Textured Gaussians for Enhanced 3D Scene Appearance Modeling

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has recently emerged as a state-of-the-art 3D reconstruction and rendering technique due to its high-quality results and fast training and rendering time. However, pixels covered by the same Gaussian are always shaded in the same color up to a Gaussian falloff scaling factor. Furthermore, the finest geometric detail any individual Gaussian can represent is a simple ellipsoid. These properties of 3DGS greatly limit the expressivity of individual Gaussian primitives. To address these issues, we draw inspiration from texture and alpha mapping in traditional graphics and integrate it with 3DGS. Specifically, we propose a new generalized Gaussian appearance representation that augments each Gaussian with alpha~(A), RGB, or RGBA texture maps to model spatially varying color and opacity across the extent of each Gaussian. As such, each Gaussian can represent a richer set of texture patterns and geometric structures, instead of just a single color and ellipsoid as in naive Gaussian Splatting. Surprisingly, we found that the expressivity of Gaussians can be greatly improved by using alpha-only texture maps, and further augmenting Gaussians with RGB texture maps achieves the highest expressivity. We validate our method on a wide variety of standard benchmark datasets and our own custom captures at both the object and scene levels. We demonstrate image quality improvements over existing methods while using a similar or lower number of Gaussians.

Planar Reflection-Aware Neural Radiance Fields

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) have demonstrated exceptional capabilities in reconstructing complex scenes with high fidelity. However, NeRF's view dependency can only handle low-frequency reflections. It falls short when handling complex planar reflections, often interpreting them as erroneous scene geometries and leading to duplicated and inaccurate scene representations. To address this challenge, we introduce a reflection-aware NeRF that jointly models planar reflectors, such as windows, and explicitly casts reflected rays to capture the source of the high-frequency reflections. We query a single radiance field to render the primary color and the source of the reflection. We propose a sparse edge regularization to help utilize the true sources of reflections for rendering planar reflections rather than creating a duplicate along the primary ray at the same depth. As a result, we obtain accurate scene geometry. Rendering along the primary ray results in a clean, reflection-free view, while explicitly rendering along the reflected ray allows us to reconstruct highly detailed reflections. Our extensive quantitative and qualitative evaluations of real-world datasets demonstrate our method's enhanced performance in accurately handling reflections.

Modeling Ambient Scene Dynamics for Free-view Synthesis

We introduce a novel method for dynamic free-view synthesis of an ambient scenes from a monocular capture bringing a immersive quality to the viewing experience. Our method builds upon the recent advancements in 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) that can faithfully reconstruct complex static scenes. Previous attempts to extend 3DGS to represent dynamics have been confined to bounded scenes or require multi-camera captures, and often fail to generalize to unseen motions, limiting their practical application. Our approach overcomes these constraints by leveraging the periodicity of ambient motions to learn the motion trajectory model, coupled with careful regularization. We also propose important practical strategies to improve the visual quality of the baseline 3DGS static reconstructions and to improve memory efficiency critical for GPU-memory intensive learning. We demonstrate high-quality photorealistic novel view synthesis of several ambient natural scenes with intricate textures and fine structural elements.

Taming Latent Diffusion Model for Neural Radiance Field Inpainting

Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) is a representation for 3D reconstruction from multi-view images. Despite some recent work showing preliminary success in editing a reconstructed NeRF with diffusion prior, they remain struggling to synthesize reasonable geometry in completely uncovered regions. One major reason is the high diversity of synthetic contents from the diffusion model, which hinders the radiance field from converging to a crisp and deterministic geometry. Moreover, applying latent diffusion models on real data often yields a textural shift incoherent to the image condition due to auto-encoding errors. These two problems are further reinforced with the use of pixel-distance losses. To address these issues, we propose tempering the diffusion model's stochasticity with per-scene customization and mitigating the textural shift with masked adversarial training. During the analyses, we also found the commonly used pixel and perceptual losses are harmful in the NeRF inpainting task. Through rigorous experiments, our framework yields state-of-the-art NeRF inpainting results on various real-world scenes. Project page: https://hubert0527.github.io/MALD-NeRF

IRIS: Inverse Rendering of Indoor Scenes from Low Dynamic Range Images

While numerous 3D reconstruction and novel-view synthesis methods allow for photorealistic rendering of a scene from multi-view images easily captured with consumer cameras, they bake illumination in their representations and fall short of supporting advanced applications like material editing, relighting, and virtual object insertion. The reconstruction of physically based material properties and lighting via inverse rendering promises to enable such applications. However, most inverse rendering techniques require high dynamic range (HDR) images as input, a setting that is inaccessible to most users. We present a method that recovers the physically based material properties and spatially-varying HDR lighting of a scene from multi-view, low-dynamic-range (LDR) images. We model the LDR image formation process in our inverse rendering pipeline and propose a novel optimization strategy for material, lighting, and a camera response model. We evaluate our approach with synthetic and real scenes compared to the state-of-the-art inverse rendering methods that take either LDR or HDR input. Our method outperforms existing methods taking LDR images as input, and allows for highly realistic relighting and object insertion.

