Daily Papers

Simultaneous localization and mapping is essential for position tracking and scene understanding. 3D Gaussian-based map representations enable photorealistic reconstruction and real-time rendering of scenes using multiple posed cameras. We show for the first time that using 3D Gaussians for map representation with unposed camera images and inertial measurements can enable accurate SLAM. Our method, MM3DGS, addresses the limitations of prior neural radiance field-based representations by enabling faster rendering, scale awareness, and improved trajectory tracking. Our framework enables keyframe-based mapping and tracking utilizing loss functions that incorporate relative pose transformations from pre-integrated inertial measurements, depth estimates, and measures of photometric rendering quality. We also release a multi-modal dataset, UT-MM, collected from a mobile robot equipped with a camera and an inertial measurement unit. Experimental evaluation on several scenes from the dataset shows that MM3DGS achieves 3x improvement in tracking and 5% improvement in photometric rendering quality compared to the current 3DGS SLAM state-of-the-art, while allowing real-time rendering of a high-resolution dense 3D map. Project Webpage: https://vita-group.github.io/MM3DGS-SLAM

We propose PRM, a novel photometric stereo based large reconstruction model to reconstruct high-quality meshes with fine-grained local details. Unlike previous large reconstruction models that prepare images under fixed and simple lighting as both input and supervision, PRM renders photometric stereo images by varying materials and lighting for the purposes, which not only improves the precise local details by providing rich photometric cues but also increases the model robustness to variations in the appearance of input images. To offer enhanced flexibility of images rendering, we incorporate a real-time physically-based rendering (PBR) method and mesh rasterization for online images rendering. Moreover, in employing an explicit mesh as our 3D representation, PRM ensures the application of differentiable PBR, which supports the utilization of multiple photometric supervisions and better models the specular color for high-quality geometry optimization. Our PRM leverages photometric stereo images to achieve high-quality reconstructions with fine-grained local details, even amidst sophisticated image appearances. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PRM significantly outperforms other models.

Photometric stereo typically demands intricate data acquisition setups involving multiple light sources to recover surface normals accurately. In this paper, we propose MERLiN, an attention-based hourglass network that integrates single image-based inverse rendering and relighting within a single unified framework. We evaluate the performance of photometric stereo methods using these relit images and demonstrate how they can circumvent the underlying challenge of complex data acquisition. Our physically-based model is trained on a large synthetic dataset containing complex shapes with spatially varying BRDF and is designed to handle indirect illumination effects to improve material reconstruction and relighting. Through extensive qualitative and quantitative evaluation, we demonstrate that the proposed framework generalizes well to real-world images, achieving high-quality shape, material estimation, and relighting. We assess these synthetically relit images over photometric stereo benchmark methods for their physical correctness and resulting normal estimation accuracy, paving the way towards single-shot photometric stereo through physically-based relighting. This work allows us to address the single image-based inverse rendering problem holistically, applying well to both synthetic and real data and taking a step towards mitigating the challenge of data acquisition in photometric stereo.

Neural surface representation has demonstrated remarkable success in the areas of novel view synthesis and 3D reconstruction. However, assessing the geometric quality of 3D reconstructions in the absence of ground truth mesh remains a significant challenge, due to its rendering-based optimization process and entangled learning of appearance and geometry with photometric losses. In this paper, we present a novel framework, i.e, GURecon, which establishes a geometric uncertainty field for the neural surface based on geometric consistency. Different from existing methods that rely on rendering-based measurement, GURecon models a continuous 3D uncertainty field for the reconstructed surface, and is learned by an online distillation approach without introducing real geometric information for supervision. Moreover, in order to mitigate the interference of illumination on geometric consistency, a decoupled field is learned and exploited to finetune the uncertainty field. Experiments on various datasets demonstrate the superiority of GURecon in modeling 3D geometric uncertainty, as well as its plug-and-play extension to various neural surface representations and improvement on downstream tasks such as incremental reconstruction. The code and supplementary material are available on the project website: https://zju3dv.github.io/GURecon/.

Universal photometric stereo (PS) aims to recover high-quality surface normals from objects under arbitrary lighting conditions without relying on specific illumination models. Despite recent advances such as SDM-UniPS and Uni MS-PS, two fundamental challenges persist: 1) the deep coupling between varying illumination and surface normal features, where ambiguity in observed intensity makes it difficult to determine whether brightness variations stem from lighting changes or surface orientation; and 2) the preservation of high-frequency geometric details in complex surfaces, where intricate geometries create self-shadowing, inter-reflections, and subtle normal variations that conventional feature processing operations struggle to capture accurately.

Integrating inverse rendering with multi-view photometric stereo (MVPS) yields more accurate 3D reconstructions than the inverse rendering approaches that rely on fixed environment illumination. However, efficient inverse rendering with MVPS remains challenging. To fill this gap, we introduce the Gaussian Splatting for Multi-view Photometric Stereo (PS-GS), which efficiently and jointly estimates the geometry, materials, and lighting of the object that is illuminated by diverse directional lights (multi-light). Our method first reconstructs a standard 2D Gaussian splatting model as the initial geometry. Based on the initialization model, it then proceeds with the deferred inverse rendering by the full rendering equation containing a lighting-computing multi-layer perceptron. During the whole optimization, we regularize the rendered normal maps by the uncalibrated photometric stereo estimated normals. We also propose the 2D Gaussian ray-tracing for single directional light to refine the incident lighting. The regularizations and the use of multi-view and multi-light images mitigate the ill-posed problem of inverse rendering. After optimization, the reconstructed object can be used for novel-view synthesis, relighting, and material and shape editing. Experiments on both synthetic and real datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms prior works in terms of reconstruction accuracy and computational efficiency.

Radiance Field methods have recently revolutionized novel-view synthesis of scenes captured with multiple photos or videos. However, achieving high visual quality still requires neural networks that are costly to train and render, while recent faster methods inevitably trade off speed for quality. For unbounded and complete scenes (rather than isolated objects) and 1080p resolution rendering, no current method can achieve real-time display rates. We introduce three key elements that allow us to achieve state-of-the-art visual quality while maintaining competitive training times and importantly allow high-quality real-time (>= 30 fps) novel-view synthesis at 1080p resolution. First, starting from sparse points produced during camera calibration, we represent the scene with 3D Gaussians that preserve desirable properties of continuous volumetric radiance fields for scene optimization while avoiding unnecessary computation in empty space; Second, we perform interleaved optimization/density control of the 3D Gaussians, notably optimizing anisotropic covariance to achieve an accurate representation of the scene; Third, we develop a fast visibility-aware rendering algorithm that supports anisotropic splatting and both accelerates training and allows realtime rendering. We demonstrate state-of-the-art visual quality and real-time rendering on several established datasets.

This paper introduces a versatile paradigm for integrating multi-view reflectance (optional) and normal maps acquired through photometric stereo. Our approach employs a pixel-wise joint re-parameterization of reflectance and normal, considering them as a vector of radiances rendered under simulated, varying illumination. This re-parameterization enables the seamless integration of reflectance and normal maps as input data in neural volume rendering-based 3D reconstruction while preserving a single optimization objective. In contrast, recent multi-view photometric stereo (MVPS) methods depend on multiple, potentially conflicting objectives. Despite its apparent simplicity, our proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in MVPS benchmarks across F-score, Chamfer distance, and mean angular error metrics. Notably, it significantly improves the detailed 3D reconstruction of areas with high curvature or low visibility.

This paper addresses the problem of inverse rendering from photometric images. Existing approaches for this problem suffer from the effects of self-shadows, inter-reflections, and lack of constraints on the surface reflectance, leading to inaccurate decomposition of reflectance and illumination due to the ill-posed nature of inverse rendering. In this work, we propose a new method for neural inverse rendering. Our method jointly optimizes the light source position to account for the self-shadows in images, and computes indirect illumination using a differentiable rendering layer and an importance sampling strategy. To enhance surface reflectance decomposition, we introduce a new regularization by distilling DINO features to foster accurate and consistent material decomposition. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in reflectance decomposition.

Recent advances in view synthesis and real-time rendering have achieved photorealistic quality at impressive rendering speeds. While Radiance Field-based methods achieve state-of-the-art quality in challenging scenarios such as in-the-wild captures and large-scale scenes, they often suffer from excessively high compute requirements linked to volumetric rendering. Gaussian Splatting-based methods, on the other hand, rely on rasterization and naturally achieve real-time rendering but suffer from brittle optimization heuristics that underperform on more challenging scenes. In this work, we present RadSplat, a lightweight method for robust real-time rendering of complex scenes. Our main contributions are threefold. First, we use radiance fields as a prior and supervision signal for optimizing point-based scene representations, leading to improved quality and more robust optimization. Next, we develop a novel pruning technique reducing the overall point count while maintaining high quality, leading to smaller and more compact scene representations with faster inference speeds. Finally, we propose a novel test-time filtering approach that further accelerates rendering and allows to scale to larger, house-sized scenes. We find that our method enables state-of-the-art synthesis of complex captures at 900+ FPS.

In this paper, we propose a novel end-to-end relightable neural inverse rendering system that achieves high-quality reconstruction of geometry and material properties, thus enabling high-quality relighting. The cornerstone of our method is a two-stage approach for learning a better factorization of scene parameters. In the first stage, we develop a reflection-aware radiance field using a neural signed distance field (SDF) as the geometry representation and deploy an MLP (multilayer perceptron) to estimate indirect illumination. In the second stage, we introduce a novel information-sharing network structure to jointly learn the radiance field and the physically based factorization of the scene. For the physically based factorization, to reduce the noise caused by Monte Carlo sampling, we apply a split-sum approximation with a simplified Disney BRDF and cube mipmap as the environment light representation. In the relighting phase, to enhance the quality of indirect illumination, we propose a second split-sum algorithm to trace secondary rays under the split-sum rendering framework. Furthermore, there is no dataset or protocol available to quantitatively evaluate the inverse rendering performance for glossy objects. To assess the quality of material reconstruction and relighting, we have created a new dataset with ground truth BRDF parameters and relighting results. Our experiments demonstrate that our algorithm achieves state-of-the-art performance in inverse rendering and relighting, with particularly strong results in the reconstruction of highly reflective objects.

We present GaSLight, a method that generates spatially-varying lighting from regular images. Our method proposes using HDR Gaussian Splats as light source representation, marking the first time regular images can serve as light sources in a 3D renderer. Our two-stage process first enhances the dynamic range of images plausibly and accurately by leveraging the priors embedded in diffusion models. Next, we employ Gaussian Splats to model 3D lighting, achieving spatially variant lighting. Our approach yields state-of-the-art results on HDR estimations and their applications in illuminating virtual objects and scenes. To facilitate the benchmarking of images as light sources, we introduce a novel dataset of calibrated and unsaturated HDR to evaluate images as light sources. We assess our method using a combination of this novel dataset and an existing dataset from the literature. Project page: https://lvsn.github.io/gaslight/

We present a spatial and angular Gaussian based representation and a triple splatting process, for real-time, high-quality novel lighting-and-view synthesis from multi-view point-lit input images. To describe complex appearance, we employ a Lambertian plus a mixture of angular Gaussians as an effective reflectance function for each spatial Gaussian. To generate self-shadow, we splat all spatial Gaussians towards the light source to obtain shadow values, which are further refined by a small multi-layer perceptron. To compensate for other effects like global illumination, another network is trained to compute and add a per-spatial-Gaussian RGB tuple. The effectiveness of our representation is demonstrated on 30 samples with a wide variation in geometry (from solid to fluffy) and appearance (from translucent to anisotropic), as well as using different forms of input data, including rendered images of synthetic/reconstructed objects, photographs captured with a handheld camera and a flash, or from a professional lightstage. We achieve a training time of 40-70 minutes and a rendering speed of 90 fps on a single commodity GPU. Our results compare favorably with state-of-the-art techniques in terms of quality/performance. Our code and data are publicly available at https://GSrelight.github.io/.

