We present a large-scale synthetic dataset for novel view synthesis consisting of ~300k images rendered from nearly 2000 complex scenes using high-quality ray tracing at high resolution (1600 x 1600 pixels). The dataset is orders of magnitude larger than existing synthetic datasets for novel view synthesis, thus providing a large unified benchmark for both training and evaluation. Using 4 distinct sources of high-quality 3D meshes, the scenes of our dataset exhibit challenging variations in camera views, lighting, shape, materials, and textures. Because our dataset is too large for existing methods to process, we propose Sparse Voxel Light Field (SVLF), an efficient voxel-based light field approach for novel view synthesis that achieves comparable performance to NeRF on synthetic data, while being an order of magnitude faster to train and two orders of magnitude faster to render. SVLF achieves this speed by relying on a sparse voxel octree, careful voxel sampling (requiring only a handful of queries per ray), and reduced network structure; as well as ground truth depth maps at training time. Our dataset is generated by NViSII, a Python-based ray tracing renderer, which is designed to be simple for non-experts to use and share, flexible and powerful through its use of scripting, and able to create high-quality and physically-based rendered images. Experiments with a subset of our dataset allow us to compare standard methods like NeRF and mip-NeRF for single-scene modeling, and pixelNeRF for category-level modeling, pointing toward the need for future improvements in this area.
This paper proposes a novel application system for the generation of three-dimensional (3D) character animation driven by markerless human body motion capturing. The entire pipeline of the system consists of five stages: 1) the capturing of motion data using multiple cameras, 2) detection of the two-dimensional (2D) human body joints, 3) estimation of the 3D joints, 4) calculation of bone transformation matrices, and 5) generation of character animation. The main objective of this study is to generate a 3D skeleton and animation for 3D characters using multi-view images captured by ordinary cameras. The computational complexity of the 3D skeleton reconstruction based on 3D vision has been reduced as needed to achieve frame-by-frame motion capturing. The experimental results reveal that our system can effectively and efficiently capture human actions and use them to animate 3D cartoon characters in real-time.
Anomaly detection is defined as discovering patterns that do not conform to the expected behavior. Previously, anomaly detection was mostly conducted using traditional shallow learning techniques, but with little improvement. As the emergence of graph neural networks (GNN), graph anomaly detection has been greatly developed. However, recent studies have shown that GNN-based methods encounter challenge, in that no graph anomaly detection algorithm can perform generalization on most datasets. To bridge the tap, we propose a multi-view fusion approach for graph anomaly detection (Mul-GAD). The view-level fusion captures the extent of significance between different views, while the feature-level fusion makes full use of complementary information. We theoretically and experimentally elaborate the effectiveness of the fusion strategies. For a more comprehensive conclusion, we further investigate the effect of the objective function and the number of fused views on detection performance. Exploiting these findings, our Mul-GAD is proposed equipped with fusion strategies and the well-performed objective function. Compared with other state-of-the-art detection methods, we achieve a better detection performance and generalization in most scenarios via a series of experiments conducted on Pubmed, Amazon Computer, Amazon Photo, Weibo and Books. Our code is available at //github.com/liuyishoua/Mul-Graph-Fusion.
Recent methods for neural surface representation and rendering, for example NeuS, have demonstrated remarkably high-quality reconstruction of static scenes. However, the training of NeuS takes an extremely long time (8 hours), which makes it almost impossible to apply them to dynamic scenes with thousands of frames. We propose a fast neural surface reconstruction approach, called NeuS2, which achieves two orders of magnitude improvement in terms of acceleration without compromising reconstruction quality. To accelerate the training process, we integrate multi-resolution hash encodings into a neural surface representation and implement our whole algorithm in CUDA. We also present a lightweight calculation of second-order derivatives tailored to our networks (i.e., ReLU-based MLPs), which achieves a factor two speed up. To further stabilize training, a progressive learning strategy is proposed to optimize multi-resolution hash encodings from coarse to fine. In addition, we extend our method for reconstructing dynamic scenes with an incremental training strategy. Our experiments on various datasets demonstrate that NeuS2 significantly outperforms the state-of-the-arts in both surface reconstruction accuracy and training speed. The video is available at //vcai.mpi-inf.mpg.de/projects/NeuS2/ .
Pose graph optimization is a special case of the simultaneous localization and mapping problem where the only variables to be estimated are pose variables and the only measurements are inter-pose constraints. The vast majority of pose graph optimization techniques are vertex based (variables are robot poses), but recent work has parameterized the pose graph optimization problem in a relative fashion (variables are the transformations between poses) that utilizes a minimum cycle basis to maximize the sparsity of the problem. We explore the construction of a cycle basis in an incremental manner while maximizing the sparsity. We validate an algorithm that constructs a sparse cycle basis incrementally and compare its performance with a minimum cycle basis. Additionally, we present an algorithm to approximate the minimum cycle basis of two graphs that are sparsely connected as is common in multi-agent scenarios. Lastly, the relative parameterization of pose graph optimization has been limited to using rigid body transforms on SE(2) or SE(3) as the constraints between poses. We introduce a methodology to allow for the use of lower-degree-of-freedom measurements in the relative pose graph optimization problem. We provide extensive validation of our algorithms on standard benchmarks, simulated datasets, and custom hardware.
