GBR: Generative Bundle Refinement for High-fidelity Gaussian Splatting and Meshing

Gaussian splatting has gained attention for its efficient representation and rendering of 3D scenes using continuous Gaussian primitives. However, it struggles with sparse-view inputs due to limited geometric and photometric information, causing ambiguities in depth, shape, and texture. we propose GBR: Generative Bundle Refinement, a method for high-fidelity Gaussian splatting and meshing using only 4-6 input views. GBR integrates a neural bundle adjustment module to enhance geometry accuracy and a generative depth refinement module to improve geometry fidelity. More specifically, the neural bundle adjustment module integrates a foundation network to produce initial 3D point maps and point matches from unposed images, followed by bundle adjustment optimization to improve multiview consistency and point cloud accuracy. The generative depth refinement module employs a diffusion-based strategy to enhance geometric details and fidelity while preserving the scale. Finally, for Gaussian splatting optimization, we propose a multimodal loss function incorporating depth and normal consistency, geometric regularization, and pseudo-view supervision, providing robust guidance under sparse-view conditions. Experiments on widely used datasets show that GBR significantly outperforms existing methods under sparse-view inputs. Additionally, GBR demonstrates the ability to reconstruct and render large-scale real-world scenes, such as the Pavilion of Prince Teng and the Great Wall, with remarkable details using only 6 views.

UniCompress: Enhancing Multi-Data Medical Image Compression with Knowledge Distillation

In the field of medical image compression, Implicit Neural Representation (INR) networks have shown remarkable versatility due to their flexible compression ratios, yet they are constrained by a one-to-one fitting approach that results in lengthy encoding times. Our novel method, ``\textbf{UniCompress}'', innovatively extends the compression capabilities of INR by being the first to compress multiple medical data blocks using a single INR network. By employing wavelet transforms and quantization, we introduce a codebook containing frequency domain information as a prior input to the INR network. This enhances the representational power of INR and provides distinctive conditioning for different image blocks. Furthermore, our research introduces a new technique for the knowledge distillation of implicit representations, simplifying complex model knowledge into more manageable formats to improve compression ratios. Extensive testing on CT and electron microscopy (EM) datasets has demonstrated that UniCompress outperforms traditional INR methods and commercial compression solutions like HEVC, especially in complex and high compression scenarios. Notably, compared to existing INR techniques, UniCompress achieves a 4$\sim$5 times increase in compression speed, marking a significant advancement in the field of medical image compression. Codes will be publicly available.

Event-Enhanced Snapshot Compressive Videography at 10K FPS

Video snapshot compressive imaging (SCI) encodes the target dynamic scene compactly into a snapshot and reconstructs its high-speed frame sequence afterward, greatly reducing the required data footprint and transmission bandwidth as well as enabling high-speed imaging with a low frame rate intensity camera. In implementation, high-speed dynamics are encoded via temporally varying patterns, and only frames at corresponding temporal intervals can be reconstructed, while the dynamics occurring between consecutive frames are lost. To unlock the potential of conventional snapshot compressive videography, we propose a novel hybrid "intensity+event" imaging scheme by incorporating an event camera into a video SCI setup. Our proposed system consists of a dual-path optical setup to record the coded intensity measurement and intermediate event signals simultaneously, which is compact and photon-efficient by collecting the half photons discarded in conventional video SCI. Correspondingly, we developed a dual-branch Transformer utilizing the reciprocal relationship between two data modes to decode dense video frames. Extensive experiments on both simulated and real-captured data demonstrate our superiority to state-of-the-art video SCI and video frame interpolation (VFI) methods. Benefiting from the new hybrid design leveraging both intrinsic redundancy in videos and the unique feature of event cameras, we achieve high-quality videography at 0.1ms time intervals with a low-cost CMOS image sensor working at 24 FPS.

Context-aware Talking Face Video Generation

In this paper, we consider a novel and practical case for talking face video generation. Specifically, we focus on the scenarios involving multi-people interactions, where the talking context, such as audience or surroundings, is present. In these situations, the video generation should take the context into consideration in order to generate video content naturally aligned with driving audios and spatially coherent to the context. To achieve this, we provide a two-stage and cross-modal controllable video generation pipeline, taking facial landmarks as an explicit and compact control signal to bridge the driving audio, talking context and generated videos. Inside this pipeline, we devise a 3D video diffusion model, allowing for efficient contort of both spatial conditions (landmarks and context video), as well as audio condition for temporally coherent generation. The experimental results verify the advantage of the proposed method over other baselines in terms of audio-video synchronization, video fidelity and frame consistency.