We propose a neural inverse rendering approach that jointly reconstructs geometry, spatially varying reflectance, and lighting conditions from multi-view images captured under varying directional lighting. Unlike prior multi-view photometric stereo methods that require light calibration or intermediate cues such as per-view normal maps, our method jointly optimizes all scene parameters from raw images in a single stage. We represent both geometry and reflectance as neural implicit fields and apply shadow-aware volume rendering. A spatial network first predicts the signed distance and a reflectance latent code for each scene point. A reflectance network then estimates reflectance values conditioned on the latent code and angularly encoded surface normal, view, and light directions. The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art normal-guided approaches in shape and lighting estimation accuracy, generalizes to view-unaligned multi-light images, and handles objects with challenging geometry and reflectance.

Achieving high-fidelity 3D surface reconstruction while preserving fine details remains challenging, especially in the presence of materials with complex reflectance properties and without a dense-view setup. In this paper, we introduce a versatile framework that incorporates multi-view normal and optionally reflectance maps into radiance-based surface reconstruction. Our approach employs a pixel-wise joint re-parametrization of reflectance and surface normals, representing them as a vector of radiances under simulated, varying illumination. This formulation enables seamless incorporation into standard surface reconstruction pipelines, such as traditional multi-view stereo (MVS) frameworks or modern neural volume rendering (NVR) ones. Combined with the latter, our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on multi-view photometric stereo (MVPS) benchmark datasets, including DiLiGenT-MV, LUCES-MV and Skoltech3D. In particular, our method excels in reconstructing fine-grained details and handling challenging visibility conditions. The present paper is an extended version of the earlier conference paper by Brument et al. (in Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2024), featuring an accelerated and more robust algorithm as well as a broader empirical evaluation. The code and data relative to this article is available at https://github.com/RobinBruneau/RNb-NeuS2.

We propose progressive radiance distillation, an inverse rendering method that combines physically-based rendering with Gaussian-based radiance field rendering using a distillation progress map. Taking multi-view images as input, our method starts from a pre-trained radiance field guidance, and distills physically-based light and material parameters from the radiance field using an image-fitting process. The distillation progress map is initialized to a small value, which favors radiance field rendering. During early iterations when fitted light and material parameters are far from convergence, the radiance field fallback ensures the sanity of image loss gradients and avoids local minima that attracts under-fit states. As fitted parameters converge, the physical model gradually takes over and the distillation progress increases correspondingly. In presence of light paths unmodeled by the physical model, the distillation progress never finishes on affected pixels and the learned radiance field stays in the final rendering. With this designed tolerance for physical model limitations, we prevent unmodeled color components from leaking into light and material parameters, alleviating relighting artifacts. Meanwhile, the remaining radiance field compensates for the limitations of the physical model, guaranteeing high-quality novel views synthesis. Experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art techniques quality-wise in both novel view synthesis and relighting. The idea of progressive radiance distillation is not limited to Gaussian splatting. We show that it also has positive effects for prominently specular scenes when adapted to a mesh-based inverse rendering method.

Automatic 3D content creation has gained increasing attention recently, due to its potential in various applications such as video games, film industry, and AR/VR. Recent advancements in diffusion models and multimodal models have notably improved the quality and efficiency of 3D object generation given a single RGB image. However, 3D objects generated even by state-of-the-art methods are still unsatisfactory compared to human-created assets. Considering only textures instead of materials makes these methods encounter challenges in photo-realistic rendering, relighting, and flexible appearance editing. And they also suffer from severe misalignment between geometry and high-frequency texture details. In this work, we propose a novel approach to boost the quality of generated 3D objects from the perspective of Physics-Based Rendering (PBR) materials. By analyzing the components of PBR materials, we choose to consider albedo, roughness, metalness, and bump maps. For albedo and bump maps, we leverage Stable Diffusion fine-tuned on synthetic data to extract these values, with novel usages of these fine-tuned models to obtain 3D consistent albedo UV and bump UV for generated objects. In terms of roughness and metalness maps, we adopt a semi-automatic process to provide room for interactive adjustment, which we believe is more practical. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model is generally beneficial for various state-of-the-art generation methods, significantly boosting the quality and realism of their generated 3D objects, with natural relighting effects and substantially improved geometry.

Light plays an important role in human well-being. However, most computer vision tasks treat pixels without considering their relationship to physical luminance. To address this shortcoming, we introduce the Laval Photometric Indoor HDR Dataset, the first large-scale photometrically calibrated dataset of high dynamic range 360{\deg} panoramas. Our key contribution is the calibration of an existing, uncalibrated HDR Dataset. We do so by accurately capturing RAW bracketed exposures simultaneously with a professional photometric measurement device (chroma meter) for multiple scenes across a variety of lighting conditions. Using the resulting measurements, we establish the calibration coefficients to be applied to the HDR images. The resulting dataset is a rich representation of indoor scenes which displays a wide range of illuminance and color, and varied types of light sources. We exploit the dataset to introduce three novel tasks, where: per-pixel luminance, per-pixel color and planar illuminance can be predicted from a single input image. Finally, we also capture another smaller photometric dataset with a commercial 360{\deg} camera, to experiment on generalization across cameras. We are optimistic that the release of our datasets and associated code will spark interest in physically accurate light estimation within the community. Dataset and code are available at https://lvsn.github.io/beyondthepixel/.

Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) has emerged as a leading technique for novel view synthesis, owing to its impressive photorealistic reconstruction and rendering capability. Nevertheless, achieving real-time NeRF rendering in large-scale scenes has presented challenges, often leading to the adoption of either intricate baked mesh representations with a substantial number of triangles or resource-intensive ray marching in baked representations. We challenge these conventions, observing that high-quality geometry, represented by meshes with substantial triangles, is not necessary for achieving photorealistic rendering quality. Consequently, we propose MixRT, a novel NeRF representation that includes a low-quality mesh, a view-dependent displacement map, and a compressed NeRF model. This design effectively harnesses the capabilities of existing graphics hardware, thus enabling real-time NeRF rendering on edge devices. Leveraging a highly-optimized WebGL-based rendering framework, our proposed MixRT attains real-time rendering speeds on edge devices (over 30 FPS at a resolution of 1280 x 720 on a MacBook M1 Pro laptop), better rendering quality (0.2 PSNR higher in indoor scenes of the Unbounded-360 datasets), and a smaller storage size (less than 80% compared to state-of-the-art methods).

Relightable object acquisition is a key challenge in simplifying digital asset creation. Complete reconstruction of an object typically requires capturing hundreds to thousands of photographs under controlled illumination, with specialized equipment. The recent progress in differentiable rendering improved the quality and accessibility of inverse rendering optimization. Nevertheless, under uncontrolled illumination and unstructured viewpoints, there is no guarantee that the observations contain enough information to reconstruct the appearance properties of the captured object. We thus propose to consider the acquisition process from a signal-processing perspective. Given an object's geometry and a lighting environment, we estimate the properties of the materials on the object's surface in seconds. We do so by leveraging frequency domain analysis, considering the recovery of material properties as a deconvolution, enabling fast error estimation. We then quantify the uncertainty of the estimation, based on the available data, highlighting the areas for which priors or additional samples would be required for improved acquisition quality. We compare our approach to previous work and quantitatively evaluate our results, showing similar quality as previous work in a fraction of the time, and providing key information about the certainty of the results.

We present GI-GS, a novel inverse rendering framework that leverages 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) and deferred shading to achieve photo-realistic novel view synthesis and relighting. In inverse rendering, accurately modeling the shading processes of objects is essential for achieving high-fidelity results. Therefore, it is critical to incorporate global illumination to account for indirect lighting that reaches an object after multiple bounces across the scene. Previous 3DGS-based methods have attempted to model indirect lighting by characterizing indirect illumination as learnable lighting volumes or additional attributes of each Gaussian, while using baked occlusion to represent shadow effects. These methods, however, fail to accurately model the complex physical interactions between light and objects, making it impossible to construct realistic indirect illumination during relighting. To address this limitation, we propose to calculate indirect lighting using efficient path tracing with deferred shading. In our framework, we first render a G-buffer to capture the detailed geometry and material properties of the scene. Then, we perform physically-based rendering (PBR) only for direct lighting. With the G-buffer and previous rendering results, the indirect lighting can be calculated through a lightweight path tracing. Our method effectively models indirect lighting under any given lighting conditions, thereby achieving better novel view synthesis and relighting. Quantitative and qualitative results show that our GI-GS outperforms existing baselines in both rendering quality and efficiency.

Current 3D content generation builds on generative models that output RGB images. Modern graphics pipelines, however, require physically-based rendering (PBR) material properties. We propose to model the PBR image distribution directly to avoid photometric inaccuracies in RGB generation and the inherent ambiguity in extracting PBR from RGB. Existing paradigms for cross-modal finetuning are not suited for PBR generation due to a lack of data and the high dimensionality of the output modalities: we overcome both challenges by retaining a frozen RGB model and tightly linking a newly trained PBR model using a novel cross-network communication paradigm. As the base RGB model is fully frozen, the proposed method does not risk catastrophic forgetting during finetuning and remains compatible with techniques such as IPAdapter pretrained for the base RGB model. We validate our design choices, robustness to data sparsity, and compare against existing paradigms with an extensive experimental section.

Recent advancements in text-to-3D generation technology have significantly advanced the conversion of textual descriptions into imaginative well-geometrical and finely textured 3D objects. Despite these developments, a prevalent limitation arises from the use of RGB data in diffusion or reconstruction models, which often results in models with inherent lighting and shadows effects that detract from their realism, thereby limiting their usability in applications that demand accurate relighting capabilities. To bridge this gap, we present UniDream, a text-to-3D generation framework by incorporating unified diffusion priors. Our approach consists of three main components: (1) a dual-phase training process to get albedo-normal aligned multi-view diffusion and reconstruction models, (2) a progressive generation procedure for geometry and albedo-textures based on Score Distillation Sample (SDS) using the trained reconstruction and diffusion models, and (3) an innovative application of SDS for finalizing PBR generation while keeping a fixed albedo based on Stable Diffusion model. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that UniDream surpasses existing methods in generating 3D objects with clearer albedo textures, smoother surfaces, enhanced realism, and superior relighting capabilities.

Modern reconstruction techniques can effectively model complex 3D scenes from sparse 2D views. However, automatically assessing the quality of novel views and identifying artifacts is challenging due to the lack of ground truth images and the limitations of no-reference image metrics in predicting detailed artifact maps. The absence of such quality metrics hinders accurate predictions of the quality of generated views and limits the adoption of post-processing techniques, such as inpainting, to enhance reconstruction quality. In this work, we propose a new no-reference metric, Puzzle Similarity, which is designed to localize artifacts in novel views. Our approach utilizes image patch statistics from the input views to establish a scene-specific distribution that is later used to identify poorly reconstructed regions in the novel views. We test and evaluate our method in the context of 3D reconstruction; to this end, we collected a novel dataset of human quality assessment in unseen reconstructed views. Through this dataset, we demonstrate that our method can not only successfully localize artifacts in novel views, correlating with human assessment, but do so without direct references. Surprisingly, our metric outperforms both no-reference metrics and popular full-reference image metrics. We can leverage our new metric to enhance applications like automatic image restoration, guided acquisition, or 3D reconstruction from sparse inputs.

Recent advancements in text-to-3D generation, building on the success of high-performance text-to-image generative models, have made it possible to create imaginative and richly textured 3D objects from textual descriptions. However, a key challenge remains in effectively decoupling light-independent and lighting-dependent components to enhance the quality of generated 3D models and their relighting performance. In this paper, we present MVLight, a novel light-conditioned multi-view diffusion model that explicitly integrates lighting conditions directly into the generation process. This enables the model to synthesize high-quality images that faithfully reflect the specified lighting environment across multiple camera views. By leveraging this capability to Score Distillation Sampling (SDS), we can effectively synthesize 3D models with improved geometric precision and relighting capabilities. We validate the effectiveness of MVLight through extensive experiments and a user study.

Image relighting is the task of showing what a scene from a source image would look like if illuminated differently. Inverse graphics schemes recover an explicit representation of geometry and a set of chosen intrinsics, then relight with some form of renderer. However error control for inverse graphics is difficult, and inverse graphics methods can represent only the effects of the chosen intrinsics. This paper describes a relighting method that is entirely data-driven, where intrinsics and lighting are each represented as latent variables. Our approach produces SOTA relightings of real scenes, as measured by standard metrics. We show that albedo can be recovered from our latent intrinsics without using any example albedos, and that the albedos recovered are competitive with SOTA methods.