TextureDreamer: Image-guided Texture Synthesis through Geometry-aware Diffusion

We present TextureDreamer, a novel image-guided texture synthesis method to transfer relightable textures from a small number of input images (3 to 5) to target 3D shapes across arbitrary categories. Texture creation is a pivotal challenge in vision and graphics. Industrial companies hire experienced artists to manually craft textures for 3D assets. Classical methods require densely sampled views and accurately aligned geometry, while learning-based methods are confined to category-specific shapes within the dataset. In contrast, TextureDreamer can transfer highly detailed, intricate textures from real-world environments to arbitrary objects with only a few casually captured images, potentially significantly democratizing texture creation. Our core idea, personalized geometry-aware score distillation (PGSD), draws inspiration from recent advancements in diffuse models, including personalized modeling for texture information extraction, variational score distillation for detailed appearance synthesis, and explicit geometry guidance with ControlNet. Our integration and several essential modifications substantially improve the texture quality. Experiments on real images spanning different categories show that TextureDreamer can successfully transfer highly realistic, semantic meaningful texture to arbitrary objects, surpassing the visual quality of previous state-of-the-art.

SpecNeRF: Gaussian Directional Encoding for Specular Reflections

Neural radiance fields have achieved remarkable performance in modeling the appearance of 3D scenes. However, existing approaches still struggle with the view-dependent appearance of glossy surfaces, especially under complex lighting of indoor environments. Unlike existing methods, which typically assume distant lighting like an environment map, we propose a learnable Gaussian directional encoding to better model the view-dependent effects under near-field lighting conditions. Importantly, our new directional encoding captures the spatially-varying nature of near-field lighting and emulates the behavior of prefiltered environment maps. As a result, it enables the efficient evaluation of preconvolved specular color at any 3D location with varying roughness coefficients. We further introduce a data-driven geometry prior that helps alleviate the shape radiance ambiguity in reflection modeling. We show that our Gaussian directional encoding and geometry prior significantly improve the modeling of challenging specular reflections in neural radiance fields, which helps decompose appearance into more physically meaningful components.

Single-Image 3D Human Digitization with Shape-Guided Diffusion

We present an approach to generate a 360-degree view of a person with a consistent, high-resolution appearance from a single input image. NeRF and its variants typically require videos or images from different viewpoints. Most existing approaches taking monocular input either rely on ground-truth 3D scans for supervision or lack 3D consistency. While recent 3D generative models show promise of 3D consistent human digitization, these approaches do not generalize well to diverse clothing appearances, and the results lack photorealism. Unlike existing work, we utilize high-capacity 2D diffusion models pretrained for general image synthesis tasks as an appearance prior of clothed humans. To achieve better 3D consistency while retaining the input identity, we progressively synthesize multiple views of the human in the input image by inpainting missing regions with shape-guided diffusion conditioned on silhouette and surface normal. We then fuse these synthesized multi-view images via inverse rendering to obtain a fully textured high-resolution 3D mesh of the given person. Experiments show that our approach outperforms prior methods and achieves photorealistic 360-degree synthesis of a wide range of clothed humans with complex textures from a single image.

VR-NeRF: High-Fidelity Virtualized Walkable Spaces

We present an end-to-end system for the high-fidelity capture, model reconstruction, and real-time rendering of walkable spaces in virtual reality using neural radiance fields. To this end, we designed and built a custom multi-camera rig to densely capture walkable spaces in high fidelity and with multi-view high dynamic range images in unprecedented quality and density. We extend instant neural graphics primitives with a novel perceptual color space for learning accurate HDR appearance, and an efficient mip-mapping mechanism for level-of-detail rendering with anti-aliasing, while carefully optimizing the trade-off between quality and speed. Our multi-GPU renderer enables high-fidelity volume rendering of our neural radiance field model at the full VR resolution of dual 2K$\times$2K at 36 Hz on our custom demo machine. We demonstrate the quality of our results on our challenging high-fidelity datasets, and compare our method and datasets to existing baselines. We release our dataset on our project website.

OmnimatteRF: Robust Omnimatte with 3D Background Modeling

Video matting has broad applications, from adding interesting effects to casually captured movies to assisting video production professionals. Matting with associated effects such as shadows and reflections has also attracted increasing research activity, and methods like Omnimatte have been proposed to separate dynamic foreground objects of interest into their own layers. However, prior works represent video backgrounds as 2D image layers, limiting their capacity to express more complicated scenes, thus hindering application to real-world videos. In this paper, we propose a novel video matting method, OmnimatteRF, that combines dynamic 2D foreground layers and a 3D background model. The 2D layers preserve the details of the subjects, while the 3D background robustly reconstructs scenes in real-world videos. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method reconstructs scenes with better quality on various videos.