Differentiable Shadow Mapping for Efficient Inverse Graphics

We show how shadows can be efficiently generated in differentiable rendering of triangle meshes. Our central observation is that pre-filtered shadow mapping, a technique for approximating shadows based on rendering from the perspective of a light, can be combined with existing differentiable rasterizers to yield differentiable visibility information. We demonstrate at several inverse graphics problems that differentiable shadow maps are orders of magnitude faster than differentiable light transport simulation with similar accuracy -- while differentiable rasterization without shadows often fails to converge.

Multi-View Mesh Reconstruction with Neural Deferred Shading

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.

Accurate Human Body Reconstruction for Volumetric Video

In this work, we enhance a professional end-to-end volumetric video production pipeline to achieve high-fidelity human body reconstruction using only passive cameras. While current volumetric video approaches estimate depth maps using traditional stereo matching techniques, we introduce and optimize deep learning-based multi-view stereo networks for depth map estimation in the context of professional volumetric video reconstruction. Furthermore, we propose a novel depth map post-processing approach including filtering and fusion, by taking into account photometric confidence, cross-view geometric consistency, foreground masks as well as camera viewing frustums. We show that our method can generate high levels of geometric detail for reconstructed human bodies.