Because of the diversity in lighting environments, existing illumination estimation techniques have been designed explicitly on indoor or outdoor environments. Methods have focused specifically on capturing accurate energy (e.g., through parametric lighting models), which emphasizes shading and strong cast shadows; or producing plausible texture (e.g., with GANs), which prioritizes plausible reflections. Approaches which provide editable lighting capabilities have been proposed, but these tend to be with simplified lighting models, offering limited realism. In this work, we propose to bridge the gap between these recent trends in the literature, and propose a method which combines a parametric light model with 360{\deg} panoramas, ready to use as HDRI in rendering engines. We leverage recent advances in GAN-based LDR panorama extrapolation from a regular image, which we extend to HDR using parametric spherical gaussians. To achieve this, we introduce a novel lighting co-modulation method that injects lighting-related features throughout the generator, tightly coupling the original or edited scene illumination within the panorama generation process. In our representation, users can easily edit light direction, intensity, number, etc. to impact shading while providing rich, complex reflections while seamlessly blending with the edits. Furthermore, our method encompasses indoor and outdoor environments, demonstrating state-of-the-art results even when compared to domain-specific methods.

Photo-realistic image restoration algorithms are typically evaluated by distortion measures (e.g., PSNR, SSIM) and by perceptual quality measures (e.g., FID, NIQE), where the desire is to attain the lowest possible distortion without compromising on perceptual quality. To achieve this goal, current methods typically attempt to sample from the posterior distribution, or to optimize a weighted sum of a distortion loss (e.g., MSE) and a perceptual quality loss (e.g., GAN). Unlike previous works, this paper is concerned specifically with the optimal estimator that minimizes the MSE under a constraint of perfect perceptual index, namely where the distribution of the reconstructed images is equal to that of the ground-truth ones. A recent theoretical result shows that such an estimator can be constructed by optimally transporting the posterior mean prediction (MMSE estimate) to the distribution of the ground-truth images. Inspired by this result, we introduce Posterior-Mean Rectified Flow (PMRF), a simple yet highly effective algorithm that approximates this optimal estimator. In particular, PMRF first predicts the posterior mean, and then transports the result to a high-quality image using a rectified flow model that approximates the desired optimal transport map. We investigate the theoretical utility of PMRF and demonstrate that it consistently outperforms previous methods on a variety of image restoration tasks.

We propose a relighting method for outdoor images. Our method mainly focuses on predicting cast shadows in arbitrary novel lighting directions from a single image while also accounting for shading and global effects such the sun light color and clouds. Previous solutions for this problem rely on reconstructing occluder geometry, e.g. using multi-view stereo, which requires many images of the scene. Instead, in this work we make use of a noisy off-the-shelf single-image depth map estimation as a source of geometry. Whilst this can be a good guide for some lighting effects, the resulting depth map quality is insufficient for directly ray-tracing the shadows. Addressing this, we propose a learned image space ray-marching layer that converts the approximate depth map into a deep 3D representation that is fused into occlusion queries using a learned traversal. Our proposed method achieves, for the first time, state-of-the-art relighting results, with only a single image as input. For supplementary material visit our project page at: https://dgriffiths.uk/outcast.

Creating plausible surfaces is an essential component in achieving a high degree of realism in rendering. To relieve artists, who create these surfaces in a time-consuming, manual process, automated retrieval of the spatially-varying Bidirectional Reflectance Distribution Function (SVBRDF) from a single mobile phone image is desirable. By leveraging a deep neural network, this casual capturing method can be achieved. The trained network can estimate per pixel normal, base color, metallic and roughness parameters from the Disney BRDF. The input image is taken with a mobile phone lit by the camera flash. The network is trained to compensate for environment lighting and thus learned to reduce artifacts introduced by other light sources. These losses contain a multi-scale discriminator with an additional perceptual loss, a rendering loss using a differentiable renderer, and a parameter loss. Besides the local precision, this loss formulation generates material texture maps which are globally more consistent. The network is set up as a generator network trained in an adversarial fashion to ensure that only plausible maps are produced. The estimated parameters not only reproduce the material faithfully in rendering but capture the style of hand-authored materials due to the more global loss terms compared to previous works without requiring additional post-processing. Both the resolution and the quality is improved.

Rendering realistic images from 3D reconstruction is an essential task of many Computer Vision and Robotics pipelines, notably for mixed-reality applications as well as training autonomous agents in simulated environments. However, the quality of novel views heavily depends of the source reconstruction which is often imperfect due to noisy or missing geometry and appearance. Inspired by the recent success of reference-based super-resolution networks, we propose MaRINeR, a refinement method that leverages information of a nearby mapping image to improve the rendering of a target viewpoint. We first establish matches between the raw rendered image of the scene geometry from the target viewpoint and the nearby reference based on deep features, followed by hierarchical detail transfer. We show improved renderings in quantitative metrics and qualitative examples from both explicit and implicit scene representations. We further employ our method on the downstream tasks of pseudo-ground-truth validation, synthetic data enhancement and detail recovery for renderings of reduced 3D reconstructions.

We show how to build a model that allows realistic, free-viewpoint renderings of a scene under novel lighting conditions from video. Our method -- UrbanIR: Urban Scene Inverse Rendering -- computes an inverse graphics representation from the video. UrbanIR jointly infers shape, albedo, visibility, and sun and sky illumination from a single video of unbounded outdoor scenes with unknown lighting. UrbanIR uses videos from cameras mounted on cars (in contrast to many views of the same points in typical NeRF-style estimation). As a result, standard methods produce poor geometry estimates (for example, roofs), and there are numerous ''floaters''. Errors in inverse graphics inference can result in strong rendering artifacts. UrbanIR uses novel losses to control these and other sources of error. UrbanIR uses a novel loss to make very good estimates of shadow volumes in the original scene. The resulting representations facilitate controllable editing, delivering photorealistic free-viewpoint renderings of relit scenes and inserted objects. Qualitative evaluation demonstrates strong improvements over the state-of-the-art.

Creating photorealistic materials for light transport algorithms requires carefully fine-tuning a set of material properties to achieve a desired artistic effect. This is typically a lengthy process that involves a trained artist with specialized knowledge. In this work, we present a technique that aims to empower novice and intermediate-level users to synthesize high-quality photorealistic materials by only requiring basic image processing knowledge. In the proposed workflow, the user starts with an input image and applies a few intuitive transforms (e.g., colorization, image inpainting) within a 2D image editor of their choice, and in the next step, our technique produces a photorealistic result that approximates this target image. Our method combines the advantages of a neural network-augmented optimizer and an encoder neural network to produce high-quality output results within 30 seconds. We also demonstrate that it is resilient against poorly-edited target images and propose a simple extension to predict image sequences with a strict time budget of 1-2 seconds per image.

While editing directly from life, photographers have found it too difficult to see simultaneously both the blue and the sky. Photographer and curator, Szarkowski insightfully revealed one of the notable gaps between general and aesthetic visual understanding: while the former focuses on identifying the factual element in an image (sky), the latter transcends such object identification, viewing it instead as an aesthetic component--a pure color block (blue). Such fundamental distinctions between general (detection, localization, etc.) and aesthetic (color, lighting, composition, etc.) visual understanding present a significant challenge for Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). Although some recent works have made initial explorations, they are often limited to general and basic aesthetic commonsense. As a result, they frequently fall short in real-world scenarios (Fig. 1), which require extensive expertise--including photographic techniques, photo pre/post-processing knowledge, and more, to provide a detailed analysis and description. To fundamentally enhance the aesthetics understanding of MLLMs, we first introduce a novel dataset, PhotoCritique, derived from extensive discussions among professional photographers and enthusiasts, and characterized by the large scale, expertise, and diversity. Then, to better learn visual aesthetics from PhotoCritique, we furthur propose a novel model, PhotoEye, featuring a languageguided multi-view vision fusion mechanism to understand image aesthetics from multiple perspectives. Finally, we present a novel benchmark, PhotoBench, a comprehensive and professional benchmark for aesthetic visual understanding. On existing benchmarks and PhotoBench, our model demonstrates clear advantages over existing models.

We present a new approach to creating photorealistic and relightable head avatars from a phone scan with unknown illumination. The reconstructed avatars can be animated and relit in real time with the global illumination of diverse environments. Unlike existing approaches that estimate parametric reflectance parameters via inverse rendering, our approach directly models learnable radiance transfer that incorporates global light transport in an efficient manner for real-time rendering. However, learning such a complex light transport that can generalize across identities is non-trivial. A phone scan in a single environment lacks sufficient information to infer how the head would appear in general environments. To address this, we build a universal relightable avatar model represented by 3D Gaussians. We train on hundreds of high-quality multi-view human scans with controllable point lights. High-resolution geometric guidance further enhances the reconstruction accuracy and generalization. Once trained, we finetune the pretrained model on a phone scan using inverse rendering to obtain a personalized relightable avatar. Our experiments establish the efficacy of our design, outperforming existing approaches while retaining real-time rendering capability.

ColorVideoVDP is a video and image quality metric that models spatial and temporal aspects of vision, for both luminance and color. The metric is built on novel psychophysical models of chromatic spatiotemporal contrast sensitivity and cross-channel contrast masking. It accounts for the viewing conditions, geometric, and photometric characteristics of the display. It was trained to predict common video streaming distortions (e.g. video compression, rescaling, and transmission errors), and also 8 new distortion types related to AR/VR displays (e.g. light source and waveguide non-uniformities). To address the latter application, we collected our novel XR-Display-Artifact-Video quality dataset (XR-DAVID), comprised of 336 distorted videos. Extensive testing on XR-DAVID, as well as several datasets from the literature, indicate a significant gain in prediction performance compared to existing metrics. ColorVideoVDP opens the doors to many novel applications which require the joint automated spatiotemporal assessment of luminance and color distortions, including video streaming, display specification and design, visual comparison of results, and perceptually-guided quality optimization.

Photorealistic image stylization concerns transferring style of a reference photo to a content photo with the constraint that the stylized photo should remain photorealistic. While several photorealistic image stylization methods exist, they tend to generate spatially inconsistent stylizations with noticeable artifacts. In this paper, we propose a method to address these issues. The proposed method consists of a stylization step and a smoothing step. While the stylization step transfers the style of the reference photo to the content photo, the smoothing step ensures spatially consistent stylizations. Each of the steps has a closed-form solution and can be computed efficiently. We conduct extensive experimental validations. The results show that the proposed method generates photorealistic stylization outputs that are more preferred by human subjects as compared to those by the competing methods while running much faster. Source code and additional results are available at https://github.com/NVIDIA/FastPhotoStyle .

With the rapid advancement of Vision Language Models (VLMs), VLM-based Image Quality Assessment (IQA) seeks to describe image quality linguistically to align with human expression and capture the multifaceted nature of IQA tasks. However, current methods are still far from practical usage. First, prior works focus narrowly on specific sub-tasks or settings, which do not align with diverse real-world applications. Second, their performance is sub-optimal due to limitations in dataset coverage, scale, and quality. To overcome these challenges, we introduce Depicted image Quality Assessment in the Wild (DepictQA-Wild). Our method includes a multi-functional IQA task paradigm that encompasses both assessment and comparison tasks, brief and detailed responses, full-reference and non-reference scenarios. We introduce a ground-truth-informed dataset construction approach to enhance data quality, and scale up the dataset to 495K under the brief-detail joint framework. Consequently, we construct a comprehensive, large-scale, and high-quality dataset, named DQ-495K. We also retain image resolution during training to better handle resolution-related quality issues, and estimate a confidence score that is helpful to filter out low-quality responses. Experimental results demonstrate that DepictQA-Wild significantly outperforms traditional score-based methods, prior VLM-based IQA models, and proprietary GPT-4V in distortion identification, instant rating, and reasoning tasks. Our advantages are further confirmed by real-world applications including assessing the web-downloaded images and ranking model-processed images. Datasets and codes will be released in https://depictqa.github.io/depictqa-wild/.

