arXiv subjects

Menglei Chai

Publications and source records attributed to Menglei Chai.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2022

DisCoScene: Spatially Disentangled Generative Radiance Fields for Controllable 3D-aware Scene Synthesis

Existing 3D-aware image synthesis approaches mainly focus on generating a single canonical object and show limited capacity in composing a complex scene containing a variety of objects. This work presents DisCoScene: a 3Daware generative model for high-quality and controllable scene synthesis. The key ingredient of our method is a very abstract object-level representation (i.e., 3D bounding boxes without semantic annotation) as the scene layout prior, which is simple to obtain, general to describe various scene contents, and yet informative to disentangle objects and background. Moreover, it serves as an intuitive user control for scene editing. Based on such a prior, the proposed model spatially disentangles the whole scene into object-centric generative radiance fields by learning on only 2D images with the global-local discrimination. Our model obtains the generation fidelity and editing flexibility of individual objects while being able to efficiently compose objects and the background into a complete scene. We demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on many scene datasets, including the challenging Waymo outdoor dataset. Project page: https://snap-research.github.io/discoscene/

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arXiv2022

NeRF-Art: Text-Driven Neural Radiance Fields Stylization

As a powerful representation of 3D scenes, the neural radiance field (NeRF) enables high-quality novel view synthesis from multi-view images. Stylizing NeRF, however, remains challenging, especially on simulating a text-guided style with both the appearance and the geometry altered simultaneously. In this paper, we present NeRF-Art, a text-guided NeRF stylization approach that manipulates the style of a pre-trained NeRF model with a simple text prompt. Unlike previous approaches that either lack sufficient geometry deformations and texture details or require meshes to guide the stylization, our method can shift a 3D scene to the target style characterized by desired geometry and appearance variations without any mesh guidance. This is achieved by introducing a novel global-local contrastive learning strategy, combined with the directional constraint to simultaneously control both the trajectory and the strength of the target style. Moreover, we adopt a weight regularization method to effectively suppress cloudy artifacts and geometry noises which arise easily when the density field is transformed during geometry stylization. Through extensive experiments on various styles, we demonstrate that our method is effective and robust regarding both single-view stylization quality and cross-view consistency. The code and more results can be found in our project page: https://cassiepython.github.io/nerfart/.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

NeROIC: Neural Rendering of Objects from Online Image Collections

We present a novel method to acquire object representations from online image collections, capturing high-quality geometry and material properties of arbitrary objects from photographs with varying cameras, illumination, and backgrounds. This enables various object-centric rendering applications such as novel-view synthesis, relighting, and harmonized background composition from challenging in-the-wild input. Using a multi-stage approach extending neural radiance fields, we first infer the surface geometry and refine the coarsely estimated initial camera parameters, while leveraging coarse foreground object masks to improve the training efficiency and geometry quality. We also introduce a robust normal estimation technique which eliminates the effect of geometric noise while retaining crucial details. Lastly, we extract surface material properties and ambient illumination, represented in spherical harmonics with extensions that handle transient elements, e.g. sharp shadows. The union of these components results in a highly modular and efficient object acquisition framework. Extensive evaluations and comparisons demonstrate the advantages of our approach in capturing high-quality geometry and appearance properties useful for rendering applications.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

Cross-Modal 3D Shape Generation and Manipulation

Creating and editing the shape and color of 3D objects require tremendous human effort and expertise. Compared to direct manipulation in 3D interfaces, 2D interactions such as sketches and scribbles are usually much more natural and intuitive for the users. In this paper, we propose a generic multi-modal generative model that couples the 2D modalities and implicit 3D representations through shared latent spaces. With the proposed model, versatile 3D generation and manipulation are enabled by simply propagating the editing from a specific 2D controlling modality through the latent spaces. For example, editing the 3D shape by drawing a sketch, re-colorizing the 3D surface via painting color scribbles on the 2D rendering, or generating 3D shapes of a certain category given one or a few reference images. Unlike prior works, our model does not require re-training or fine-tuning per editing task and is also conceptually simple, easy to implement, robust to input domain shifts, and flexible to diverse reconstruction on partial 2D inputs. We evaluate our framework on two representative 2D modalities of grayscale line sketches and rendered color images, and demonstrate that our method enables various shape manipulation and generation tasks with these 2D modalities.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