An Event-Oriented Diffusion-Refinement Method for Sparse Events Completion

Event cameras or dynamic vision sensors (DVS) record asynchronous response to brightness changes instead of conventional intensity frames, and feature ultra-high sensitivity at low bandwidth. The new mechanism demonstrates great advantages in challenging scenarios with fast motion and large dynamic range. However, the recorded events might be highly sparse due to either limited hardware bandwidth or extreme photon starvation in harsh environments. To unlock the full potential of event cameras, we propose an inventive event sequence completion approach conforming to the unique characteristics of event data in both the processing stage and the output form. Specifically, we treat event streams as 3D event clouds in the spatiotemporal domain, develop a diffusion-based generative model to generate dense clouds in a coarse-to-fine manner, and recover exact timestamps to maintain the temporal resolution of raw data successfully. To validate the effectiveness of our method comprehensively, we perform extensive experiments on three widely used public datasets with different spatial resolutions, and additionally collect a novel event dataset covering diverse scenarios with highly dynamic motions and under harsh illumination. Besides generating high-quality dense events, our method can benefit downstream applications such as object classification and intensity frame reconstruction.

Lightweight High-Speed Photography Built on Coded Exposure and Implicit Neural Representation of Videos

The compact cameras recording high-speed scenes with high resolution are highly demanded, but the required high bandwidth often leads to bulky, heavy systems, which limits their applications on low-capacity platforms. Adopting a coded exposure setup to encode a frame sequence into a blurry snapshot and retrieve the latent sharp video afterward can serve as a lightweight solution. However, restoring motion from blur is quite challenging due to the high ill-posedness of motion blur decomposition, intrinsic ambiguity in motion direction, and diverse motions in natural videos. In this work, by leveraging classical coded exposure imaging technique and emerging implicit neural representation for videos, we tactfully embed the motion direction cues into the blurry image during the imaging process and develop a novel self-recursive neural network to sequentially retrieve the latent video sequence from the blurry image utilizing the embedded motion direction cues. To validate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed framework, we conduct extensive experiments on benchmark datasets and real-captured blurry images. The results demonstrate that our proposed framework significantly outperforms existing methods in quality and flexibility. The code for our work is available at https://github.com/zhihongz/BDINR

PARF: Primitive-Aware Radiance Fusion for Indoor Scene Novel View Synthesis

This paper proposes a method for fast scene radiance field reconstruction with strong novel view synthesis performance and convenient scene editing functionality. The key idea is to fully utilize semantic parsing and primitive extraction for constraining and accelerating the radiance field reconstruction process. To fulfill this goal, a primitive-aware hybrid rendering strategy was proposed to enjoy the best of both volumetric and primitive rendering. We further contribute a reconstruction pipeline conducts primitive parsing and radiance field learning iteratively for each input frame which successfully fuses semantic, primitive, and radiance information into a single framework. Extensive evaluations demonstrate the fast reconstruction ability, high rendering quality, and convenient editing functionality of our method.

ImmersiveNeRF: Hybrid Radiance Fields for Unbounded Immersive Light Field Reconstruction

This paper proposes a hybrid radiance field representation for unbounded immersive light field reconstruction which supports high-quality rendering and aggressive view extrapolation. The key idea is to first formally separate the foreground and the background and then adaptively balance learning of them during the training process. To fulfill this goal, we represent the foreground and background as two separate radiance fields with two different spatial mapping strategies. We further propose an adaptive sampling strategy and a segmentation regularizer for more clear segmentation and robust convergence. Finally, we contribute a novel immersive light field dataset, named THUImmersive, with the potential to achieve much larger space 6DoF immersive rendering effects compared with existing datasets, by capturing multiple neighboring viewpoints for the same scene, to stimulate the research and AR/VR applications in the immersive light field domain. Extensive experiments demonstrate the strong performance of our method for unbounded immersive light field reconstruction.

SHoP: A Deep Learning Framework for Solving High-order Partial Differential Equations

Solving partial differential equations (PDEs) has been a fundamental problem in computational science and of wide applications for both scientific and engineering research. Due to its universal approximation property, neural network is widely used to approximate the solutions of PDEs. However, existing works are incapable of solving high-order PDEs due to insufficient calculation accuracy of higher-order derivatives, and the final network is a black box without explicit explanation. To address these issues, we propose a deep learning framework to solve high-order PDEs, named SHoP. Specifically, we derive the high-order derivative rule for neural network, to get the derivatives quickly and accurately; moreover, we expand the network into a Taylor series, providing an explicit solution for the PDEs. We conduct experimental validations four high-order PDEs with different dimensions, showing that we can solve high-order PDEs efficiently and accurately.

CUTS+: High-dimensional Causal Discovery from Irregular Time-series

Causal discovery in time-series is a fundamental problem in the machine learning community, enabling causal reasoning and decision-making in complex scenarios. Recently, researchers successfully discover causality by combining neural networks with Granger causality, but their performances degrade largely when encountering high-dimensional data because of the highly redundant network design and huge causal graphs. Moreover, the missing entries in the observations further hamper the causal structural learning. To overcome these limitations, We propose CUTS+, which is built on the Granger-causality-based causal discovery method CUTS and raises the scalability by introducing a technique called Coarse-to-fine-discovery (C2FD) and leveraging a message-passing-based graph neural network (MPGNN). Compared to previous methods on simulated, quasi-real, and real datasets, we show that CUTS+ largely improves the causal discovery performance on high-dimensional data with different types of irregular sampling.