We introduce SynthLight, a diffusion model for portrait relighting. Our approach frames image relighting as a re-rendering problem, where pixels are transformed in response to changes in environmental lighting conditions. Using a physically-based rendering engine, we synthesize a dataset to simulate this lighting-conditioned transformation with 3D head assets under varying lighting. We propose two training and inference strategies to bridge the gap between the synthetic and real image domains: (1) multi-task training that takes advantage of real human portraits without lighting labels; (2) an inference time diffusion sampling procedure based on classifier-free guidance that leverages the input portrait to better preserve details. Our method generalizes to diverse real photographs and produces realistic illumination effects, including specular highlights and cast shadows, while preserving the subject's identity. Our quantitative experiments on Light Stage data demonstrate results comparable to state-of-the-art relighting methods. Our qualitative results on in-the-wild images showcase rich and unprecedented illumination effects. Project Page: https://vrroom.github.io/synthlight/

Machine vision systems (MVS) are intrinsically vulnerable to performance degradation under adverse visual conditions. To address this, we propose a machine-centric image quality assessment (MIQA) framework that quantifies the impact of image degradations on MVS performance. We establish an MIQA paradigm encompassing the end-to-end assessment workflow. To support this, we construct a machine-centric image quality database (MIQD-2.5M), comprising 2.5 million samples that capture distinctive degradation responses in both consistency and accuracy metrics, spanning 75 vision models, 250 degradation types, and three representative vision tasks. We further propose a region-aware MIQA (RA-MIQA) model to evaluate MVS visual quality through fine-grained spatial degradation analysis. Extensive experiments benchmark the proposed RA-MIQA against seven human visual system (HVS)-based IQA metrics and five retrained classical backbones. Results demonstrate RA-MIQA's superior performance in multiple dimensions, e.g., achieving SRCC gains of 13.56% on consistency and 13.37% on accuracy for image classification, while also revealing task-specific degradation sensitivities. Critically, HVS-based metrics prove inadequate for MVS quality prediction, while even specialized MIQA models struggle with background degradations, accuracy-oriented estimation, and subtle distortions. This study can advance MVS reliability and establish foundations for machine-centric image processing and optimization. The model and code are available at: https://github.com/XiaoqiWang/MIQA.

We present a novel differentiable point-based rendering framework for material and lighting decomposition from multi-view images, enabling editing, ray-tracing, and real-time relighting of the 3D point cloud. Specifically, a 3D scene is represented as a set of relightable 3D Gaussian points, where each point is additionally associated with a normal direction, BRDF parameters, and incident lights from different directions. To achieve robust lighting estimation, we further divide incident lights of each point into global and local components, as well as view-dependent visibilities. The 3D scene is optimized through the 3D Gaussian Splatting technique while BRDF and lighting are decomposed by physically-based differentiable rendering. Moreover, we introduce an innovative point-based ray-tracing approach based on the bounding volume hierarchy for efficient visibility baking, enabling real-time rendering and relighting of 3D Gaussian points with accurate shadow effects. Extensive experiments demonstrate improved BRDF estimation and novel view rendering results compared to state-of-the-art material estimation approaches. Our framework showcases the potential to revolutionize the mesh-based graphics pipeline with a relightable, traceable, and editable rendering pipeline solely based on point cloud. Project page:https://nju-3dv.github.io/projects/Relightable3DGaussian/.

Modern 3D reconstruction and novel view synthesis approaches have demonstrated strong performance on scenes with opaque Lambertian objects. However, most assume straight light paths and therefore cannot properly handle refractive and reflective materials. Moreover, datasets specialized for these effects are limited, stymieing efforts to evaluate performance and develop suitable techniques. In this work, we introduce a synthetic RefRef dataset and benchmark for reconstructing scenes with refractive and reflective objects from posed images. Our dataset has 50 such objects of varying complexity, from single-material convex shapes to multi-material non-convex shapes, each placed in three different background types, resulting in 150 scenes. We also propose an oracle method that, given the object geometry and refractive indices, calculates accurate light paths for neural rendering, and an approach based on this that avoids these assumptions. We benchmark these against several state-of-the-art methods and show that all methods lag significantly behind the oracle, highlighting the challenges of the task and dataset.

Despite the tremendous progress in neural radiance fields (NeRF), we still face a dilemma of the trade-off between quality and efficiency, e.g., MipNeRF presents fine-detailed and anti-aliased renderings but takes days for training, while Instant-ngp can accomplish the reconstruction in a few minutes but suffers from blurring or aliasing when rendering at various distances or resolutions due to ignoring the sampling area. To this end, we propose a novel Tri-Mip encoding that enables both instant reconstruction and anti-aliased high-fidelity rendering for neural radiance fields. The key is to factorize the pre-filtered 3D feature spaces in three orthogonal mipmaps. In this way, we can efficiently perform 3D area sampling by taking advantage of 2D pre-filtered feature maps, which significantly elevates the rendering quality without sacrificing efficiency. To cope with the novel Tri-Mip representation, we propose a cone-casting rendering technique to efficiently sample anti-aliased 3D features with the Tri-Mip encoding considering both pixel imaging and observing distance. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate our method achieves state-of-the-art rendering quality and reconstruction speed while maintaining a compact representation that reduces 25% model size compared against Instant-ngp.

Novel view synthesis from unconstrained in-the-wild images remains a meaningful but challenging task. The photometric variation and transient occluders in those unconstrained images make it difficult to reconstruct the original scene accurately. Previous approaches tackle the problem by introducing a global appearance feature in Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF). However, in the real world, the unique appearance of each tiny point in a scene is determined by its independent intrinsic material attributes and the varying environmental impacts it receives. Inspired by this fact, we propose Gaussian in the wild (GS-W), a method that uses 3D Gaussian points to reconstruct the scene and introduces separated intrinsic and dynamic appearance feature for each point, capturing the unchanged scene appearance along with dynamic variation like illumination and weather. Additionally, an adaptive sampling strategy is presented to allow each Gaussian point to focus on the local and detailed information more effectively. We also reduce the impact of transient occluders using a 2D visibility map. More experiments have demonstrated better reconstruction quality and details of GS-W compared to NeRF-based methods, with a faster rendering speed. Video results and code are available at https://eastbeanzhang.github.io/GS-W/.

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) have shown impressive novel view synthesis results; nonetheless, even thorough recordings yield imperfections in reconstructions, for instance due to poorly observed areas or minor lighting changes. Our goal is to mitigate these imperfections from various sources with a joint solution: we take advantage of the ability of generative adversarial networks (GANs) to produce realistic images and use them to enhance realism in 3D scene reconstruction with NeRFs. To this end, we learn the patch distribution of a scene using an adversarial discriminator, which provides feedback to the radiance field reconstruction, thus improving realism in a 3D-consistent fashion. Thereby, rendering artifacts are repaired directly in the underlying 3D representation by imposing multi-view path rendering constraints. In addition, we condition a generator with multi-resolution NeRF renderings which is adversarially trained to further improve rendering quality. We demonstrate that our approach significantly improves rendering quality, e.g., nearly halving LPIPS scores compared to Nerfacto while at the same time improving PSNR by 1.4dB on the advanced indoor scenes of Tanks and Temples.

Despite rapid advances in 3D content generation, quality assessment for the generated 3D assets remains challenging. Existing methods mainly rely on image-based metrics and operate solely at the object level, limiting their ability to capture spatial coherence, material authenticity, and high-fidelity local details. 1) To address these challenges, we introduce Hi3DEval, a hierarchical evaluation framework tailored for 3D generative content. It combines both object-level and part-level evaluation, enabling holistic assessments across multiple dimensions as well as fine-grained quality analysis. Additionally, we extend texture evaluation beyond aesthetic appearance by explicitly assessing material realism, focusing on attributes such as albedo, saturation, and metallicness. 2) To support this framework, we construct Hi3DBench, a large-scale dataset comprising diverse 3D assets and high-quality annotations, accompanied by a reliable multi-agent annotation pipeline. We further propose a 3D-aware automated scoring system based on hybrid 3D representations. Specifically, we leverage video-based representations for object-level and material-subject evaluations to enhance modeling of spatio-temporal consistency and employ pretrained 3D features for part-level perception. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing image-based metrics in modeling 3D characteristics and achieves superior alignment with human preference, providing a scalable alternative to manual evaluations. The project page is available at https://zyh482.github.io/Hi3DEval/.

The image signal processor (ISP) pipeline in modern cameras consists of several modules that transform raw sensor data into visually pleasing images in a display color space. Among these, the auto white balance (AWB) module is essential for compensating for scene illumination. However, commercial AWB systems often strive to compute aesthetic white-balance preferences rather than accurate neutral color correction. While learning-based methods have improved AWB accuracy, they typically struggle to generalize across different camera sensors -- an issue for smartphones with multiple cameras. Recent work has explored cross-camera AWB, but most methods remain focused on achieving neutral white balance. In contrast, this paper is the first to address aesthetic consistency by learning a post-illuminant-estimation mapping that transforms neutral illuminant corrections into aesthetically preferred corrections in a camera-agnostic space. Once trained, our mapping can be applied after any neutral AWB module to enable consistent and stylized color rendering across unseen cameras. Our proposed model is lightweight -- containing only sim500 parameters -- and runs in just 0.024 milliseconds on a typical flagship mobile CPU. Evaluated on a dataset of 771 smartphone images from three different cameras, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance while remaining fully compatible with existing cross-camera AWB techniques, introducing minimal computational and memory overhead.

Photographs captured in unstructured tourist environments frequently exhibit variable appearances and transient occlusions, challenging accurate scene reconstruction and inducing artifacts in novel view synthesis. Although prior approaches have integrated the Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) with additional learnable modules to handle the dynamic appearances and eliminate transient objects, their extensive training demands and slow rendering speeds limit practical deployments. Recently, 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has emerged as a promising alternative to NeRF, offering superior training and inference efficiency along with better rendering quality. This paper presents Wild-GS, an innovative adaptation of 3DGS optimized for unconstrained photo collections while preserving its efficiency benefits. Wild-GS determines the appearance of each 3D Gaussian by their inherent material attributes, global illumination and camera properties per image, and point-level local variance of reflectance. Unlike previous methods that model reference features in image space, Wild-GS explicitly aligns the pixel appearance features to the corresponding local Gaussians by sampling the triplane extracted from the reference image. This novel design effectively transfers the high-frequency detailed appearance of the reference view to 3D space and significantly expedites the training process. Furthermore, 2D visibility maps and depth regularization are leveraged to mitigate the transient effects and constrain the geometry, respectively. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Wild-GS achieves state-of-the-art rendering performance and the highest efficiency in both training and inference among all the existing techniques.

Rendering photo-realistic novel-view images of complex scenes has been a long-standing challenge in computer graphics. In recent years, great research progress has been made on enhancing rendering quality and accelerating rendering speed in the realm of view synthesis. However, when rendering complex dynamic scenes with sparse views, the rendering quality remains limited due to occlusion problems. Besides, for rendering high-resolution images on dynamic scenes, the rendering speed is still far from real-time. In this work, we propose a generalizable view synthesis method that can render high-resolution novel-view images of complex static and dynamic scenes in real-time from sparse views. To address the occlusion problems arising from the sparsity of input views and the complexity of captured scenes, we introduce an explicit 3D visibility reasoning approach that can efficiently estimate the visibility of sampled 3D points to the input views. The proposed visibility reasoning approach is fully differentiable and can gracefully fit inside the volume rendering pipeline, allowing us to train our networks with only multi-view images as supervision while refining geometry and texture simultaneously. Besides, each module in our pipeline is carefully designed to bypass the time-consuming MLP querying process and enhance the rendering quality of high-resolution images, enabling us to render high-resolution novel-view images in real-time.Experimental results show that our method outperforms previous view synthesis methods in both rendering quality and speed, particularly when dealing with complex dynamic scenes with sparse views.

Realistic shadow generation is a critical component for high-quality image compositing and visual effects, yet existing methods suffer from certain limitations: Physics-based approaches require a 3D scene geometry, which is often unavailable, while learning-based techniques struggle with control and visual artifacts. We introduce a novel method for fast, controllable, and background-free shadow generation for 2D object images. We create a large synthetic dataset using a 3D rendering engine to train a diffusion model for controllable shadow generation, generating shadow maps for diverse light source parameters. Through extensive ablation studies, we find that rectified flow objective achieves high-quality results with just a single sampling step enabling real-time applications. Furthermore, our experiments demonstrate that the model generalizes well to real-world images. To facilitate further research in evaluating quality and controllability in shadow generation, we release a new public benchmark containing a diverse set of object images and shadow maps in various settings. The project page is available at https://gojasper.github.io/controllable-shadow-generation-project/

Casually captured Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) suffer from artifacts such as floaters or flawed geometry when rendered outside the camera trajectory. Existing evaluation protocols often do not capture these effects, since they usually only assess image quality at every 8th frame of the training capture. To push forward progress in novel-view synthesis, we propose a new dataset and evaluation procedure, where two camera trajectories are recorded of the scene: one used for training, and the other for evaluation. In this more challenging in-the-wild setting, we find that existing hand-crafted regularizers do not remove floaters nor improve scene geometry. Thus, we propose a 3D diffusion-based method that leverages local 3D priors and a novel density-based score distillation sampling loss to discourage artifacts during NeRF optimization. We show that this data-driven prior removes floaters and improves scene geometry for casual captures.

