabling them to learn the dynamic scene from images. However, they represent the deformation field as translational vector field or SE(3) field, which makes the optimization highly under-constrained. Moreover, these representations cannot be explicitly controlled by input motions. Instead, we introduce neural blend weight fields to produce the deformation fields. Based on the skeleton-driven deformation, blend weight fields are used with 3D human skeletons to generate observation-to-canonical and canonical-to-observation correspondences. Since 3D human skeletons are more observable, they can regularize the learning of deformation fields. Moreover, the learned blend weight fields can be combined with input skeletal motions to generate new deformation fields to animate the human model. Experiments show that our approach significantly outperforms recent human synthesis methods. The code and supplementary materials are available at https://zju3dv.github.io/animatable_nerf/.

We present a novel end-to-end plane detection and description network named SuperPlane to detect and match planes in two RGB images. SuperPlane takes a single image as input and extracts 3D planes and generates corresponding descriptors simultaneously. A mask-attention module and an instance-triplet loss are proposed to improve the distinctiveness of the plane descriptor. For image matching, we also propose an area-aware Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence retrieval method. Extensive experiments show that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods and retains good generalization capacity. The applications in image-based localization and augmented reality also demonstrate the effectiveness of SuperPlane.

Reconstructing 3D digital models of humans from sensory data is a long-standing problem in computer vision and graphics with a variety of applications in VR/AR, film production, and human–computer interaction, etc. While a huge amount of effort has been devoted to developing various capture hardware and reconstruction algorithms , traditional reconstruction pipelines may still suffer from high-cost capture systems and tedious capture processes, which prevent them from being easily accessible. Moreover, the dedicatedly hand-crafted pipelines are prone to reconstruction artifacts, resulting in limited visual quality. To solve these challenges, the recent trend in this area is to use deep neural networks to improve reconstruction efficiency and robustness by learning human priors from existing data. Neural network-based implicit functions have been also shown to be a favorable 3D representation compared to traditional forms like meshes and voxels. Furthermore, neural rendering has emerged as a powerful tool to achieve highly photorealistic modeling and re-rendering of humans by end-to-end optimizing the visual quality of output images. In this article, we will briefly review these advances in this fast-developing field, discuss the advantages and limitations of different approaches, and finally, share some thoughts on future research directions.

In this work, we address the problem of multi-person 3D pose estimation from a single image. A typical regression approach in the top-down setting of this problem would first detect all humans and then reconstruct each one of them independently. However, this type of prediction suffers from incoherent results, e.g., interpenetration and inconsistent depth ordering between the people in the scene. Our goal is to train a single network that learns to avoid these problems and generate a coherent 3D reconstruction of all the humans in the scene. To this end, a key design choice is the incorporation of the SMPL parametric body model in our top-down framework, which enables the use of two novel losses. First, a distance field-based collision loss penalizes interpenetration among the reconstructed people. Second, a depth ordering-aware loss reasons about occlusions and promotes a depth ordering of people that leads to a rendering which is consistent with the annotated instance segmentation. This provides depth supervision signals to the network, even if the image has no explicit 3D annotations. The experiments show that our approach outperforms previous methods on standard 3D pose benchmarks, while our proposed losses enable more coherent reconstruction in natural images. The project website with videos, results, and code can be found at: https://jiangwenpl.github.io/multiperson.

This paper introduces a novel contour-based approach named deep snake for real-time instance segmentation. Unlike some recent methods that directly regress the coordinates of the object boundary points from an image, deep snake uses a neural network to iteratively deform an initial contour to match the object boundary, which implements the classic idea of snake algorithms with a learning-based approach. For structured feature learning on the contour, we propose to use circular convolution in deep snake, which better exploits the cycle-graph structure of a contour compared against generic graph convolution. Based on deep snake, we develop a two-stage pipeline for instance segmentation: initial contour proposal and contour deformation, which can handle errors in object localization. Experiments show that the proposed approach achieves competitive performances on the Cityscapes, KINS, SBD and COCO datasets while being efficient for real-time applications with a speed of 32.3 fps for 512 × 512 images on a 1080Ti GPU. The code is available at https://github.com/zju3dv/snake/.