R2L: Distilling Neural Radiance Field to Neural Light Field for Efficient Novel View Synthesis

Recent research explosion on Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) shows the encouraging potential to represent complex scenes with neural networks. One major drawback of NeRF is its prohibitive inference time: Rendering a single pixel requires querying the NeRF network hundreds of times. To resolve it, existing efforts mainly attempt to reduce the number of required sampled points. However, the problem of iterative sampling still exists. On the other hand, Neural Light Field (NeLF) presents a more straightforward representation over NeRF in novel view synthesis -- the rendering of a pixel amounts to one single forward pass without ray-marching. In this work, we present a deep residual MLP network (88 layers) to effectively learn the light field. We show the key to successfully learning such a deep NeLF network is to have sufficient data, for which we transfer the knowledge from a pre-trained NeRF model via data distillation. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world scenes show the merits of our method over other counterpart algorithms. On the synthetic scenes, we achieve 26-35x FLOPs reduction (per camera ray) and 28-31x runtime speedup, meanwhile delivering significantly better (1.4-2.8 dB average PSNR improvement) rendering quality than NeRF without any customized parallelism requirement.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

Quantized GAN for Complex Music Generation from Dance Videos

We present Dance2Music-GAN (D2M-GAN), a novel adversarial multi-modal framework that generates complex musical samples conditioned on dance videos. Our proposed framework takes dance video frames and human body motions as input, and learns to generate music samples that plausibly accompany the corresponding input. Unlike most existing conditional music generation works that generate specific types of mono-instrumental sounds using symbolic audio representations (e.g., MIDI), and that usually rely on pre-defined musical synthesizers, in this work we generate dance music in complex styles (e.g., pop, breaking, etc.) by employing a Vector Quantized (VQ) audio representation, and leverage both its generality and high abstraction capacity of its symbolic and continuous counterparts. By performing an extensive set of experiments on multiple datasets, and following a comprehensive evaluation protocol, we assess the generative qualities of our proposal against alternatives. The attained quantitative results, which measure the music consistency, beats correspondence, and music diversity, demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method. Last but not least, we curate a challenging dance-music dataset of in-the-wild TikTok videos, which we use to further demonstrate the efficacy of our approach in real-world applications -- and which we hope to serve as a starting point for relevant future research.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

CLIP-NeRF: Text-and-Image Driven Manipulation of Neural Radiance Fields

We present CLIP-NeRF, a multi-modal 3D object manipulation method for neural radiance fields (NeRF). By leveraging the joint language-image embedding space of the recent Contrastive Language-Image Pre-Training (CLIP) model, we propose a unified framework that allows manipulating NeRF in a user-friendly way, using either a short text prompt or an exemplar image. Specifically, to combine the novel view synthesis capability of NeRF and the controllable manipulation ability of latent representations from generative models, we introduce a disentangled conditional NeRF architecture that allows individual control over both shape and appearance. This is achieved by performing the shape conditioning via applying a learned deformation field to the positional encoding and deferring color conditioning to the volumetric rendering stage. To bridge this disentangled latent representation to the CLIP embedding, we design two code mappers that take a CLIP embedding as input and update the latent codes to reflect the targeted editing. The mappers are trained with a CLIP-based matching loss to ensure the manipulation accuracy. Furthermore, we propose an inverse optimization method that accurately projects an input image to the latent codes for manipulation to enable editing on real images. We evaluate our approach by extensive experiments on a variety of text prompts and exemplar images and also provide an intuitive interface for interactive editing. Our implementation is available at https://cassiepython.github.io/clipnerf/