We present a physics-based inverse rendering method that learns the illumination, geometry, and materials of a scene from posed multi-view RGB images. To model the illumination of a scene, existing inverse rendering works either completely ignore the indirect illumination or model it by coarse approximations, leading to sub-optimal illumination, geometry, and material prediction of the scene. In this work, we propose a physics-based illumination model that first locates surface points through an efficient refined sphere tracing algorithm, then explicitly traces the incoming indirect lights at each surface point based on reflection. Then, we estimate each identified indirect light through an efficient neural network. Moreover, we utilize the Leibniz's integral rule to resolve non-differentiability in the proposed illumination model caused by boundary lights inspired by differentiable irradiance in computer graphics. As a result, the proposed differentiable illumination model can be learned end-to-end together with geometry and materials estimation. As a side product, our physics-based inverse rendering model also facilitates flexible and realistic material editing as well as relighting. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed method performs favorably against existing inverse rendering methods on novel view synthesis and inverse rendering.

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) achieves unprecedented performance in synthesizing novel view synthesis, utilizing multi-view consistency. When capturing multiple inputs, image signal processing (ISP) in modern cameras will independently enhance them, including exposure adjustment, color correction, local tone mapping, etc. While these processings greatly improve image quality, they often break the multi-view consistency assumption, leading to "floaters" in the reconstructed radiance fields. To address this concern without compromising visual aesthetics, we aim to first disentangle the enhancement by ISP at the NeRF training stage and re-apply user-desired enhancements to the reconstructed radiance fields at the finishing stage. Furthermore, to make the re-applied enhancements consistent between novel views, we need to perform imaging signal processing in 3D space (i.e. "3D ISP"). For this goal, we adopt the bilateral grid, a locally-affine model, as a generalized representation of ISP processing. Specifically, we optimize per-view 3D bilateral grids with radiance fields to approximate the effects of camera pipelines for each input view. To achieve user-adjustable 3D finishing, we propose to learn a low-rank 4D bilateral grid from a given single view edit, lifting photo enhancements to the whole 3D scene. We demonstrate our approach can boost the visual quality of novel view synthesis by effectively removing floaters and performing enhancements from user retouching. The source code and our data are available at: https://bilarfpro.github.io.

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 2Ktimes2K 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.

We present a novel differentiable rendering framework for joint geometry, material, and lighting estimation from multi-view images. In contrast to previous methods which assume a simplified environment map or co-located flashlights, in this work, we formulate the lighting of a static scene as one neural incident light field (NeILF) and one outgoing neural radiance field (NeRF). The key insight of the proposed method is the union of the incident and outgoing light fields through physically-based rendering and inter-reflections between surfaces, making it possible to disentangle the scene geometry, material, and lighting from image observations in a physically-based manner. The proposed incident light and inter-reflection framework can be easily applied to other NeRF systems. We show that our method can not only decompose the outgoing radiance into incident lights and surface materials, but also serve as a surface refinement module that further improves the reconstruction detail of the neural surface. We demonstrate on several datasets that the proposed method is able to achieve state-of-the-art results in terms of geometry reconstruction quality, material estimation accuracy, and the fidelity of novel view rendering.

Decomposing a scene into its shape, reflectance, and illumination is a challenging but important problem in computer vision and graphics. This problem is inherently more challenging when the illumination is not a single light source under laboratory conditions but is instead an unconstrained environmental illumination. Though recent work has shown that implicit representations can be used to model the radiance field of an object, most of these techniques only enable view synthesis and not relighting. Additionally, evaluating these radiance fields is resource and time-intensive. We propose a neural reflectance decomposition (NeRD) technique that uses physically-based rendering to decompose the scene into spatially varying BRDF material properties. In contrast to existing techniques, our input images can be captured under different illumination conditions. In addition, we also propose techniques to convert the learned reflectance volume into a relightable textured mesh enabling fast real-time rendering with novel illuminations. We demonstrate the potential of the proposed approach with experiments on both synthetic and real datasets, where we are able to obtain high-quality relightable 3D assets from image collections. The datasets and code is available on the project page: https://markboss.me/publication/2021-nerd/

We propose GS-IR, a novel inverse rendering approach based on 3D Gaussian Splatting (GS) that leverages forward mapping volume rendering to achieve photorealistic novel view synthesis and relighting results. Unlike previous works that use implicit neural representations and volume rendering (e.g. NeRF), which suffer from low expressive power and high computational complexity, we extend GS, a top-performance representation for novel view synthesis, to estimate scene geometry, surface material, and environment illumination from multi-view images captured under unknown lighting conditions. There are two main problems when introducing GS to inverse rendering: 1) GS does not support producing plausible normal natively; 2) forward mapping (e.g. rasterization and splatting) cannot trace the occlusion like backward mapping (e.g. ray tracing). To address these challenges, our GS-IR proposes an efficient optimization scheme that incorporates a depth-derivation-based regularization for normal estimation and a baking-based occlusion to model indirect lighting. The flexible and expressive GS representation allows us to achieve fast and compact geometry reconstruction, photorealistic novel view synthesis, and effective physically-based rendering. We demonstrate the superiority of our method over baseline methods through qualitative and quantitative evaluations on various challenging scenes.

Recent advances in 3D avatar generation have gained significant attentions. These breakthroughs aim to produce more realistic animatable avatars, narrowing the gap between virtual and real-world experiences. Most of existing works employ Score Distillation Sampling (SDS) loss, combined with a differentiable renderer and text condition, to guide a diffusion model in generating 3D avatars. However, SDS often generates oversmoothed results with few facial details, thereby lacking the diversity compared with ancestral sampling. On the other hand, other works generate 3D avatar from a single image, where the challenges of unwanted lighting effects, perspective views, and inferior image quality make them difficult to reliably reconstruct the 3D face meshes with the aligned complete textures. In this paper, we propose a novel 3D avatar generation approach termed UltrAvatar with enhanced fidelity of geometry, and superior quality of physically based rendering (PBR) textures without unwanted lighting. To this end, the proposed approach presents a diffuse color extraction model and an authenticity guided texture diffusion model. The former removes the unwanted lighting effects to reveal true diffuse colors so that the generated avatars can be rendered under various lighting conditions. The latter follows two gradient-based guidances for generating PBR textures to render diverse face-identity features and details better aligning with 3D mesh geometry. We demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method, outperforming the state-of-the-art methods by a large margin in the experiments.

We propose NEMTO, the first end-to-end neural rendering pipeline to model 3D transparent objects with complex geometry and unknown indices of refraction. Commonly used appearance modeling such as the Disney BSDF model cannot accurately address this challenging problem due to the complex light paths bending through refractions and the strong dependency of surface appearance on illumination. With 2D images of the transparent object as input, our method is capable of high-quality novel view and relighting synthesis. We leverage implicit Signed Distance Functions (SDF) to model the object geometry and propose a refraction-aware ray bending network to model the effects of light refraction within the object. Our ray bending network is more tolerant to geometric inaccuracies than traditional physically-based methods for rendering transparent objects. We provide extensive evaluations on both synthetic and real-world datasets to demonstrate our high-quality synthesis and the applicability of our method.

We introduce IntrinsiX, a novel method that generates high-quality intrinsic images from text description. In contrast to existing text-to-image models whose outputs contain baked-in scene lighting, our approach predicts physically-based rendering (PBR) maps. This enables the generated outputs to be used for content creation scenarios in core graphics applications that facilitate re-lighting, editing, and texture generation tasks. In order to train our generator, we exploit strong image priors, and pre-train separate models for each PBR material component (albedo, roughness, metallic, normals). We then align these models with a new cross-intrinsic attention formulation that concatenates key and value features in a consistent fashion. This allows us to exchange information between each output modality and to obtain semantically coherent PBR predictions. To ground each intrinsic component, we propose a rendering loss which provides image-space signals to constrain the model, thus facilitating sharp details also in the output BRDF properties. Our results demonstrate detailed intrinsic generation with strong generalization capabilities that outperforms existing intrinsic image decomposition methods used with generated images by a significant margin. Finally, we show a series of applications, including re-lighting, editing, and text-conditioned room-scale PBR texture generation.

We introduce a co-designed approach for human portrait relighting that combines a physics-guided architecture with a pre-training framework. Drawing on the Cook-Torrance reflectance model, we have meticulously configured the architecture design to precisely simulate light-surface interactions. Furthermore, to overcome the limitation of scarce high-quality lightstage data, we have developed a self-supervised pre-training strategy. This novel combination of accurate physical modeling and expanded training dataset establishes a new benchmark in relighting realism.

Point-based radiance field rendering has demonstrated impressive results for novel view synthesis, offering a compelling blend of rendering quality and computational efficiency. However, also latest approaches in this domain are not without their shortcomings. 3D Gaussian Splatting [Kerbl and Kopanas et al. 2023] struggles when tasked with rendering highly detailed scenes, due to blurring and cloudy artifacts. On the other hand, ADOP [R\"uckert et al. 2022] can accommodate crisper images, but the neural reconstruction network decreases performance, it grapples with temporal instability and it is unable to effectively address large gaps in the point cloud. In this paper, we present TRIPS (Trilinear Point Splatting), an approach that combines ideas from both Gaussian Splatting and ADOP. The fundamental concept behind our novel technique involves rasterizing points into a screen-space image pyramid, with the selection of the pyramid layer determined by the projected point size. This approach allows rendering arbitrarily large points using a single trilinear write. A lightweight neural network is then used to reconstruct a hole-free image including detail beyond splat resolution. Importantly, our render pipeline is entirely differentiable, allowing for automatic optimization of both point sizes and positions. Our evaluation demonstrate that TRIPS surpasses existing state-of-the-art methods in terms of rendering quality while maintaining a real-time frame rate of 60 frames per second on readily available hardware. This performance extends to challenging scenarios, such as scenes featuring intricate geometry, expansive landscapes, and auto-exposed footage.

Existing methods for relightable view synthesis -- using a set of images of an object under unknown lighting to recover a 3D representation that can be rendered from novel viewpoints under a target illumination -- are based on inverse rendering, and attempt to disentangle the object geometry, materials, and lighting that explain the input images. Furthermore, this typically involves optimization through differentiable Monte Carlo rendering, which is brittle and computationally-expensive. In this work, we propose a simpler approach: we first relight each input image using an image diffusion model conditioned on lighting and then reconstruct a Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) with these relit images, from which we render novel views under the target lighting. We demonstrate that this strategy is surprisingly competitive and achieves state-of-the-art results on multiple relighting benchmarks. Please see our project page at https://illuminerf.github.io/.

The recent advancements in 3D Gaussian splatting (3D-GS) have not only facilitated real-time rendering through modern GPU rasterization pipelines but have also attained state-of-the-art rendering quality. Nevertheless, despite its exceptional rendering quality and performance on standard datasets, 3D-GS frequently encounters difficulties in accurately modeling specular and anisotropic components. This issue stems from the limited ability of spherical harmonics (SH) to represent high-frequency information. To overcome this challenge, we introduce Spec-Gaussian, an approach that utilizes an anisotropic spherical Gaussian (ASG) appearance field instead of SH for modeling the view-dependent appearance of each 3D Gaussian. Additionally, we have developed a coarse-to-fine training strategy to improve learning efficiency and eliminate floaters caused by overfitting in real-world scenes. Our experimental results demonstrate that our method surpasses existing approaches in terms of rendering quality. Thanks to ASG, we have significantly improved the ability of 3D-GS to model scenes with specular and anisotropic components without increasing the number of 3D Gaussians. This improvement extends the applicability of 3D GS to handle intricate scenarios with specular and anisotropic surfaces.