In this paper, we propose a novel system named Disp R-CNN for 3D object detection from stereo images. Many recent works solve this problem by first recovering a point cloud with disparity estimation and then apply a 3D detector. The disparity map is computed for the entire image, which is costly and fails to leverage category-specific prior. In contrast, we design an instance disparity estimation network (iDispNet) that predicts disparity only for pixels on objects of interest and learns a category-specific shape prior for more accurate disparity estimation. To address the challenge from scarcity of disparity annotation in training, we propose to use a statistical shape model to generate dense disparity pseudo-ground-truth without the need of LiDAR point clouds, which makes our system more widely applicable. Experiments on the KITTI dataset show that, even when LiDAR ground-truth is not available at training time, Disp R-CNN achieves competitive performance and outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods by 20% in terms of average precision. The code will be available at https://github.com/zju3dv/disprcnn.

Consider the case of multiple visual sensors perceiving the same scene from different viewpoints. In order to achieve consistent visual perception, the problem of data association, in this case establishing correspondences between observed features, must be first solved. In this work, we consider multiway matching which is a specific instance of multi-sensory data association. Multiway matching refers to the problem of establishing correspondences among a set of images from noisy pairwise correspondences, typically by exploiting cycle- consistency. We propose a novel optimization-based formulation of multiway matching problem as a nonconvex low-rank matrix approximation problem. We propose two novel algorithms for numerically solving the problem at hand. The first one is an algorithm based on the Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM). The second one is a Riemannian trust- region method on the multinomial manifold, the manifold of strictly positive stochastic matrices, equipped with the Fisher information metric. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed methods have the state of the art performance in multiway matching while reducing the computational complexity compared to the state of the art.

Abstract Superior human pose and shape reconstruction from monocular images depends on removing the ambiguities caused by occlusions and shape variance. Recent works succeed in regression‐based methods which estimate parametric models directly through a deep neural network supervised by 3D ground truth. However, 3D ground truth is neither in abundance nor can efficiently be obtained. In this paper, we introduce body part segmentation as critical supervision. Part segmentation not only indicates the shape of each body part but helps to infer the occlusions among parts as well. To improve the reconstruction with part segmentation, we propose a part‐level differentiable renderer that enables part‐based models to be supervised by part segmentation in neural networks or optimization loops. We also introduce a general parametric model engaged in the rendering pipeline as an intermediate representation between skeletons and detailed shapes, which consists of primitive geometries for better interpretability. The proposed approach combines parameter regression, body model optimization, and detailed model registration altogether. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves balanced evaluation on pose and shape, and outperforms the state‐of‐the‐art approaches on Human3.6M, UP‐3D and LSP datasets.

Intrinsic image decomposition, i.e., decomposing a natural image into a reflectance image and a shading image, is used in many augmented reality applications for achieving better visual coherence between virtual contents and real scenes. The main challenge is that the decomposition is ill-posed, especially in indoor scenes where lighting conditions are complicated, while real training data is inadequate. To solve this challenge, we propose NIID-Net, a novel learning-based framework that adapts surface normal knowledge for improving the decomposition. The knowledge learned from relatively more abundant data for surface normal estimation is integrated into intrinsic image decomposition in two novel ways. First, normal feature adapters are proposed to incorporate scene geometry features when decomposing the image. Secondly, a map of integrated lighting is proposed for propagating object contour and planarity information during shading rendering. Furthermore, this map is capable of representing spatially-varying lighting conditions indoors. Experiments show that NIID-Net achieves competitive performance in reflectance estimation and outperforms all previous methods in shading estimation quantitatively and qualitatively. The source code of our implementation is released at https://github.com/zju3dv/NIID-Net.

Recovering human pose from RGB images and videos has drawn increasing attention in recent years owing to minimum sensor requirements and applicability in diverse fields such as human-computer interaction, robotics, video analytics, and augmented reality. Although a large amount of work has been devoted to this field, 3D human pose estimation based on monocular images or videos remains a very challenging task due to a variety of difficulties such as depth ambiguities, occlusion, background clutters, and lack of training data. In this survey, we summarize recent advances in monocular 3D human pose estimation. We provide a general taxonomy to cover existing approaches and analyze their capabilities and limitations. We also present a summary of extensively used datasets and metrics, and provide a quantitative comparison of some representative methods. Finally, we conclude with a discussion on realistic challenges and open problems for future research directions.

