arXiv subjects

Sida Peng

Publications and source records attributed to Sida Peng.

At least 73 records · Page 4Linked to original sources

arXiv2024

AI Revolution on Chat Bot: Evidence from a Randomized Controlled Experiment

In recent years, generative AI has undergone major advancements, demonstrating significant promise in augmenting human productivity. Notably, large language models (LLM), with ChatGPT-4 as an example, have drawn considerable attention. Numerous articles have examined the impact of LLM-based tools on human productivity in lab settings and designed tasks or in observational studies. Despite recent advances, field experiments applying LLM-based tools in realistic settings are limited. This paper presents the findings of a field randomized controlled trial assessing the effectiveness of LLM-based tools in providing unmonitored support services for information retrieval.

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arXiv2023

EasyVolcap: Accelerating Neural Volumetric Video Research

Volumetric video is a technology that digitally records dynamic events such as artistic performances, sporting events, and remote conversations. When acquired, such volumography can be viewed from any viewpoint and timestamp on flat screens, 3D displays, or VR headsets, enabling immersive viewing experiences and more flexible content creation in a variety of applications such as sports broadcasting, video conferencing, gaming, and movie productions. With the recent advances and fast-growing interest in neural scene representations for volumetric video, there is an urgent need for a unified open-source library to streamline the process of volumetric video capturing, reconstruction, and rendering for both researchers and non-professional users to develop various algorithms and applications of this emerging technology. In this paper, we present EasyVolcap, a Python & Pytorch library for accelerating neural volumetric video research with the goal of unifying the process of multi-view data processing, 4D scene reconstruction, and efficient dynamic volumetric video rendering. Our source code is available at https://github.com/zju3dv/EasyVolcap.

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arXiv2023

4K4D: Real-Time 4D View Synthesis at 4K Resolution

This paper targets high-fidelity and real-time view synthesis of dynamic 3D scenes at 4K resolution. Recently, some 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 enables unprecedented rendering speed. 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 30x faster than previous methods and achieves the state-of-the-art rendering quality. Our project page is available at https://zju3dv.github.io/4k4d/.

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arXiv2023

Ponder: Point Cloud Pre-training via Neural Rendering

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 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.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

Im4D: High-Fidelity and Real-Time Novel View Synthesis for Dynamic Scenes

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.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

Hierarchical Generation of Human-Object Interactions with Diffusion Probabilistic Models

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.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

Deep Generative Models on 3D Representations: A Survey

Generative models aim to learn the distribution of observed data by generating new instances. With the advent of neural networks, deep generative models, including variational autoencoders (VAEs), generative adversarial networks (GANs), and diffusion models (DMs), have progressed remarkably in synthesizing 2D images. Recently, researchers started to shift focus from 2D to 3D space, considering that 3D data is more closely aligned with our physical world and holds immense practical potential. However, unlike 2D images, which possess an inherent and efficient representation (\textit{i.e.}, a pixel grid), representing 3D data poses significantly greater challenges. Ideally, a robust 3D representation should be capable of accurately modeling complex shapes and appearances while being highly efficient in handling high-resolution data with high processing speeds and low memory requirements. Regrettably, existing 3D representations, such as point clouds, meshes, and neural fields, often fail to satisfy all of these requirements simultaneously. In this survey, we thoroughly review the ongoing developments of 3D generative models, including methods that employ 2D and 3D supervision. Our analysis centers on generative models, with a particular focus on the representations utilized in this context. We believe our survey will help the community to track the field's evolution and to spark innovative ideas to propel progress towards solving this challenging task.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

Relightable and Animatable Neural Avatar from Sparse-View Video

This paper tackles the challenge of creating relightable and animatable neural avatars from sparse-view (or even monocular) videos of dynamic humans under unknown illumination. Compared to studio environments, this setting is more practical and accessible but poses an extremely challenging ill-posed problem. Previous neural human reconstruction methods are able to reconstruct animatable avatars from sparse views using deformed Signed Distance Fields (SDF) but cannot recover material parameters for relighting. While differentiable inverse rendering-based methods have succeeded in material recovery of static objects, it is not straightforward to extend them to dynamic humans as it is computationally intensive to compute pixel-surface intersection and light visibility on deformed SDFs for inverse rendering. To solve this challenge, we propose a Hierarchical Distance Query (HDQ) algorithm to approximate the world space distances under arbitrary human poses. Specifically, we estimate coarse distances based on a parametric human model and compute fine distances by exploiting the local deformation invariance of SDF. Based on the HDQ algorithm, we leverage sphere tracing to efficiently estimate the surface intersection and light visibility. This allows us to develop the first system to recover animatable and relightable neural avatars from sparse view (or monocular) inputs. Experiments demonstrate that our approach is able to produce superior results compared to state-of-the-art methods. Our code will be released for reproducibility.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