Recent studies in Radiance Fields have paved the robust way for novel view synthesis with their photorealistic rendering quality. Nevertheless, they usually employ neural networks and volumetric rendering, which are costly to train and impede their broad use in various real-time applications due to the lengthy rendering time. Lately 3D Gaussians splatting-based approach has been proposed to model the 3D scene, and it achieves remarkable visual quality while rendering the images in real-time. However, it suffers from severe degradation in the rendering quality if the training images are blurry. Blurriness commonly occurs due to the lens defocusing, object motion, and camera shake, and it inevitably intervenes in clean image acquisition. Several previous studies have attempted to render clean and sharp images from blurry input images using neural fields. The majority of those works, however, are designed only for volumetric rendering-based neural radiance fields and are not straightforwardly applicable to rasterization-based 3D Gaussian splatting methods. Thus, we propose a novel real-time deblurring framework, deblurring 3D Gaussian Splatting, using a small Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) that manipulates the covariance of each 3D Gaussian to model the scene blurriness. While deblurring 3D Gaussian Splatting can still enjoy real-time rendering, it can reconstruct fine and sharp details from blurry images. A variety of experiments have been conducted on the benchmark, and the results have revealed the effectiveness of our approach for deblurring. Qualitative results are available at https://benhenryl.github.io/Deblurring-3D-Gaussian-Splatting/

We present the first system for physically based, neural inverse rendering from multi-viewpoint videos of propagating light. Our approach relies on a time-resolved extension of neural radiance caching -- a technique that accelerates inverse rendering by storing infinite-bounce radiance arriving at any point from any direction. The resulting model accurately accounts for direct and indirect light transport effects and, when applied to captured measurements from a flash lidar system, enables state-of-the-art 3D reconstruction in the presence of strong indirect light. Further, we demonstrate view synthesis of propagating light, automatic decomposition of captured measurements into direct and indirect components, as well as novel capabilities such as multi-view time-resolved relighting of captured scenes.

Static LiDAR scanners produce accurate, dense, colored point clouds, but often contain obtrusive artifacts which makes them ill-suited for direct display. We propose an efficient method to render photorealistic images of such scans without any expensive preprocessing or training of a scene-specific model. A naive projection of the point cloud to the output view using 1x1 pixels is fast and retains the available detail, but also results in unintelligible renderings as background points leak in between the foreground pixels. The key insight is that these projections can be transformed into a realistic result using a deep convolutional model in the form of a U-Net, and a depth-based heuristic that prefilters the data. The U-Net also handles LiDAR-specific problems such as missing parts due to occlusion, color inconsistencies and varying point densities. We also describe a method to generate synthetic training data to deal with imperfectly-aligned ground truth images. Our method achieves real-time rendering rates using an off-the-shelf GPU and outperforms the state-of-the-art in both speed and quality.

Inverse rendering methods aim to estimate geometry, materials and illumination from multi-view RGB images. In order to achieve better decomposition, recent approaches attempt to model indirect illuminations reflected from different materials via Spherical Gaussians (SG), which, however, tends to blur the high-frequency reflection details. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end inverse rendering pipeline that decomposes materials and illumination from multi-view images, while considering near-field indirect illumination. In a nutshell, we introduce the Monte Carlo sampling based path tracing and cache the indirect illumination as neural radiance, enabling a physics-faithful and easy-to-optimize inverse rendering method. To enhance efficiency and practicality, we leverage SG to represent the smooth environment illuminations and apply importance sampling techniques. To supervise indirect illuminations from unobserved directions, we develop a novel radiance consistency constraint between implicit neural radiance and path tracing results of unobserved rays along with the joint optimization of materials and illuminations, thus significantly improving the decomposition performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art on multiple synthetic and real datasets, especially in terms of inter-reflection decomposition.Our code and data are available at https://woolseyyy.github.io/nefii/.

2D diffusion model, which often contains unwanted baked-in shading effects and results in unrealistic rendering effects in the downstream applications. Generating Physically Based Rendering (PBR) materials instead of just RGB textures would be a promising solution. However, directly distilling the PBR material parameters from 2D diffusion models still suffers from incorrect material decomposition, such as baked-in shading effects in albedo. We introduce DreamMat, an innovative approach to resolve the aforementioned problem, to generate high-quality PBR materials from text descriptions. We find out that the main reason for the incorrect material distillation is that large-scale 2D diffusion models are only trained to generate final shading colors, resulting in insufficient constraints on material decomposition during distillation. To tackle this problem, we first finetune a new light-aware 2D diffusion model to condition on a given lighting environment and generate the shading results on this specific lighting condition. Then, by applying the same environment lights in the material distillation, DreamMat can generate high-quality PBR materials that are not only consistent with the given geometry but also free from any baked-in shading effects in albedo. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the materials produced through our methods exhibit greater visual appeal to users and achieve significantly superior rendering quality compared to baseline methods, which are preferable for downstream tasks such as game and film production.

The lack of labeled datasets in 3D vision for surgical scenes inhibits the development of robust 3D reconstruction algorithms in the medical domain. Despite the popularity of Neural Radiance Fields and 3D Gaussian Splatting in the general computer vision community, these systems have yet to find consistent success in surgical scenes due to challenges such as non-stationary lighting and non-Lambertian surfaces. As a result, the need for labeled surgical datasets continues to grow. In this work, we introduce a differentiable rendering framework for material and lighting estimation from endoscopic images and known geometry. Compared to previous approaches that model lighting and material jointly as radiance, we explicitly disentangle these scene properties for robust and photorealistic novel view synthesis. To disambiguate the training process, we formulate domain-specific properties inherent in surgical scenes. Specifically, we model the scene lighting as a simple spotlight and material properties as a bidirectional reflectance distribution function, parameterized by a neural network. By grounding color predictions in the rendering equation, we can generate photorealistic images at arbitrary camera poses. We evaluate our method with various sequences from the Colonoscopy 3D Video Dataset and show that our method produces competitive novel view synthesis results compared with other approaches. Furthermore, we demonstrate that synthetic data can be used to develop 3D vision algorithms by finetuning a depth estimation model with our rendered outputs. Overall, we see that the depth estimation performance is on par with fine-tuning with the original real images.

The progress in the generation of synthetic images has made it crucial to assess their quality. While several metrics have been proposed to assess the rendering of images, it is crucial for Text-to-Image (T2I) models, which generate images based on a prompt, to consider additional aspects such as to which extent the generated image matches the important content of the prompt. Moreover, although the generated images usually result from a random starting point, the influence of this one is generally not considered. In this article, we propose a new metric based on prompt templates to study the alignment between the content specified in the prompt and the corresponding generated images. It allows us to better characterize the alignment in terms of the type of the specified objects, their number, and their color. We conducted a study on several recent T2I models about various aspects. An additional interesting result we obtained with our approach is that image quality can vary drastically depending on the latent noise used as a seed for the images. We also quantify the influence of the number of concepts in the prompt, their order as well as their (color) attributes. Finally, our method allows us to identify some latent seeds that produce better images than others, opening novel directions of research on this understudied topic.

Real-time novel-view image synthesis on mobile devices is prohibitive due to the limited computational power and storage. Using volumetric rendering methods, such as NeRF and its derivatives, on mobile devices is not suitable due to the high computational cost of volumetric rendering. On the other hand, recent advances in neural light field representations have shown promising real-time view synthesis results on mobile devices. Neural light field methods learn a direct mapping from a ray representation to the pixel color. The current choice of ray representation is either stratified ray sampling or Pl\"{u}cker coordinates, overlooking the classic light slab (two-plane) representation, the preferred representation to interpolate between light field views. In this work, we find that using the light slab representation is an efficient representation for learning a neural light field. More importantly, it is a lower-dimensional ray representation enabling us to learn the 4D ray space using feature grids which are significantly faster to train and render. Although mostly designed for frontal views, we show that the light-slab representation can be further extended to non-frontal scenes using a divide-and-conquer strategy. Our method offers superior rendering quality compared to previous light field methods and achieves a significantly improved trade-off between rendering quality and speed.

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has shown its impressive power in novel view synthesis. However, creating relightable 3D assets, especially for objects with ill-defined shapes (e.g., fur), is still a challenging task. For these scenes, the decomposition between the light, geometry, and material is more ambiguous, as neither the surface constraints nor the analytical shading model hold. To address this issue, we propose RNG, a novel representation of relightable neural Gaussians, enabling the relighting of objects with both hard surfaces or fluffy boundaries. We avoid any assumptions in the shading model but maintain feature vectors, which can be further decoded by an MLP into colors, in each Gaussian point. Following prior work, we utilize a point light to reduce the ambiguity and introduce a shadow-aware condition to the network. We additionally propose a depth refinement network to help the shadow computation under the 3DGS framework, leading to better shadow effects under point lights. Furthermore, to avoid the blurriness brought by the alpha-blending in 3DGS, we design a hybrid forward-deferred optimization strategy. As a result, we achieve about 20times faster in training and about 600times faster in rendering than prior work based on neural radiance fields, with 60 frames per second on an RTX4090.

Synthesizing NeRFs under arbitrary lighting has become a seminal problem in the last few years. Recent efforts tackle the problem via the extraction of physically-based parameters that can then be rendered under arbitrary lighting, but they are limited in the range of scenes they can handle, usually mishandling glossy scenes. We propose RRM, a method that can extract the materials, geometry, and environment lighting of a scene even in the presence of highly reflective objects. Our method consists of a physically-aware radiance field representation that informs physically-based parameters, and an expressive environment light structure based on a Laplacian Pyramid. We demonstrate that our contributions outperform the state-of-the-art on parameter retrieval tasks, leading to high-fidelity relighting and novel view synthesis on surfacic scenes.

We present a method to efficiently generate 3D-aware high-resolution images that are view-consistent across multiple target views. The proposed multiplane neural radiance model, named GMNR, consists of a novel {\alpha}-guided view-dependent representation ({\alpha}-VdR) module for learning view-dependent information. The {\alpha}-VdR module, faciliated by an {\alpha}-guided pixel sampling technique, computes the view-dependent representation efficiently by learning viewing direction and position coefficients. Moreover, we propose a view-consistency loss to enforce photometric similarity across multiple views. The GMNR model can generate 3D-aware high-resolution images that are viewconsistent across multiple camera poses, while maintaining the computational efficiency in terms of both training and inference time. Experiments on three datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed modules, leading to favorable results in terms of both generation quality and inference time, compared to existing approaches. Our GMNR model generates 3D-aware images of 1024 X 1024 pixels with 17.6 FPS on a single V100. Code : https://github.com/VIROBO-15/GMNR

Neural implicit surface learning has shown significant progress in multi-view 3D reconstruction, where an object is represented by multilayer perceptrons that provide continuous implicit surface representation and view-dependent radiance. However, current methods often fail to accurately reconstruct reflective surfaces, leading to severe ambiguity. To overcome this issue, we propose Ref-NeuS, which aims to reduce ambiguity by attenuating the effect of reflective surfaces. Specifically, we utilize an anomaly detector to estimate an explicit reflection score with the guidance of multi-view context to localize reflective surfaces. Afterward, we design a reflection-aware photometric loss that adaptively reduces ambiguity by modeling rendered color as a Gaussian distribution, with the reflection score representing the variance. We show that together with a reflection direction-dependent radiance, our model achieves high-quality surface reconstruction on reflective surfaces and outperforms the state-of-the-arts by a large margin. Besides, our model is also comparable on general surfaces.

Image generation has witnessed significant advancements in the past few years. However, evaluating the performance of image generation models remains a formidable challenge. In this paper, we propose ICE-Bench, a unified and comprehensive benchmark designed to rigorously assess image generation models. Its comprehensiveness could be summarized in the following key features: (1) Coarse-to-Fine Tasks: We systematically deconstruct image generation into four task categories: No-ref/Ref Image Creating/Editing, based on the presence or absence of source images and reference images. And further decompose them into 31 fine-grained tasks covering a broad spectrum of image generation requirements, culminating in a comprehensive benchmark. (2) Multi-dimensional Metrics: The evaluation framework assesses image generation capabilities across 6 dimensions: aesthetic quality, imaging quality, prompt following, source consistency, reference consistency, and controllability. 11 metrics are introduced to support the multi-dimensional evaluation. Notably, we introduce VLLM-QA, an innovative metric designed to assess the success of image editing by leveraging large models. (3) Hybrid Data: The data comes from real scenes and virtual generation, which effectively improves data diversity and alleviates the bias problem in model evaluation. Through ICE-Bench, we conduct a thorough analysis of existing generation models, revealing both the challenging nature of our benchmark and the gap between current model capabilities and real-world generation requirements. To foster further advancements in the field, we will open-source ICE-Bench, including its dataset, evaluation code, and models, thereby providing a valuable resource for the research community.