This paper addresses the problem of 3D pose estimation for multiple people in a few calibrated camera views. The main challenge of this problem is to find the cross-view correspondences among noisy and incomplete 2D pose predictions. Most previous methods address this challenge by directly reasoning in 3D using a pictorial structure model, which is inefficient due to the huge state space. We propose a fast and robust approach to solve this problem. Our key idea is to use a multi-way matching algorithm to cluster the detected 2D poses in all views. Each resulting cluster encodes 2D poses of the same person across different views and consistent correspondences across the keypoints, from which the 3D pose of each person can be effectively inferred. The proposed convex optimization based multi-way matching algorithm is efficient and robust against missing and false detections, without knowing the number of people in the scene. Moreover, we propose to combine geometric and appearance cues for cross-view matching. The proposed approach achieves significant performance gains from the state-of-the-art (96.3% vs. 90.6% and 96.9% vs. 88% on the Campus and Shelf datasets, respectively), while being efficient for real-time applications.

Reconstructing the 3D model of a physical object typically requires us to align the depth scans obtained from different camera poses into the same coordinate system. Solutions to this global alignment problem usually proceed in two steps. The first step estimates relative transformations between pairs of scans using an off-the-shelf technique. Due to limited information presented between pairs of scans, the resulting relative transformations are generally noisy. The second step then jointly optimizes the relative transformations among all input depth scans. A natural constraint used in this step is the cycle-consistency constraint, which allows us to prune incorrect relative transformations by detecting inconsistent cycles. The performance of such approaches, however, heavily relies on the quality of the input relative transformations. Instead of merely using the relative transformations as the input to perform transformation synchronization, we propose to use a neural network to learn the weights associated with each relative transformation. Our approach alternates between transformation synchronization using weighted relative transformations and predicting new weights of the input relative transformations using a neural network. We demonstrate the usefulness of this approach across a wide range of datasets.

This paper addresses the challenge of 6DoF pose estimation from a single RGB image under severe occlusion or truncation. Many recent works have shown that a two-stage approach, which first detects keypoints and then solves a Perspective-n-Point (PnP) problem for pose estimation, achieves remarkable performance. However, most of these methods only localize a set of sparse keypoints by regressing their image coordinates or heatmaps, which are sensitive to occlusion and truncation. Instead, we introduce a Pixel-wise Voting Network (PVNet) to regress pixel-wise vectors pointing to the keypoints and use these vectors to vote for keypoint locations. This creates a flexible representation for localizing occluded or truncated keypoints. Another important feature of this representation is that it provides uncertainties of keypoint locations that can be further leveraged by the PnP solver. Experiments show that the proposed approach outperforms the state of the art on the LINEMOD, Occlusion LINEMOD and YCB-Video datasets by a large margin, while being efficient for real-time pose estimation. We further create a Truncation LINEMOD dataset to validate the robustness of our approach against truncation. The code is available at https://zju3dv.github.io/pvnet/.

Estimating the relative rigid pose between two RGB-D scans of the same underlying environment is a fundamental problem in computer vision, robotics, and computer graphics. Most existing approaches allow only limited maximum relative pose changes since they require considerable overlap between the input scans. We introduce a novel approach that extends the scope to extreme relative poses, with little or even no overlap between the input scans. The key idea is to infer more complete scene information about the underlying environment and match on the completed scans. In particular, instead of only performing scene completion from each individual scan, our approach alternates between relative pose estimation and scene completion. This allows us to perform scene completion by utilizing information from both input scans at late iterations, resulting in better results for both scene completion and relative pose estimation. Experimental results on benchmark datasets show that our approach leads to considerable improvements over state-of-the-art approaches for relative pose estimation. In particular, our approach provides encouraging relative pose estimates even between non-overlapping scans.

Optimizing a network of maps among a collection of objects/domains (or map synchronization) is a central problem across computer vision and many other relevant fields. Compared to optimizing pairwise maps in isolation, the benefit of map synchronization is that there are natural constraints among a map network that can improve the quality of individual maps. While such self-supervision constraints are well-understood for undirected map networks (e.g., the cycle-consistency constraint), they are under-explored for directed map networks, which naturally arise when maps are given by parametric maps (e.g., a feed-forward neural network). In this paper, we study a natural self-supervision constraint for directed map networks called path-invariance, which enforces that composite maps along different paths between a fixed pair of source and target domains are identical. We introduce path-invariance bases for efficient encoding of the path-invariance constraint and present an algorithm that outputs a path-variance basis with polynomial time and space complexities. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our formulation on optimizing object correspondences, estimating dense image maps via neural networks, and 3D scene segmentation via map networks of diverse 3D representations. In particular, our approach only requires 8\% labeled data from ScanNet to achieve the same performance as training a single 3D semantic segmentation network with 30\% to 100\% labeled data.

