Recent neural human representations can produce high-quality multi-view rendering but require using dense multi-view inputs and costly training. They are hence largely limited to static models as training each frame is infeasible. We present HumanNeRF - a generalizable neural representation - for high-fidelity free-view synthesis of dynamic humans. Analogous to how IBRNet assists NeRF by avoiding per-scene training, HumanNeRF employs an aggregated pixel-alignment feature across multi-view inputs along with a pose embedded non-rigid deformation field for tackling dynamic motions. The raw HumanNeRF can already produce reasonable rendering on sparse video inputs of unseen subjects and camera settings. To further improve the rendering quality, we augment our solution with an appearance blending module for combining the benefits of both neural volumetric rendering and neural texture blending. Extensive experiments on various multi-view dynamic human datasets demonstrate the generalizability and effectiveness of our approach in synthesizing photo-realistic free-view humans under challenging motions and with very sparse camera view inputs.
We present Block-NeRF, a variant of Neural Radiance Fields that can represent large-scale environments. Specifically, we demonstrate that when scaling NeRF to render city-scale scenes spanning multiple blocks, it is vital to decompose the scene into individually trained NeRFs. This decomposition decouples rendering time from scene size, enables rendering to scale to arbitrarily large environments, and allows per-block updates of the environment. We adopt several architectural changes to make NeRF robust to data captured over months under different environmental conditions. We add appearance embeddings, learned pose refinement, and controllable exposure to each individual NeRF, and introduce a procedure for aligning appearance between adjacent NeRFs so that they can be seamlessly combined. We build a grid of Block-NeRFs from 2.8 million images to create the largest neural scene representation to date, capable of rendering an entire neighborhood of San Francisco.
We present PVSeRF, a learning framework that reconstructs neural radiance fields from single-view RGB images, for novel view synthesis. Previous solutions, such as pixelNeRF, rely only on pixel-aligned features and suffer from feature ambiguity issues. As a result, they struggle with the disentanglement of geometry and appearance, leading to implausible geometries and blurry results. To address this challenge, we propose to incorporate explicit geometry reasoning and combine it with pixel-aligned features for radiance field prediction. Specifically, in addition to pixel-aligned features, we further constrain the radiance field learning to be conditioned on i) voxel-aligned features learned from a coarse volumetric grid and ii) fine surface-aligned features extracted from a regressed point cloud. We show that the introduction of such geometry-aware features helps to achieve a better disentanglement between appearance and geometry, i.e. recovering more accurate geometries and synthesizing higher quality images of novel views. Extensive experiments against state-of-the-art methods on ShapeNet benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of our approach for single-image novel view synthesis.
Deep generative models have made great progress in synthesizing images with arbitrary human poses and transferring poses of one person to others. Though many different methods have been proposed to generate images with high visual fidelity, the main challenge remains and comes from two fundamental issues: pose ambiguity and appearance inconsistency. To alleviate the current limitations and improve the quality of the synthesized images, we propose a pose transfer network with augmented Disentangled Feature Consistency (DFC-Net) to facilitate human pose transfer. Given a pair of images containing the source and target person, DFC-Net extracts pose and static information from the source and target respectively, then synthesizes an image of the target person with the desired pose from the source. Moreover, DFC-Net leverages disentangled feature consistency losses in the adversarial training to strengthen the transfer coherence and integrates a keypoint amplifier to enhance the pose feature extraction. With the help of the disentangled feature consistency losses, we further propose a novel data augmentation scheme that introduces unpaired support data with the augmented consistency constraints to improve the generality and robustness of DFC-Net. Extensive experimental results on Mixamo-Pose and EDN-10k have demonstrated DFC-Net achieves state-of-the-art performance on pose transfer.
Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) have recently gained a surge of interest within the computer vision community for its power to synthesize photorealistic novel views of real-world scenes. One limitation of NeRF, however, is its requirement of accurate camera poses to learn the scene representations. In this paper, we propose Bundle-Adjusting Neural Radiance Fields (BARF) for training NeRF from imperfect (or even unknown) camera poses -- the joint problem of learning neural 3D representations and registering camera frames. We establish a theoretical connection to classical image alignment and show that coarse-to-fine registration is also applicable to NeRF. Furthermore, we show that na\"ively applying positional encoding in NeRF has a negative impact on registration with a synthesis-based objective. Experiments on synthetic and real-world data show that BARF can effectively optimize the neural scene representations and resolve large camera pose misalignment at the same time. This enables view synthesis and localization of video sequences from unknown camera poses, opening up new avenues for visual localization systems (e.g. SLAM) and potential applications for dense 3D mapping and reconstruction.