Realistic video simulation has shown significant potential across diverse applications, from virtual reality to film production. This is particularly true for scenarios where capturing videos in real-world settings is either impractical or expensive. Existing approaches in video simulation often fail to accurately model the lighting environment, represent the object geometry, or achieve high levels of photorealism. In this paper, we propose Anything in Any Scene, a novel and generic framework for realistic video simulation that seamlessly inserts any object into an existing dynamic video with a strong emphasis on physical realism. Our proposed general framework encompasses three key processes: 1) integrating a realistic object into a given scene video with proper placement to ensure geometric realism; 2) estimating the sky and environmental lighting distribution and simulating realistic shadows to enhance the light realism; 3) employing a style transfer network that refines the final video output to maximize photorealism. We experimentally demonstrate that Anything in Any Scene framework produces simulated videos of great geometric realism, lighting realism, and photorealism. By significantly mitigating the challenges associated with video data generation, our framework offers an efficient and cost-effective solution for acquiring high-quality videos. Furthermore, its applications extend well beyond video data augmentation, showing promising potential in virtual reality, video editing, and various other video-centric applications. Please check our project website https://anythinginanyscene.github.io for access to our project code and more high-resolution video results.

Lighting normalization is a crucial but underexplored restoration task with broad applications. However, existing works often simplify this task within the context of shadow removal, limiting the light sources to one and oversimplifying the scene, thus excluding complex self-shadows and restricting surface classes to smooth ones. Although promising, such simplifications hinder generalizability to more realistic settings encountered in daily use. In this paper, we propose a new challenging task termed Ambient Lighting Normalization (ALN), which enables the study of interactions between shadows, unifying image restoration and shadow removal in a broader context. To address the lack of appropriate datasets for ALN, we introduce the large-scale high-resolution dataset Ambient6K, comprising samples obtained from multiple light sources and including self-shadows resulting from complex geometries, which is the first of its kind. For benchmarking, we select various mainstream methods and rigorously evaluate them on Ambient6K. Additionally, we propose IFBlend, a novel strong baseline that maximizes Image-Frequency joint entropy to selectively restore local areas under different lighting conditions, without relying on shadow localization priors. Experiments show that IFBlend achieves SOTA scores on Ambient6K and exhibits competitive performance on conventional shadow removal benchmarks compared to shadow-specific models with mask priors. The dataset, benchmark, and code are available at https://github.com/fvasluianu97/IFBlend.

While recent advancing image super-resolution (SR) techniques are continually improving the perceptual quality of their outputs, they can usually fail in quantitative evaluations. This inconsistency leads to a growing distrust in existing image metrics for SR evaluations. Though image evaluation depends on both the metric and the reference ground truth (GT), researchers typically do not inspect the role of GTs, as they are generally accepted as `perfect' references. However, due to the data being collected in the early years and the ignorance of controlling other types of distortions, we point out that GTs in existing SR datasets can exhibit relatively poor quality, which leads to biased evaluations. Following this observation, in this paper, we are interested in the following questions: Are GT images in existing SR datasets 100% trustworthy for model evaluations? How does GT quality affect this evaluation? And how to make fair evaluations if there exist imperfect GTs? To answer these questions, this paper presents two main contributions. First, by systematically analyzing seven state-of-the-art SR models across three real-world SR datasets, we show that SR performances can be consistently affected across models by low-quality GTs, and models can perform quite differently when GT quality is controlled. Second, we propose a novel perceptual quality metric, Relative Quality Index (RQI), that measures the relative quality discrepancy of image pairs, thus issuing the biased evaluations caused by unreliable GTs. Our proposed model achieves significantly better consistency with human opinions. We expect our work to provide insights for the SR community on how future datasets, models, and metrics should be developed.

Multi-view image generation attracts particular attention these days due to its promising 3D-related applications, e.g., image viewpoint editing. Most existing methods follow a paradigm where a 3D representation is first synthesized, and then rendered into 2D images to ensure photo-consistency across viewpoints. However, such explicit bias for photo-consistency sacrifices photo-realism, causing geometry artifacts and loss of fine-scale details when these methods are applied to edit real images. To address this issue, we propose ray conditioning, a geometry-free alternative that relaxes the photo-consistency constraint. Our method generates multi-view images by conditioning a 2D GAN on a light field prior. With explicit viewpoint control, state-of-the-art photo-realism and identity consistency, our method is particularly suited for the viewpoint editing task.

Although recent advancements in text-to-3D generation have significantly improved generation quality, issues like limited level of detail and low fidelity still persist, which requires further improvement. To understand the essence of those issues, we thoroughly analyze current score distillation methods by connecting theories of consistency distillation to score distillation. Based on the insights acquired through analysis, we propose an optimization framework, Guided Consistency Sampling (GCS), integrated with 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) to alleviate those issues. Additionally, we have observed the persistent oversaturation in the rendered views of generated 3D assets. From experiments, we find that it is caused by unwanted accumulated brightness in 3DGS during optimization. To mitigate this issue, we introduce a Brightness-Equalized Generation (BEG) scheme in 3DGS rendering. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach generates 3D assets with more details and higher fidelity than state-of-the-art methods. The codes are released at https://github.com/LMozart/ECCV2024-GCS-BEG.

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) typically struggle to reconstruct and render highly specular objects, whose appearance varies quickly with changes in viewpoint. Recent works have improved NeRF's ability to render detailed specular appearance of distant environment illumination, but are unable to synthesize consistent reflections of closer content. Moreover, these techniques rely on large computationally-expensive neural networks to model outgoing radiance, which severely limits optimization and rendering speed. We address these issues with an approach based on ray tracing: instead of querying an expensive neural network for the outgoing view-dependent radiance at points along each camera ray, our model casts reflection rays from these points and traces them through the NeRF representation to render feature vectors which are decoded into color using a small inexpensive network. We demonstrate that our model outperforms prior methods for view synthesis of scenes containing shiny objects, and that it is the only existing NeRF method that can synthesize photorealistic specular appearance and reflections in real-world scenes, while requiring comparable optimization time to current state-of-the-art view synthesis models.

Physically-based rendering (PBR) is key for immersive rendering effects used widely in the industry to showcase detailed realistic scenes from computer graphics assets. A well-known caveat is that producing the same is computationally heavy and relies on complex capture devices. Inspired by the success in quality and efficiency of recent volumetric neural rendering, we want to develop a physically-based neural shader to eliminate device dependency and significantly boost performance. However, no existing lighting and material models in the current neural rendering approaches can accurately represent the comprehensive lighting models and BRDFs properties required by the PBR process. Thus, this paper proposes a novel lighting representation that models direct and indirect light locally through a light sampling strategy in a learned light sampling field. We also propose BRDF models to separately represent surface/subsurface scattering details to enable complex objects such as translucent material (i.e., skin, jade). We then implement our proposed representations with an end-to-end physically-based neural face skin shader, which takes a standard face asset (i.e., geometry, albedo map, and normal map) and an HDRI for illumination as inputs and generates a photo-realistic rendering as output. Extensive experiments showcase the quality and efficiency of our PBR face skin shader, indicating the effectiveness of our proposed lighting and material representations.

Implicit Neural Representations (INRs) approximate discrete data through continuous functions and are commonly used for encoding 2D images. Traditional image-based INRs employ neural networks to map pixel coordinates to RGB values, capturing shapes, colors, and textures within the network's weights. Recently, GaussianImage has been proposed as an alternative, using Gaussian functions instead of neural networks to achieve comparable quality and compression. Such a solution obtains a quality and compression ratio similar to classical INR models but does not allow image modification. In contrast, our work introduces a novel method, MiraGe, which uses mirror reflections to perceive 2D images in 3D space and employs flat-controlled Gaussians for precise 2D image editing. Our approach improves the rendering quality and allows realistic image modifications, including human-inspired perception of photos in the 3D world. Thanks to modeling images in 3D space, we obtain the illusion of 3D-based modification in 2D images. We also show that our Gaussian representation can be easily combined with a physics engine to produce physics-based modification of 2D images. Consequently, MiraGe allows for better quality than the standard approach and natural modification of 2D images

High dynamic range (HDR) capture and display have seen significant growth in popularity driven by the advancements in technology and increasing consumer demand for superior image quality. As a result, HDR image compression is crucial to fully realize the benefits of HDR imaging without suffering from large file sizes and inefficient data handling. Conventionally, this is achieved by introducing a residual/gain map as additional metadata to bridge the gap between HDR and low dynamic range (LDR) images, making the former compatible with LDR image codecs but offering suboptimal rate-distortion performance. In this work, we initiate efforts towards end-to-end optimized HDR image compression for perceptually optimal storage and display. Specifically, we learn to compress an HDR image into two bitstreams: one for generating an LDR image to ensure compatibility with legacy LDR displays, and another as side information to aid HDR image reconstruction from the output LDR image. To measure the perceptual quality of output HDR and LDR images, we use two recently proposed image distortion metrics, both validated against human perceptual data of image quality and with reference to the uncompressed HDR image. Through end-to-end optimization for rate-distortion performance, our method dramatically improves HDR and LDR image quality at all bit rates.

Cameras rely on auto white balance (AWB) to correct undesirable color casts caused by scene illumination and the camera's spectral sensitivity. This is typically achieved using an illuminant estimator that determines the global color cast solely from the color information in the camera's raw sensor image. Mobile devices provide valuable additional metadata-such as capture timestamp and geolocation-that offers strong contextual clues to help narrow down the possible illumination solutions. This paper proposes a lightweight illuminant estimation method that incorporates such contextual metadata, along with additional capture information and image colors, into a compact model (~5K parameters), achieving promising results, matching or surpassing larger models. To validate our method, we introduce a dataset of 3,224 smartphone images with contextual metadata collected at various times of day and under diverse lighting conditions. The dataset includes ground-truth illuminant colors, determined using a color chart, and user-preferred illuminants validated through a user study, providing a comprehensive benchmark for AWB evaluation.

Powered by large-scale text-to-image generation models, text-to-3D avatar generation has made promising progress. However, most methods fail to produce photorealistic results, limited by imprecise geometry and low-quality appearance. Towards more practical avatar generation, we present SEEAvatar, a method for generating photorealistic 3D avatars from text with SElf-Evolving constraints for decoupled geometry and appearance. For geometry, we propose to constrain the optimized avatar in a decent global shape with a template avatar. The template avatar is initialized with human prior and can be updated by the optimized avatar periodically as an evolving template, which enables more flexible shape generation. Besides, the geometry is also constrained by the static human prior in local parts like face and hands to maintain the delicate structures. For appearance generation, we use diffusion model enhanced by prompt engineering to guide a physically based rendering pipeline to generate realistic textures. The lightness constraint is applied on the albedo texture to suppress incorrect lighting effect. Experiments show that our method outperforms previous methods on both global and local geometry and appearance quality by a large margin. Since our method can produce high-quality meshes and textures, such assets can be directly applied in classic graphics pipeline for realistic rendering under any lighting condition. Project page at: https://seeavatar3d.github.io.

The proliferation of in-the-wild videos has greatly expanded the Video Quality Assessment (VQA) problem. Unlike early definitions that usually focus on limited distortion types, VQA on in-the-wild videos is especially challenging as it could be affected by complicated factors, including various distortions and diverse contents. Though subjective studies have collected overall quality scores for these videos, how the abstract quality scores relate with specific factors is still obscure, hindering VQA methods from more concrete quality evaluations (e.g. sharpness of a video). To solve this problem, we collect over two million opinions on 4,543 in-the-wild videos on 13 dimensions of quality-related factors, including in-capture authentic distortions (e.g. motion blur, noise, flicker), errors introduced by compression and transmission, and higher-level experiences on semantic contents and aesthetic issues (e.g. composition, camera trajectory), to establish the multi-dimensional Maxwell database. Specifically, we ask the subjects to label among a positive, a negative, and a neutral choice for each dimension. These explanation-level opinions allow us to measure the relationships between specific quality factors and abstract subjective quality ratings, and to benchmark different categories of VQA algorithms on each dimension, so as to more comprehensively analyze their strengths and weaknesses. Furthermore, we propose the MaxVQA, a language-prompted VQA approach that modifies vision-language foundation model CLIP to better capture important quality issues as observed in our analyses. The MaxVQA can jointly evaluate various specific quality factors and final quality scores with state-of-the-art accuracy on all dimensions, and superb generalization ability on existing datasets. Code and data available at https://github.com/VQAssessment/MaxVQA.