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

Cross-Domain and Disentangled Face Manipulation with 3D Guidance

Face image manipulation via three-dimensional guidance has been widely applied in various interactive scenarios due to its semantically-meaningful understanding and user-friendly controllability. However, existing 3D-morphable-model-based manipulation methods are not directly applicable to out-of-domain faces, such as non-photorealistic paintings, cartoon portraits, or even animals, mainly due to the formidable difficulties in building the model for each specific face domain. To overcome this challenge, we propose, as far as we know, the first method to manipulate faces in arbitrary domains using human 3DMM. This is achieved through two major steps: 1) disentangled mapping from 3DMM parameters to the latent space embedding of a pre-trained StyleGAN2 that guarantees disentangled and precise controls for each semantic attribute; and 2) cross-domain adaptation that bridges domain discrepancies and makes human 3DMM applicable to out-of-domain faces by enforcing a consistent latent space embedding. Experiments and comparisons demonstrate the superiority of our high-quality semantic manipulation method on a variety of face domains with all major 3D facial attributes controllable-pose, expression, shape, albedo, and illumination. Moreover, we develop an intuitive editing interface to support user-friendly control and instant feedback. Our project page is https://cassiepython.github.io/cddfm3d/index.html

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arXiv2021

DisUnknown: Distilling Unknown Factors for Disentanglement Learning

Disentangling data into interpretable and independent factors is critical for controllable generation tasks. With the availability of labeled data, supervision can help enforce the separation of specific factors as expected. However, it is often expensive or even impossible to label every single factor to achieve fully-supervised disentanglement. In this paper, we adopt a general setting where all factors that are hard to label or identify are encapsulated as a single unknown factor. Under this setting, we propose a flexible weakly-supervised multi-factor disentanglement framework DisUnknown, which Distills Unknown factors for enabling multi-conditional generation regarding both labeled and unknown factors. Specifically, a two-stage training approach is adopted to first disentangle the unknown factor with an effective and robust training method, and then train the final generator with the proper disentanglement of all labeled factors utilizing the unknown distillation. To demonstrate the generalization capacity and scalability of our method, we evaluate it on multiple benchmark datasets qualitatively and quantitatively and further apply it to various real-world applications on complicated datasets.

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arXiv2021

Flow Guided Transformable Bottleneck Networks for Motion Retargeting

Human motion retargeting aims to transfer the motion of one person in a "driving" video or set of images to another person. Existing efforts leverage a long training video from each target person to train a subject-specific motion transfer model. However, the scalability of such methods is limited, as each model can only generate videos for the given target subject, and such training videos are labor-intensive to acquire and process. Few-shot motion transfer techniques, which only require one or a few images from a target, have recently drawn considerable attention. Methods addressing this task generally use either 2D or explicit 3D representations to transfer motion, and in doing so, sacrifice either accurate geometric modeling or the flexibility of an end-to-end learned representation. Inspired by the Transformable Bottleneck Network, which renders novel views and manipulations of rigid objects, we propose an approach based on an implicit volumetric representation of the image content, which can then be spatially manipulated using volumetric flow fields. We address the challenging question of how to aggregate information across different body poses, learning flow fields that allow for combining content from the appropriate regions of input images of highly non-rigid human subjects performing complex motions into a single implicit volumetric representation. This allows us to learn our 3D representation solely from videos of moving people. Armed with both 3D object understanding and end-to-end learned rendering, this categorically novel representation delivers state-of-the-art image generation quality, as shown by our quantitative and qualitative evaluations.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