Camera localization from monocular images has been a long-standing problem, but its robustness in dynamic environments is still not adequately addressed. Compared with classic geometric approaches, modern CNN-based methods (e.g. PoseNet) have manifested the reliability against illumination or viewpoint variations, but they still have the following limitations. First, foreground moving objects are not explicitly handled, which results in poor performance and instability in dynamic environments. Second, the output for each image is a point estimate without uncertainty quantification. In this paper, we propose a framework which can be generally applied to existing CNN-based pose regressors to improve their robustness in dynamic environments. The key idea is a prior guided dropout module coupled with a self-attention module which can guide CNNs to ignore foreground objects during both training and inference. Additionally, the dropout module enables the pose regressor to output multiple hypotheses from which the uncertainty of pose estimates can be quantified and leveraged in the following uncertainty-aware pose graph optimization to improve the robustness further. We achieve an average accuracy of 9.98m/3.63° on RobotCar dataset, which outperforms the state-of-the-art method by 62.97%/47.08%. The source code of our implementation is available at https://github.com/zju3dv/RVL-Dynamic.

Finding local correspondences between images with different viewpoints requires local descriptors that are robust against geometric transformations. An approach for transformation invariance is to integrate out the transformations by pooling the features extracted from transformed versions of an image. However, the feature pooling may sacrifice the distinctiveness of the resulting descriptors. In this paper, we introduce a novel visual descriptor named Group Invariant Feature Transform (GIFT), which is both discriminative and robust to geometric transformations. The key idea is that the features extracted from the transformed versions of an image can be viewed as a function defined on the group of the transformations. Instead of feature pooling, we use group convolutions to exploit underlying structures of the extracted features on the group, resulting in descriptors that are both discriminative and provably invariant to the group of transformations. Extensive experiments show that GIFT outperforms state-of-the-art methods on several benchmark datasets and practically improves the performance of relative pose estimation.

Recovering 3D full-body human pose is a challenging problem with many applications. It has been successfully addressed by motion capture systems with body worn markers and multiple cameras. In this paper, we address the more challenging case of not only using a single camera but also not leveraging markers: going directly from 2D appearance to 3D geometry. Deep learning approaches have shown remarkable abilities to discriminatively learn 2D appearance features. The missing piece is how to integrate 2D, 3D, and temporal information to recover 3D geometry and account for the uncertainties arising from the discriminative model. We introduce a novel approach that treats 2D joint locations as latent variables whose uncertainty distributions are given by a deep fully convolutional neural network. The unknown 3D poses are modeled by a sparse representation and the 3D parameter estimates are realized via an Expectation-Maximization algorithm, where it is shown that the 2D joint location uncertainties can be conveniently marginalized out during inference. Extensive evaluation on benchmark datasets shows that the proposed approach achieves greater accuracy over state-of-the-art baselines. Notably, the proposed approach does not require synchronized 2D-3D data for training and is applicable to "in-the-wild" images, which is demonstrated with the MPII dataset.

Our ability to train end-to-end systems for 3D human pose estimation from single images is currently constrained by the limited availability of 3D annotations for natural images. Most datasets are captured using Motion Capture (MoCap) systems in a studio setting and it is difficult to reach the variability of 2D human pose datasets, like MPII or LSP. To alleviate the need for accurate 3D ground truth, we propose to use a weaker supervision signal provided by the ordinal depths of human joints. This information can be acquired by human annotators for a wide range of images and poses. We showcase the effectiveness and flexibility of training Convolutional Networks (ConvNets) with these ordinal relations in different settings, always achieving competitive performance with ConvNets trained with accurate 3D joint coordinates. Additionally, to demonstrate the potential of the approach, we augment the popular LSP and MPII datasets with ordinal depth annotations. This extension allows us to present quantitative and qualitative evaluation in non-studio conditions. Simultaneously, these ordinal annotations can be easily incorporated in the training procedure of typical ConvNets for 3D human pose. Through this inclusion we achieve new state-of-the-art performance for the relevant benchmarks and validate the effectiveness of ordinal depth supervision for 3D human pose.