Detector-Free Structure from Motion

We propose a new 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 new 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 capability of our framework to reconstruct texture-poor scenes. Based on this framework, we take $\textit{first place}$ in Image Matching Challenge 2023.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

Benchmarking and Analyzing 3D-aware Image Synthesis with a Modularized Codebase

Despite the rapid advance of 3D-aware image synthesis, existing studies usually adopt a mixture of techniques and tricks, leaving it unclear how each part contributes to the final performance in terms of generality. Following the most popular and effective paradigm in this field, which incorporates a neural radiance field (NeRF) into the generator of a generative adversarial network (GAN), we build a well-structured codebase, dubbed Carver, through modularizing the generation process. Such a design allows researchers to develop and replace each module independently, and hence offers an opportunity to fairly compare various approaches and recognize their contributions from the module perspective. The reproduction of a range of cutting-edge algorithms demonstrates the availability of our modularized codebase. We also perform a variety of in-depth analyses, such as the comparison across different types of point feature, the necessity of the tailing upsampler in the generator, the reliance on the camera pose prior, etc., which deepen our understanding of existing methods and point out some further directions of the research work. We release code and models at https://github.com/qiuyu96/Carver to facilitate the development and evaluation of this field.

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arXiv2023

Neural Scene Chronology

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 viewpoint, time, and illumination.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

Learning Human Mesh Recovery in 3D Scenes

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 sceneaware 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.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

AutoRecon: Automated 3D Object Discovery and Reconstruction

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.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

Animatable Implicit Neural Representations for Creating Realistic Avatars from Videos

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 a pose-driven deformation field based on the linear blend skinning algorithm, which combines the blend weight field and the 3D human skeleton to produce observation-to-canonical correspondences. Since 3D human skeletons are more observable, they can regularize the learning of the deformation field. Moreover, the pose-driven deformation field can be controlled by input skeletal motions to generate new deformation fields to animate the canonical human model. Experiments show that our approach significantly outperforms recent human modeling methods. The code is available at https://zju3dv.github.io/animatable_nerf/.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

Representing Volumetric Videos as Dynamic MLP Maps

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/.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

Grid-guided Neural Radiance Fields for Large Urban Scenes

Purely MLP-based neural radiance fields (NeRF-based methods) often suffer from underfitting with blurred renderings on large-scale scenes due to limited model capacity. Recent approaches propose to geographically divide the scene and adopt multiple sub-NeRFs to model each region individually, leading to linear scale-up in training costs and the number of sub-NeRFs as the scene expands. An alternative solution is to use a feature grid representation, which is computationally efficient and can naturally scale to a large scene with increased grid resolutions. However, the feature grid tends to be less constrained and often reaches suboptimal solutions, producing noisy artifacts in renderings, especially in regions with complex geometry and texture. In this work, we present a new framework that realizes high-fidelity rendering on large urban scenes while being computationally efficient. We propose to use a compact multiresolution ground feature plane representation to coarsely capture the scene, and complement it with positional encoding inputs through another NeRF branch for rendering in a joint learning fashion. We show that such an integration can utilize the advantages of two alternative solutions: a light-weighted NeRF is sufficient, under the guidance of the feature grid representation, to render photorealistic novel views with fine details; and the jointly optimized ground feature planes, can meanwhile gain further refinements, forming a more accurate and compact feature space and output much more natural rendering results.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

Learning 3D-aware Image Synthesis with Unknown Pose Distribution

Existing methods for 3D-aware image synthesis largely depend on the 3D pose distribution pre-estimated on the training set. An inaccurate estimation may mislead the model into learning faulty geometry. This work proposes PoF3D that frees generative radiance fields from the requirements of 3D pose priors. We first equip the generator with an efficient pose learner, which is able to infer a pose from a latent code, to approximate the underlying true pose distribution automatically. We then assign the discriminator a task to learn pose distribution under the supervision of the generator and to differentiate real and synthesized images with the predicted pose as the condition. The pose-free generator and the pose-aware discriminator are jointly trained in an adversarial manner. Extensive results on a couple of datasets confirm that the performance of our approach, regarding both image quality and geometry quality, is on par with state of the art. To our best knowledge, PoF3D demonstrates the feasibility of learning high-quality 3D-aware image synthesis without using 3D pose priors for the first time.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

Learning Neural Volumetric Representations of Dynamic Humans in Minutes

This paper addresses the challenge of quickly reconstructing free-viewpoint videos of dynamic humans from sparse multi-view videos. Some recent works represent the dynamic human as a canonical neural radiance field (NeRF) and a motion field, which are learned from videos through differentiable rendering. But the per-scene optimization generally requires hours. Other generalizable NeRF models leverage learned prior from datasets and 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 videos of dynamic humans from sparse view videos 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 prior per-scene optimization methods while being competitive in the rendering quality. Training our model on a $512 \times 512$ video with 100 frames typically takes about 5 minutes on a single RTX 3090 GPU. The code will be released on our project page: https://zju3dv.github.io/instant_nvr

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