Efficient Semantic Image Synthesis via Class-Adaptive Normalization

Spatially-adaptive normalization (SPADE) is remarkably successful recently in conditional semantic image synthesis \cite{park2019semantic}, which modulates the normalized activation with spatially-varying transformations learned from semantic layouts, to prevent the semantic information from being washed away. Despite its impressive performance, a more thorough understanding of the advantages inside the box is still highly demanded to help reduce the significant computation and parameter overhead introduced by this novel structure. In this paper, from a return-on-investment point of view, we conduct an in-depth analysis of the effectiveness of this spatially-adaptive normalization and observe that its modulation parameters benefit more from semantic-awareness rather than spatial-adaptiveness, especially for high-resolution input masks. Inspired by this observation, we propose class-adaptive normalization (CLADE), a lightweight but equally-effective variant that is only adaptive to semantic class. In order to further improve spatial-adaptiveness, we introduce intra-class positional map encoding calculated from semantic layouts to modulate the normalization parameters of CLADE and propose a truly spatially-adaptive variant of CLADE, namely CLADE-ICPE.Through extensive experiments on multiple challenging datasets, we demonstrate that the proposed CLADE can be generalized to different SPADE-based methods while achieving comparable generation quality compared to SPADE, but it is much more efficient with fewer extra parameters and lower computational cost. The code and pretrained models are available at \url{https://github.com/tzt101/CLADE.git}.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

A Good Image Generator Is What You Need for High-Resolution Video Synthesis

Image and video synthesis are closely related areas aiming at generating content from noise. While rapid progress has been demonstrated in improving image-based models to handle large resolutions, high-quality renderings, and wide variations in image content, achieving comparable video generation results remains problematic. We present a framework that leverages contemporary image generators to render high-resolution videos. We frame the video synthesis problem as discovering a trajectory in the latent space of a pre-trained and fixed image generator. Not only does such a framework render high-resolution videos, but it also is an order of magnitude more computationally efficient. We introduce a motion generator that discovers the desired trajectory, in which content and motion are disentangled. With such a representation, our framework allows for a broad range of applications, including content and motion manipulation. Furthermore, we introduce a new task, which we call cross-domain video synthesis, in which the image and motion generators are trained on disjoint datasets belonging to different domains. This allows for generating moving objects for which the desired video data is not available. Extensive experiments on various datasets demonstrate the advantages of our methods over existing video generation techniques. Code will be released at https://github.com/snap-research/MoCoGAN-HD.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

Exemplar-Based 3D Portrait Stylization

Exemplar-based portrait stylization is widely attractive and highly desired. Despite recent successes, it remains challenging, especially when considering both texture and geometric styles. In this paper, we present the first framework for one-shot 3D portrait style transfer, which can generate 3D face models with both the geometry exaggerated and the texture stylized while preserving the identity from the original content. It requires only one arbitrary style image instead of a large set of training examples for a particular style, provides geometry and texture outputs that are fully parameterized and disentangled, and enables further graphics applications with the 3D representations. The framework consists of two stages. In the first geometric style transfer stage, we use facial landmark translation to capture the coarse geometry style and guide the deformation of the dense 3D face geometry. In the second texture style transfer stage, we focus on performing style transfer on the canonical texture by adopting a differentiable renderer to optimize the texture in a multi-view framework. Experiments show that our method achieves robustly good results on different artistic styles and outperforms existing methods. We also demonstrate the advantages of our method via various 2D and 3D graphics applications. Project page is https://halfjoe.github.io/projs/3DPS/index.html.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

Motion Representations for Articulated Animation

We propose novel motion representations for animating articulated objects consisting of distinct parts. In a completely unsupervised manner, our method identifies object parts, tracks them in a driving video, and infers their motions by considering their principal axes. In contrast to the previous keypoint-based works, our method extracts meaningful and consistent regions, describing locations, shape, and pose. The regions correspond to semantically relevant and distinct object parts, that are more easily detected in frames of the driving video. To force decoupling of foreground from background, we model non-object related global motion with an additional affine transformation. To facilitate animation and prevent the leakage of the shape of the driving object, we disentangle shape and pose of objects in the region space. Our model can animate a variety of objects, surpassing previous methods by a large margin on existing benchmarks. We present a challenging new benchmark with high-resolution videos and show that the improvement is particularly pronounced when articulated objects are considered, reaching 96.6% user preference vs. the state of the art.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