This work addresses the problem of estimating the full body 3D human pose and shape from a single color image. This is a task where iterative optimization-based solutions have typically prevailed, while Convolutional Networks (ConvNets) have suffered because of the lack of training data and their low resolution 3D predictions. Our work aims to bridge this gap and proposes an efficient and effective direct prediction method based on ConvNets. Central part to our approach is the incorporation of a parametric statistical body shape model (SMPL) within our end-to-end framework. This allows us to get very detailed 3D mesh results, while requiring estimation only of a small number of parameters, making it friendly for direct network prediction. Interestingly, we demonstrate that these parameters can be predicted reliably only from 2D keypoints and masks. These are typical outputs of generic 2D human analysis ConvNets, allowing us to relax the massive requirement that images with 3D shape ground truth are available for training. Simultaneously, by maintaining differentiability, at training time we generate the 3D mesh from the estimated parameters and optimize explicitly for the surface using a 3D per-vertex loss. Finally, a differentiable renderer is employed to project the 3D mesh to the image, which enables further refinement of the network, by optimizing for the consistency of the projection with 2D annotations (i.e., 2D keypoints or masks). The proposed approach outperforms previous baselines on this task and offers an attractive solution for direct prediction of3D shape from a single color image.

This work proposes a multi-image matching method to estimate semantic correspondences across multiple images. In contrast to the previous methods that optimize all pairwise correspondences, the proposed method identifies and matches only a sparse set of reliable features in the image collection. In this way, the proposed method is able to prune nonrepeatable features and also highly scalable to handle thousands of images. We additionally propose a low-rank constraint to ensure the geometric consistency of feature correspondences over the whole image collection. Besides the competitive performance on multi-graph matching and semantic flow benchmarks, we also demonstrate the applicability of the proposed method for reconstructing object-class models and discovering object-class landmarks from images without using any annotation.

Current motion capture (MoCap) systems generally require markers and multiple calibrated cameras, which can be used only in constrained environments. In this work we introduce a drone-based system for 3D human MoCap. The system only needs an autonomously flying drone with an on-board RGB camera and is usable in various indoor and outdoor environments. A reconstruction algorithm is developed to recover full-body motion from the video recorded by the drone. We argue that, besides the capability of tracking a moving subject, a flying drone also provides fast varying viewpoints, which is beneficial for motion reconstruction. We evaluate the accuracy of the proposed system using our new DroCap dataset and also demonstrate its applicability for MoCap in the wild using a consumer drone.

Recent advances with Convolutional Networks (ConvNets) have shifted the bottleneck for many computer vision tasks to annotated data collection. In this paper, we present a geometry-driven approach to automatically collect annotations for human pose prediction tasks. Starting from a generic ConvNet for 2D human pose, and assuming a multi-view setup, we describe an automatic way to collect accurate 3D human pose annotations. We capitalize on constraints offered by the 3D geometry of the camera setup and the 3D structure of the human body to probabilistically combine per view 2D ConvNet predictions into a globally optimal 3D pose. This 3D pose is used as the basis for harvesting annotations. The benefit of the annotations produced automatically with our approach is demonstrated in two challenging settings: (i) fine-tuning a generic ConvNet-based 2D pose predictor to capture the discriminative aspects of a subjects appearance (i.e.,personalization), and (ii) training a ConvNet from scratch for single view 3D human pose prediction without leveraging 3D pose groundtruth. The proposed multi-view pose estimator achieves state-of-the-art results on standard benchmarks, demonstrating the effectiveness of our method in exploiting the available multi-view information.

This paper addresses the challenge of 3D human pose estimation from a single color image. Despite the general success of the end-to-end learning paradigm, top performing approaches employ a two-step solution consisting of a Convolutional Network (ConvNet) for 2D joint localization and a subsequent optimization step to recover 3D pose. In this paper, we identify the representation of 3D pose as a critical issue with current ConvNet approaches and make two important contributions towards validating the value of end-to-end learning for this task. First, we propose a fine discretization of the 3D space around the subject and train a ConvNet to predict per voxel likelihoods for each joint. This creates a natural representation for 3D pose and greatly improves performance over the direct regression of joint coordinates. Second, to further improve upon initial estimates, we employ a coarse-to-fine prediction scheme. This step addresses the large dimensionality increase and enables iterative refinement and repeated processing of the image features. The proposed approach outperforms all state-of-the-art methods on standard benchmarks achieving a relative error reduction greater than 30% on average. Additionally, we investigate using our volumetric representation in a related architecture which is suboptimal compared to our end-to-end approach, but is of practical interest, since it enables training when no image with corresponding 3D groundtruth is available, and allows us to present compelling results for in-the-wild images.