We propose an analysis-by-synthesis method for fast multi-view 3D reconstruction of opaque objects with arbitrary materials and illumination. State-of-the-art methods use both neural surface representations and neural rendering. While flexible, neural surface representations are a significant bottleneck in optimization runtime. Instead, we represent surfaces as triangle meshes and build a differentiable rendering pipeline around triangle rasterization and neural shading. The renderer is used in a gradient descent optimization where both a triangle mesh and a neural shader are jointly optimized to reproduce the multi-view images. We evaluate our method on a public 3D reconstruction dataset and show that it can match the reconstruction accuracy of traditional baselines and neural approaches while surpassing them in optimization runtime. Additionally, we investigate the shader and find that it learns an interpretable representation of appearance, enabling applications such as 3D material editing.
Vehicle re-identification (Re-ID) is a critical component of the autonomous driving perception system, and research in this area has accelerated in recent years. However, there is yet no perfect solution to the vehicle re-identification issue associated with the car's surround-view camera system. Our analysis identifies two significant issues in the aforementioned scenario: i) It is difficult to identify the same vehicle in many picture frames due to the unique construction of the fisheye camera. ii) The appearance of the same vehicle when seen via the surround vision system's several cameras is rather different. To overcome these issues, we suggest an integrative vehicle Re-ID solution method. On the one hand, we provide a technique for determining the consistency of the tracking box drift with respect to the target. On the other hand, we combine a Re-ID network based on the attention mechanism with spatial limitations to increase performance in situations involving multiple cameras. Finally, our approach combines state-of-the-art accuracy with real-time performance. We will soon make the source code and annotated fisheye dataset available.
Given a piece of text, a video clip and a reference audio, the movie dubbing (also known as visual voice clone V2C) task aims to generate speeches that match the speaker's emotion presented in the video using the desired speaker voice as reference. V2C is more challenging than conventional text-to-speech tasks as it additionally requires the generated speech to exactly match the varying emotions and speaking speed presented in the video. Unlike previous works, we propose a novel movie dubbing architecture to tackle these problems via hierarchical prosody modelling, which bridges the visual information to corresponding speech prosody from three aspects: lip, face, and scene. Specifically, we align lip movement to the speech duration, and convey facial expression to speech energy and pitch via attention mechanism based on valence and arousal representations inspired by recent psychology findings. Moreover, we design an emotion booster to capture the atmosphere from global video scenes. All these embeddings together are used to generate mel-spectrogram and then convert to speech waves via existing vocoder. Extensive experimental results on the Chem and V2C benchmark datasets demonstrate the favorable performance of the proposed method. The source code and trained models will be released to the public.
With the explosive growth of information technology, multi-view graph data have become increasingly prevalent and valuable. Most existing multi-view clustering techniques either focus on the scenario of multiple graphs or multi-view attributes. In this paper, we propose a generic framework to cluster multi-view attributed graph data. Specifically, inspired by the success of contrastive learning, we propose multi-view contrastive graph clustering (MCGC) method to learn a consensus graph since the original graph could be noisy or incomplete and is not directly applicable. Our method composes of two key steps: we first filter out the undesirable high-frequency noise while preserving the graph geometric features via graph filtering and obtain a smooth representation of nodes; we then learn a consensus graph regularized by graph contrastive loss. Results on several benchmark datasets show the superiority of our method with respect to state-of-the-art approaches. In particular, our simple approach outperforms existing deep learning-based methods.
Generative models are now capable of producing highly realistic images that look nearly indistinguishable from the data on which they are trained. This raises the question: if we have good enough generative models, do we still need datasets? We investigate this question in the setting of learning general-purpose visual representations from a black-box generative model rather than directly from data. Given an off-the-shelf image generator without any access to its training data, we train representations from the samples output by this generator. We compare several representation learning methods that can be applied to this setting, using the latent space of the generator to generate multiple "views" of the same semantic content. We show that for contrastive methods, this multiview data can naturally be used to identify positive pairs (nearby in latent space) and negative pairs (far apart in latent space). We find that the resulting representations rival those learned directly from real data, but that good performance requires care in the sampling strategy applied and the training method. Generative models can be viewed as a compressed and organized copy of a dataset, and we envision a future where more and more "model zoos" proliferate while datasets become increasingly unwieldy, missing, or private. This paper suggests several techniques for dealing with visual representation learning in such a future. Code is released on our project page: //ali-design.github.io/GenRep/
Large knowledge graphs often grow to store temporal facts that model the dynamic relations or interactions of entities along the timeline. Since such temporal knowledge graphs often suffer from incompleteness, it is important to develop time-aware representation learning models that help to infer the missing temporal facts. While the temporal facts are typically evolving, it is observed that many facts often show a repeated pattern along the timeline, such as economic crises and diplomatic activities. This observation indicates that a model could potentially learn much from the known facts appeared in history. To this end, we propose a new representation learning model for temporal knowledge graphs, namely CyGNet, based on a novel timeaware copy-generation mechanism. CyGNet is not only able to predict future facts from the whole entity vocabulary, but also capable of identifying facts with repetition and accordingly predicting such future facts with reference to the known facts in the past. We evaluate the proposed method on the knowledge graph completion task using five benchmark datasets. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of CyGNet for predicting future facts with repetition as well as de novo fact prediction.