Monocular Dynamic Gaussian Splatting is Fast and Brittle but Smooth Motion Helps

Gaussian splatting methods are emerging as a popular approach for converting multi-view image data into scene representations that allow view synthesis. In particular, there is interest in enabling view synthesis for dynamic scenes using only monocular input data -- an ill-posed and challenging problem. The fast pace of work in this area has produced multiple simultaneous papers that claim to work best, which cannot all be true. In this work, we organize, benchmark, and analyze many Gaussian-splatting-based methods, providing apples-to-apples comparisons that prior works have lacked. We use multiple existing datasets and a new instructive synthetic dataset designed to isolate factors that affect reconstruction quality. We systematically categorize Gaussian splatting methods into specific motion representation types and quantify how their differences impact performance. Empirically, we find that their rank order is well-defined in synthetic data, but the complexity of real-world data currently overwhelms the differences. Furthermore, the fast rendering speed of all Gaussian-based methods comes at the cost of brittleness in optimization. We summarize our experiments into a list of findings that can help to further progress in this lively problem setting. Project Webpage: https://lynl7130.github.io/MonoDyGauBench.github.io/

GauFRe: Gaussian Deformation Fields for Real-time Dynamic Novel View Synthesis

We propose a method for dynamic scene reconstruction using deformable 3D Gaussians that is tailored for monocular video. Building upon the efficiency of Gaussian splatting, our approach extends the representation to accommodate dynamic elements via a deformable set of Gaussians residing in a canonical space, and a time-dependent deformation field defined by a multi-layer perceptron (MLP). Moreover, under the assumption that most natural scenes have large regions that remain static, we allow the MLP to focus its representational power by additionally including a static Gaussian point cloud. The concatenated dynamic and static point clouds form the input for the Gaussian Splatting rasterizer, enabling real-time rendering. The differentiable pipeline is optimized end-to-end with a self-supervised rendering loss. Our method achieves results that are comparable to state-of-the-art dynamic neural radiance field methods while allowing much faster optimization and rendering. Project website: https://lynl7130.github.io/gaufre/index.html

Semantic Attention Flow Fields for Dynamic Scene Decomposition

We present SAFF: a dynamic neural volume reconstruction of a casual monocular video that consists of time-varying color, density, scene flow, semantics, and attention information. The semantics and attention let us identify salient foreground objects separately from the background in arbitrary spacetime views. We add two network heads to represent the semantic and attention information. For optimization, we design semantic attention pyramids from DINO-ViT outputs that trade detail with whole-image context. After optimization, we perform a saliency-aware clustering to decompose the scene. For evaluation on real-world dynamic scene decomposition across spacetime, we annotate object masks in the NVIDIA Dynamic Scene Dataset. We demonstrate that SAFF can decompose dynamic scenes without affecting RGB or depth reconstruction quality, that volume-integrated SAFF outperforms 2D baselines, and that SAFF improves foreground/background segmentation over recent static/dynamic split methods. Project Webpage: https://visual.cs.brown.edu/saff

SGEITL: Scene Graph Enhanced Image-Text Learning for Visual Commonsense Reasoning

Answering complex questions about images is an ambitious goal for machine intelligence, which requires a joint understanding of images, text, and commonsense knowledge, as well as a strong reasoning ability. Recently, multimodal Transformers have made great progress in the task of Visual Commonsense Reasoning (VCR), by jointly understanding visual objects and text tokens through layers of cross-modality attention. However, these approaches do not utilize the rich structure of the scene and the interactions between objects which are essential in answering complex commonsense questions. We propose a Scene Graph Enhanced Image-Text Learning (SGEITL) framework to incorporate visual scene graphs in commonsense reasoning. To exploit the scene graph structure, at the model structure level, we propose a multihop graph transformer for regularizing attention interaction among hops. As for pre-training, a scene-graph-aware pre-training method is proposed to leverage structure knowledge extracted in the visual scene graph. Moreover, we introduce a method to train and generate domain-relevant visual scene graphs using textual annotations in a weakly-supervised manner. Extensive experiments on VCR and other tasks show a significant performance boost compared with the state-of-the-art methods and prove the efficacy of each proposed component.

SSCNav: Confidence-Aware Semantic Scene Completion for Visual Semantic Navigation

This paper focuses on visual semantic navigation, the task of producing actions for an active agent to navigate to a specified target object category in an unknown environment. To complete this task, the algorithm should simultaneously locate and navigate to an instance of the category. In comparison to the traditional point goal navigation, this task requires the agent to have a stronger contextual prior of indoor environments. We introduce SSCNav, an algorithm that explicitly models scene priors using a confidence-aware semantic scene completion module to complete the scene and guide the agent's navigation planning. Given a partial observation of the environment, SSCNav first infers a complete scene representation with semantic labels for the unobserved scene together with a confidence map associated with its own prediction. Then, a policy network infers the action from the scene completion result and confidence map. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed scene completion module improves the efficiency of the downstream navigation policies. https://youtu.be/tfBbdGS72zg