Data association is one of the fundamental problems in multi-sensor systems. Most current techniques rely on pairwise data associations which can be spurious even after the employment of outlier rejection schemes. Considering multiple pairwise associations at once significantly increases accuracy and leads to consistency. In this work, we propose a fully decentralized method for globally consistent data association from pairwise data associations based on a distributed averaging scheme on the set of doubly stochastic matrices. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method using theoretical analysis and experimental evaluation.

This paper presents a novel approach to estimating the continuous six degree of freedom (6-DoF) pose (3D translation and rotation) of an object from a single RGB image. The approach combines semantic keypoints predicted by a convolutional network (convnet) with a deformable shape model. Unlike prior work, we are agnostic to whether the object is textured or textureless, as the convnet learns the optimal representation from the available training image data. Furthermore, the approach can be applied to instance- and class-based pose recovery. Empirically, we show that the proposed approach can accurately recover the 6-DoF object pose for both instance- and class-based scenarios with a cluttered background. For class-based object pose estimation, state-of-the-art accuracy is shown on the large-scale PASCAL3D+ dataset.

MOTIVATION: Genome-wide association studies (GWAS), which genotype millions of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in thousands of individuals, are widely used to identify the risk SNPs underlying complex human phenotypes (quantitative traits or diseases). Most conventional statistical methods in GWAS only investigate one phenotype at a time. However, an increasing number of reports suggest the ubiquity of pleiotropy, i.e. many complex phenotypes sharing common genetic bases. This motivated us to leverage pleiotropy to develop new statistical approaches to joint analysis of multiple GWAS. RESULTS: In this study, we propose a latent low-rank (LLR) approach to colocalizing genetic risk variants using summary statistics. In the presence of pleiotropy, there exist risk loci that affect multiple phenotypes. To leverage pleiotropy, we introduce a low-rank structure to modulate the probabilities of the latent association statuses between loci and phenotypes. Regarding the computational efficiency of LLR, a novel expectation-maximization-path (EM-path) algorithm has been developed to greatly reduce the computational cost and facilitate model selection and inference. We demonstrate the advantages of LLR over competing approaches through simulation studies and joint analysis of 18 GWAS datasets. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: The LLR software is available on https://sites.google.com/site/liujin810822. CONTACT: [email protected]. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

We investigate the problem of estimating the 3D shape of an object defined by a set of 3D landmarks, given their 2D correspondences in a single image. A successful approach to alleviating the reconstruction ambiguity is the 3D deformable shape model and a sparse representation is often used to capture complex shape variability. But the model inference is still challenging due to the nonconvexity in the joint optimization of shape and viewpoint. In contrast to prior work that relies on an alternating scheme whose solution depends on initialization, we propose a convex approach to addressing this challenge and develop an efficient algorithm to solve the proposed convex program. We further propose a robust model to handle gross errors in the 2D correspondences. We demonstrate the exact recovery property of the proposed method, the advantage compared to several nonconvex baselines and the applicability to recover 3D human poses and car models from single images.

This paper addresses the challenge of 3D full-body human pose estimation from a monocular image sequence. Here, two cases are considered: (i) the image locations of the human joints are provided and (ii) the image locations of joints are unknown. In the former case, a novel approach is introduced that integrates a sparsity-driven 3D geometric prior and temporal smoothness. In the latter case, the former case is extended by treating the image locations of the joints as latent variables to take into account considerable uncertainties in 2D joint locations. A deep fully convolutional network is trained to predict the uncertainty maps of the 2D joint locations. The 3D pose estimates are realized via an Expectation-Maximization algorithm over the entire sequence, where it is shown that the 2D joint location uncertainties can be conveniently marginalized out during inference. Empirical evaluation on the Human3.6M dataset shows that the proposed approaches achieve greater 3D pose estimation accuracy over state-of-the-art baselines. Further, the proposed approach outperforms a publicly available 2D pose estimation baseline on the challenging PennAction dataset.