Although supervised person re-identification (Re-ID) methods have shown impressive performance, they suffer from a poor generalization capability on unseen domains. Therefore, generalizable Re-ID has recently attracted growing attention. Many existing methods have employed an instance normalization technique to reduce style variations, but the loss of discriminative information could not be avoided. In this paper, we propose a novel generalizable Re-ID framework, named Meta Batch-Instance Normalization (MetaBIN). Our main idea is to generalize normalization layers by simulating unsuccessful generalization scenarios beforehand in the meta-learning pipeline. To this end, we combine learnable batch-instance normalization layers with meta-learning and investigate the challenging cases caused by both batch and instance normalization layers. Moreover, we diversify the virtual simulations via our meta-train loss accompanied by a cyclic inner-updating manner to boost generalization capability. After all, the MetaBIN framework prevents our model from overfitting to the given source styles and improves the generalization capability to unseen domains without additional data augmentation or complicated network design. Extensive experimental results show that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on the large-scale domain generalization Re-ID benchmark and the cross-domain Re-ID problem. The source code is available at: //github.com/bismex/MetaBIN.
Hashing has been a widely-adopted technique for nearest neighbor search in large-scale image retrieval tasks. Recent research has shown that leveraging supervised information can lead to high quality hashing. However, the cost of annotating data is often an obstacle when applying supervised hashing to a new domain. Moreover, the results can suffer from the robustness problem as the data at training and test stage could come from similar but different distributions. This paper studies the exploration of generating synthetic data through semi-supervised generative adversarial networks (GANs), which leverages largely unlabeled and limited labeled training data to produce highly compelling data with intrinsic invariance and global coherence, for better understanding statistical structures of natural data. We demonstrate that the above two limitations can be well mitigated by applying the synthetic data for hashing. Specifically, a novel deep semantic hashing with GANs (DSH-GANs) is presented, which mainly consists of four components: a deep convolution neural networks (CNN) for learning image representations, an adversary stream to distinguish synthetic images from real ones, a hash stream for encoding image representations to hash codes and a classification stream. The whole architecture is trained end-to-end by jointly optimizing three losses, i.e., adversarial loss to correct label of synthetic or real for each sample, triplet ranking loss to preserve the relative similarity ordering in the input real-synthetic triplets and classification loss to classify each sample accurately. Extensive experiments conducted on both CIFAR-10 and NUS-WIDE image benchmarks validate the capability of exploiting synthetic images for hashing. Our framework also achieves superior results when compared to state-of-the-art deep hash models.
Can an algorithm create original and compelling fashion designs to serve as an inspirational assistant? To help answer this question, we design and investigate different image generation models associated with different loss functions to boost creativity in fashion generation. The dimensions of our explorations include: (i) different Generative Adversarial Networks architectures that start from noise vectors to generate fashion items, (ii) a new loss function that encourages creativity, and (iii) a generation process following the key elements of fashion design (disentangling shape and texture makers). A key challenge of this study is the evaluation of generated designs and the retrieval of best ones, hence we put together an evaluation protocol associating automatic metrics and human experimental studies that we hope will help ease future research. We show that our proposed creativity loss yields better overall appreciation than the one employed in Creative Adversarial Networks. In the end, about 61% of our images are thought to be created by human designers rather than by a computer while also being considered original per our human subject experiments, and our proposed loss scores the highest compared to existing losses in both novelty and likability.
Domain Adaptation is an actively researched problem in Computer Vision. In this work, we propose an approach that leverages unsupervised data to bring the source and target distributions closer in a learned joint feature space. We accomplish this by inducing a symbiotic relationship between the learned embedding and a generative adversarial network. This is in contrast to methods which use the adversarial framework for realistic data generation and retraining deep models with such data. We demonstrate the strength and generality of our approach by performing experiments on three different tasks with varying levels of difficulty: (1) Digit classification (MNIST, SVHN and USPS datasets) (2) Object recognition using OFFICE dataset and (3) Domain adaptation from synthetic to real data. Our method achieves state-of-the art performance in most experimental settings and by far the only GAN-based method that has been shown to work well across different datasets such as OFFICE and DIGITS.
In this paper, we propose an improved quantitative evaluation framework for Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) on generating domain-specific images, where we improve conventional evaluation methods on two levels: the feature representation and the evaluation metric. Unlike most existing evaluation frameworks which transfer the representation of ImageNet inception model to map images onto the feature space, our framework uses a specialized encoder to acquire fine-grained domain-specific representation. Moreover, for datasets with multiple classes, we propose Class-Aware Frechet Distance (CAFD), which employs a Gaussian mixture model on the feature space to better fit the multi-manifold feature distribution. Experiments and analysis on both the feature level and the image level were conducted to demonstrate improvements of our proposed framework over the recently proposed state-of-the-art FID method. To our best knowledge, we are the first to provide counter examples where FID gives inconsistent results with human judgments. It is shown in the experiments that our framework is able to overcome the shortness of FID and improves robustness. Code will be made available.
Despite of the success of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) for image generation tasks, the trade-off between image diversity and visual quality are an well-known issue. Conventional techniques achieve either visual quality or image diversity; the improvement in one side is often the result of sacrificing the degradation in the other side. In this paper, we aim to achieve both simultaneously by improving the stability of training GANs. A key idea of the proposed approach is to implicitly regularizing the discriminator using a representative feature. For that, this representative feature is extracted from the data distribution, and then transferred to the discriminator for enforcing slow updates of the gradient. Consequently, the entire training process is stabilized because the learning curve of discriminator varies slowly. Based on extensive evaluation, we demonstrate that our approach improves the visual quality and diversity of state-of-the art GANs.