Diverse Semantic Image Synthesis via Probability Distribution Modeling

Semantic image synthesis, translating semantic layouts to photo-realistic images, is a one-to-many mapping problem. Though impressive progress has been recently made, diverse semantic synthesis that can efficiently produce semantic-level multimodal results, still remains a challenge. In this paper, we propose a novel diverse semantic image synthesis framework from the perspective of semantic class distributions, which naturally supports diverse generation at semantic or even instance level. We achieve this by modeling class-level conditional modulation parameters as continuous probability distributions instead of discrete values, and sampling per-instance modulation parameters through instance-adaptive stochastic sampling that is consistent across the network. Moreover, we propose prior noise remapping, through linear perturbation parameters encoded from paired references, to facilitate supervised training and exemplar-based instance style control at test time. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets show that our method can achieve superior diversity and comparable quality compared to state-of-the-art methods. Code will be available at \url{https://github.com/tzt101/INADE.git}

cs.CV↗

arXiv2020

MichiGAN: Multi-Input-Conditioned Hair Image Generation for Portrait Editing

Despite the recent success of face image generation with GANs, conditional hair editing remains challenging due to the under-explored complexity of its geometry and appearance. In this paper, we present MichiGAN (Multi-Input-Conditioned Hair Image GAN), a novel conditional image generation method for interactive portrait hair manipulation. To provide user control over every major hair visual factor, we explicitly disentangle hair into four orthogonal attributes, including shape, structure, appearance, and background. For each of them, we design a corresponding condition module to represent, process, and convert user inputs, and modulate the image generation pipeline in ways that respect the natures of different visual attributes. All these condition modules are integrated with the backbone generator to form the final end-to-end network, which allows fully-conditioned hair generation from multiple user inputs. Upon it, we also build an interactive portrait hair editing system that enables straightforward manipulation of hair by projecting intuitive and high-level user inputs such as painted masks, guiding strokes, or reference photos to well-defined condition representations. Through extensive experiments and evaluations, we demonstrate the superiority of our method regarding both result quality and user controllability. The code is available at https://github.com/tzt101/MichiGAN.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2020

Neural Hair Rendering

In this paper, we propose a generic neural-based hair rendering pipeline that can synthesize photo-realistic images from virtual 3D hair models. Unlike existing supervised translation methods that require model-level similarity to preserve consistent structure representation for both real images and fake renderings, our method adopts an unsupervised solution to work on arbitrary hair models. The key component of our method is a shared latent space to encode appearance-invariant structure information of both domains, which generates realistic renderings conditioned by extra appearance inputs. This is achieved by domain-specific pre-disentangled structure representation, partially shared domain encoder layers and a structure discriminator. We also propose a simple yet effective temporal conditioning method to enforce consistency for video sequence generation. We demonstrate the superiority of our method by testing it on a large number of portraits and comparing it with alternative baselines and state-of-the-art unsupervised image translation methods.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2020

Interactive Video Stylization Using Few-Shot Patch-Based Training

In this paper, we present a learning-based method to the keyframe-based video stylization that allows an artist to propagate the style from a few selected keyframes to the rest of the sequence. Its key advantage is that the resulting stylization is semantically meaningful, i.e., specific parts of moving objects are stylized according to the artist's intention. In contrast to previous style transfer techniques, our approach does not require any lengthy pre-training process nor a large training dataset. We demonstrate how to train an appearance translation network from scratch using only a few stylized exemplars while implicitly preserving temporal consistency. This leads to a video stylization framework that supports real-time inference, parallel processing, and random access to an arbitrary output frame. It can also merge the content from multiple keyframes without the need to perform an explicit blending operation. We demonstrate its practical utility in various interactive scenarios, where the user paints over a selected keyframe and sees her style transferred to an existing recorded sequence or a live video stream.

cs.GR↗