We propose a second order stochastic dynamical model for generic articulated objects whose state space is a Riemannian manifold naturally suggested by the articulation constraints. We derive the equations of a Riemannian Extended Kalman Filter to perform the structure estimation from an image sequence captured by a perspective camera. In order to theoretically validate our approach, we prove that the proposed model is locally weakly observable. Finally, we report quantitative results on both synthetic data and on real sequences from the CMU Mocap dataset.

We investigate the problem of estimating the 3D shape of an object, given a set of 2D landmarks in a single image. To alleviate the reconstruction ambiguity, a widely-used approach is to confine the unknown 3D shape within a shape space built upon existing shapes. While this approach has proven to be successful in various applications, a challenging issue remains, i.e., the joint estimation of shape parameters and camera-pose parameters requires to solve a nonconvex optimization problem. The existing methods often adopt an alternating minimization scheme to locally update the parameters, and consequently the solution is sensitive to initialization. In this paper, we propose a convex formulation to address this problem and develop an efficient algorithm to solve the proposed convex program. We demonstrate the exact recovery property of the proposed method, its merits compared to alternative methods, and the applicability in human pose and car shape estimation.

In this paper we propose a global optimization-based approach to jointly matching a set of images. The estimated correspondences simultaneously maximize pairwise feature affinities and cycle consistency across multiple images. Unlike previous convex methods relying on semidefinite programming, we formulate the problem as a low-rank matrix recovery problem and show that the desired semidefiniteness of a solution can be spontaneously fulfilled. The low-rank formulation enables us to derive a fast alternating minimization algorithm in order to handle practical problems with thousands of features. Both simulation and real experiments demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can achieve a competitive performance with an order of magnitude speedup compared to the state-of-the-art algorithm. In the end, we demonstrate the applicability of the proposed method to match the images of different object instances and as a result the potential to reconstruct category-specific object models from those images.

We introduce a new approach for estimating a fine grained 3D shape and continuous pose of an object from a single image. Given a training set of view exemplars, we learn and select appearance-based discriminative parts which are mapped onto the 3D model through a facility location optimization. The training set of 3D models is summarized into a set of basis shapes from which we can generalize by linear combination. Given a test image, we detect hypotheses for each part. The main challenge is to select from these hypotheses and compute the 3D pose and shape coefficients at the same time. To achieve this, we optimize a function that considers simultaneously the appearance matching of the parts as well as the geometric reprojection error. We apply the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) to minimize the resulting convex function. Our main and novel contribution is the simultaneous solution for part localization and detailed 3D geometry estimation by maximizing both appearance and geometric compatibility with convex relaxation.

MOTIVATION: The post-genome era sees urgent need for more novel approaches to extracting useful information from the huge amount of genetic data. The identification of recurrent copy number variations (CNVs) from array-based comparative genomic hybridization (aCGH) data can help understand complex diseases, such as cancer. Most of the previous computational methods focused on single-sample analysis or statistical testing based on the results of single-sample analysis. Finding recurrent CNVs from multi-sample data remains a challenging topic worth further study. RESULTS: We present a general and robust method to identify recurrent CNVs from multi-sample aCGH profiles. We express the raw dataset as a matrix and demonstrate that recurrent CNVs will form a low-rank matrix. Hence, we formulate the problem as a matrix recovering problem, where we aim to find a piecewise-constant and low-rank approximation (PLA) to the input matrix. We propose a convex formulation for matrix recovery and an efficient algorithm to globally solve the problem. We demonstrate the advantages of PLA compared with alternative methods using synthesized datasets and two breast cancer datasets. The experimental results show that PLA can successfully reconstruct the recurrent CNV patterns from raw data and achieve better performance compared with alternative methods under a wide range of scenarios. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: The MATLAB code is available at http://bioinformatics.ust.hk/pla.zip.

Active contours are widely used in image segmentation. To cope with missing or misleading features in images, researchers have introduced various ways to model the prior of shapes and use the prior to constrain active contours. However, the shape prior is usually learnt from a large set of annotated data, which is not always accessible in practice. Moreover, it is often doubted that the existing shapes in the training set will be sufficient to model the new instance in the testing image. In this paper, we propose to use the group similarity of object shapes in multiple images as a prior to aid segmentation, which can be interpreted as an unsupervised approach of shape prior modeling. We show that the rank of the matrix consisting of multiple shapes is a good measure of the group similarity of the shapes, and the nuclear norm minimization is a simple and effective way to impose the proposed constraint on existing active contour models. Moreover, we develop a fast algorithm to solve the proposed model by using the accelerated proximal method. Experiments using echocardiographic image sequences acquired from acute canine experiments demonstrate that the proposed method can consistently improve the performance of active contour models and increase the robustness against image defects such as missing boundaries.

Object detection is a fundamental step for automated video analysis in many vision applications. Object detection in a video is usually performed by object detectors or background subtraction techniques. Often, an object detector requires manually labeled examples to train a binary classifier, while background subtraction needs a training sequence that contains no objects to build a background model. To automate the analysis, object detection without a separate training phase becomes a critical task. People have tried to tackle this task by using motion information. But existing motion-based methods are usually limited when coping with complex scenarios such as nonrigid motion and dynamic background. In this paper, we show that the above challenges can be addressed in a unified framework named DEtecting Contiguous Outliers in the LOw-rank Representation (DECOLOR). This formulation integrates object detection and background learning into a single process of optimization, which can be solved by an alternating algorithm efficiently. We explain the relations between DECOLOR and other sparsity-based methods. Experiments on both simulated data and real sequences demonstrate that DECOLOR outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches and it can work effectively on a wide range of complex scenarios.

DNA copy number variation (CNV) accounts for a large proportion of genetic variation. One commonly used approach to detecting CNVs is array-based comparative genomic hybridization (aCGH). Although many methods have been proposed to analyze aCGH data, it is not clear how to combine information from multiple samples to improve CNV detection. In this paper, we propose to use a matrix to approximate the multisample aCGH data and minimize the total variation of each sample as well as the nuclear norm of the whole matrix. In this way, we can make use of the smoothness property of each sample and the correlation among multiple samples simultaneously in a convex optimization framework. We also developed an efficient and scalable algorithm to handle large-scale data. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art techniques under a wide range of scenarios and it is capable of processing large data sets with millions of probes.

Tracking the mitral valve leaflet in an ultrasound sequence is a challenging task because of the poor image quality and fast and irregular leaflet motion. Previous algorithms usually applied standard segmentation methods based on edges, object intensity and anatomical information to segment the mitral leaflet in static frames. However, they are limited in practical applications due to the requirement of manual input for initialization or large annotated datasets for training. In this paper we present a completely automatic and unsupervised algorithm for mitral leaflet detection and tracking. We demonstrate that the image sequence of a cardiac cycle can be well approximated with a low-rank matrix, except for the mitral leaflet region with fast motion and tissue deformation. Based on this difference, we propose to track the mitral leaflet by detecting contiguous outliers in the low-rank representation. With this formulation, the leaflet is tracked using the motion cue, but the complicated motion computation is avoided. To the best of our knowledge, the proposed algorithm is the first unsupervised method for mitral leaflet tracking. The algorithm was tested on both 2D and 3D echocardiography, which achieved accurate segmentation with an average distance of 0.87 ± 0.42mm compared to the manual tracing.

MOTIVATION: Although genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified many disease-susceptibility single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), these findings can only explain a small portion of genetic contributions to complex diseases, which is known as the missing heritability. A possible explanation is that genetic variants with small effects have not been detected. The chance is < 8 that a causal SNP will be directly genotyped. The effects of its neighboring SNPs may be too weak to be detected due to the effect decay caused by imperfect linkage disequilibrium. Moreover, it is still challenging to detect a causal SNP with a small effect even if it has been directly genotyped. RESULTS: In order to increase the statistical power when detecting disease-associated SNPs with relatively small effects, we propose a method using neighborhood information. Since the disease-associated SNPs account for only a small fraction of the entire SNP set, we formulate this problem as Contiguous Outlier DEtection (CODE), which is a discrete optimization problem. In our formulation, we cast the disease-associated SNPs as outliers and further impose a spatial continuity constraint for outlier detection. We show that this optimization can be solved exactly using graph cuts. We also employ the stability selection strategy to control the false positive results caused by imperfect parameter tuning. We demonstrate its advantage in simulations and real experiments. In particular, the newly identified SNP clusters are replicable in two independent datasets. AVAILABILITY: The software is available at: http://bioinformatics.ust.hk/CODE.zip. CONTACT: [email protected] SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.