Novel View Synthesis (NVS) from unconstrained photo collections is challenging in computer graphics. Recently, 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has shown promise for photorealistic and real-time NVS of static scenes. Building on 3DGS, we propose an efficient point-based differentiable rendering framework for scene reconstruction from photo collections. Our key innovation is a residual-based spherical harmonic coefficients transfer module that adapts 3DGS to varying lighting conditions and photometric post-processing. This lightweight module can be pre-computed and ensures efficient gradient propagation from rendered images to 3D Gaussian attributes. Additionally, we observe that the appearance encoder and the transient mask predictor, the two most critical parts of NVS from unconstrained photo collections, can be mutually beneficial. We introduce a plug-and-play lightweight spatial attention module to simultaneously predict transient occluders and latent appearance representation for each image. After training and preprocessing, our method aligns with the standard 3DGS format and rendering pipeline, facilitating seamlessly integration into various 3DGS applications. Extensive experiments on diverse datasets show our approach outperforms existing approaches on the rendering quality of novel view and appearance synthesis with high converge and rendering speed.

Neural radiance fields provide state-of-the-art view synthesis quality but tend to be slow to render. One reason is that they make use of volume rendering, thus requiring many samples (and model queries) per ray at render time. Although this representation is flexible and easy to optimize, most real-world objects can be modeled more efficiently with surfaces instead of volumes, requiring far fewer samples per ray. This observation has spurred considerable progress in surface representations such as signed distance functions, but these may struggle to model semi-opaque and thin structures. We propose a method, HybridNeRF, that leverages the strengths of both representations by rendering most objects as surfaces while modeling the (typically) small fraction of challenging regions volumetrically. We evaluate HybridNeRF against the challenging Eyeful Tower dataset along with other commonly used view synthesis datasets. When comparing to state-of-the-art baselines, including recent rasterization-based approaches, we improve error rates by 15-30% while achieving real-time framerates (at least 36 FPS) for virtual-reality resolutions (2Kx2K).

White balance (WB) algorithms in many commercial cameras assume single and uniform illumination, leading to undesirable results when multiple lighting sources with different chromaticities exist in the scene. Prior research on multi-illuminant WB typically predicts illumination at the pixel level without fully grasping the scene's actual lighting conditions, including the number and color of light sources. This often results in unnatural outcomes lacking in overall consistency. To handle this problem, we present a deep white balancing model that leverages the slot attention, where each slot is in charge of representing individual illuminants. This design enables the model to generate chromaticities and weight maps for individual illuminants, which are then fused to compose the final illumination map. Furthermore, we propose the centroid-matching loss, which regulates the activation of each slot based on the color range, thereby enhancing the model to separate illumination more effectively. Our method achieves the state-of-the-art performance on both single- and multi-illuminant WB benchmarks, and also offers additional information such as the number of illuminants in the scene and their chromaticity. This capability allows for illumination editing, an application not feasible with prior methods.

Recent techniques for real-time view synthesis have rapidly advanced in fidelity and speed, and modern methods are capable of rendering near-photorealistic scenes at interactive frame rates. At the same time, a tension has arisen between explicit scene representations amenable to rasterization and neural fields built on ray marching, with state-of-the-art instances of the latter surpassing the former in quality while being prohibitively expensive for real-time applications. In this work, we introduce SMERF, a view synthesis approach that achieves state-of-the-art accuracy among real-time methods on large scenes with footprints up to 300 m^2 at a volumetric resolution of 3.5 mm^3. Our method is built upon two primary contributions: a hierarchical model partitioning scheme, which increases model capacity while constraining compute and memory consumption, and a distillation training strategy that simultaneously yields high fidelity and internal consistency. Our approach enables full six degrees of freedom (6DOF) navigation within a web browser and renders in real-time on commodity smartphones and laptops. Extensive experiments show that our method exceeds the current state-of-the-art in real-time novel view synthesis by 0.78 dB on standard benchmarks and 1.78 dB on large scenes, renders frames three orders of magnitude faster than state-of-the-art radiance field models, and achieves real-time performance across a wide variety of commodity devices, including smartphones. We encourage readers to explore these models interactively at our project website: https://smerf-3d.github.io.

Gaussian Splatting has become a popular technique for various 3D Computer Vision tasks, including novel view synthesis, scene reconstruction, and dynamic scene rendering. However, the challenge of natural-looking object insertion, where the object's appearance seamlessly matches the scene, remains unsolved. In this work, we propose a method, dubbed D3DR, for inserting a 3DGS-parametrized object into 3DGS scenes while correcting its lighting, shadows, and other visual artifacts to ensure consistency, a problem that has not been successfully addressed before. We leverage advances in diffusion models, which, trained on real-world data, implicitly understand correct scene lighting. After inserting the object, we optimize a diffusion-based Delta Denoising Score (DDS)-inspired objective to adjust its 3D Gaussian parameters for proper lighting correction. Utilizing diffusion model personalization techniques to improve optimization quality, our approach ensures seamless object insertion and natural appearance. Finally, we demonstrate the method's effectiveness by comparing it to existing approaches, achieving 0.5 PSNR and 0.15 SSIM improvements in relighting quality.

Capturing geometric and material information from images remains a fundamental challenge in computer vision and graphics. Traditional optimization-based methods often require hours of computational time to reconstruct geometry, material properties, and environmental lighting from dense multi-view inputs, while still struggling with inherent ambiguities between lighting and material. On the other hand, learning-based approaches leverage rich material priors from existing 3D object datasets but face challenges with maintaining multi-view consistency. In this paper, we introduce IDArb, a diffusion-based model designed to perform intrinsic decomposition on an arbitrary number of images under varying illuminations. Our method achieves accurate and multi-view consistent estimation on surface normals and material properties. This is made possible through a novel cross-view, cross-domain attention module and an illumination-augmented, view-adaptive training strategy. Additionally, we introduce ARB-Objaverse, a new dataset that provides large-scale multi-view intrinsic data and renderings under diverse lighting conditions, supporting robust training. Extensive experiments demonstrate that IDArb outperforms state-of-the-art methods both qualitatively and quantitatively. Moreover, our approach facilitates a range of downstream tasks, including single-image relighting, photometric stereo, and 3D reconstruction, highlighting its broad applications in realistic 3D content creation.

Novel view synthesis from unconstrained in-the-wild image collections remains a significant yet challenging task due to photometric variations and transient occluders that complicate accurate scene reconstruction. Previous methods have approached these issues by integrating per-image appearance features embeddings in Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs). Although 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) offers faster training and real-time rendering, adapting it for unconstrained image collections is non-trivial due to the substantially different architecture. In this paper, we introduce Splatfacto-W, an approach that integrates per-Gaussian neural color features and per-image appearance embeddings into the rasterization process, along with a spherical harmonics-based background model to represent varying photometric appearances and better depict backgrounds. Our key contributions include latent appearance modeling, efficient transient object handling, and precise background modeling. Splatfacto-W delivers high-quality, real-time novel view synthesis with improved scene consistency in in-the-wild scenarios. Our method improves the Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) by an average of 5.3 dB compared to 3DGS, enhances training speed by 150 times compared to NeRF-based methods, and achieves a similar rendering speed to 3DGS. Additional video results and code integrated into Nerfstudio are available at https://kevinxu02.github.io/splatfactow/.

Reconstructing and relighting objects and scenes under varying lighting conditions is challenging: existing neural rendering methods often cannot handle the complex interactions between materials and light. Incorporating pre-computed radiance transfer techniques enables global illumination, but still struggles with materials with subsurface scattering effects. We propose a novel framework for learning the radiance transfer field via volume rendering and utilizing various appearance cues to refine geometry end-to-end. This framework extends relighting and reconstruction capabilities to handle a wider range of materials in a data-driven fashion. The resulting models produce plausible rendering results in existing and novel conditions. We will release our code and a novel light stage dataset of objects with subsurface scattering effects publicly available.

Recent developments in differentiable and neural rendering have made impressive breakthroughs in a variety of 2D and 3D tasks, e.g. novel view synthesis, 3D reconstruction. Typically, differentiable rendering relies on a dense viewpoint coverage of the scene, such that the geometry can be disambiguated from appearance observations alone. Several challenges arise when only a few input views are available, often referred to as sparse or few-shot neural rendering. As this is an underconstrained problem, most existing approaches introduce the use of regularisation, together with a diversity of learnt and hand-crafted priors. A recurring problem in sparse rendering literature is the lack of an homogeneous, up-to-date, dataset and evaluation protocol. While high-resolution datasets are standard in dense reconstruction literature, sparse rendering methods often evaluate with low-resolution images. Additionally, data splits are inconsistent across different manuscripts, and testing ground-truth images are often publicly available, which may lead to over-fitting. In this work, we propose the Sparse Rendering (SpaRe) dataset and benchmark. We introduce a new dataset that follows the setup of the DTU MVS dataset. The dataset is composed of 97 new scenes based on synthetic, high-quality assets. Each scene has up to 64 camera views and 7 lighting configurations, rendered at 1600x1200 resolution. We release a training split of 82 scenes to foster generalizable approaches, and provide an online evaluation platform for the validation and test sets, whose ground-truth images remain hidden. We propose two different sparse configurations (3 and 9 input images respectively). This provides a powerful and convenient tool for reproducible evaluation, and enable researchers easy access to a public leaderboard with the state-of-the-art performance scores. Available at: https://sparebenchmark.github.io/

Neural rendering methods have significantly advanced photo-realistic 3D scene rendering in various academic and industrial applications. The recent 3D Gaussian Splatting method has achieved the state-of-the-art rendering quality and speed combining the benefits of both primitive-based representations and volumetric representations. However, it often leads to heavily redundant Gaussians that try to fit every training view, neglecting the underlying scene geometry. Consequently, the resulting model becomes less robust to significant view changes, texture-less area and lighting effects. We introduce Scaffold-GS, which uses anchor points to distribute local 3D Gaussians, and predicts their attributes on-the-fly based on viewing direction and distance within the view frustum. Anchor growing and pruning strategies are developed based on the importance of neural Gaussians to reliably improve the scene coverage. We show that our method effectively reduces redundant Gaussians while delivering high-quality rendering. We also demonstrates an enhanced capability to accommodate scenes with varying levels-of-detail and view-dependent observations, without sacrificing the rendering speed.

Differentiable volumetric rendering-based methods made significant progress in novel view synthesis. On one hand, innovative methods have replaced the Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) network with locally parameterized structures, enabling high-quality renderings in a reasonable time. On the other hand, approaches have used differentiable splatting instead of NeRF's ray casting to optimize radiance fields rapidly using Gaussian kernels, allowing for fine adaptation to the scene. However, differentiable ray casting of irregularly spaced kernels has been scarcely explored, while splatting, despite enabling fast rendering times, is susceptible to clearly visible artifacts. Our work closes this gap by providing a physically consistent formulation of the emitted radiance c and density {\sigma}, decomposed with Gaussian functions associated with Spherical Gaussians/Harmonics for all-frequency colorimetric representation. We also introduce a method enabling differentiable ray casting of irregularly distributed Gaussians using an algorithm that integrates radiance fields slab by slab and leverages a BVH structure. This allows our approach to finely adapt to the scene while avoiding splatting artifacts. As a result, we achieve superior rendering quality compared to the state-of-the-art while maintaining reasonable training times and achieving inference speeds of 25 FPS on the Blender dataset. Project page with videos and code: https://raygauss.github.io/

Understanding and modeling lighting effects are fundamental tasks in computer vision and graphics. Classic physically-based rendering (PBR) accurately simulates the light transport, but relies on precise scene representations--explicit 3D geometry, high-quality material properties, and lighting conditions--that are often impractical to obtain in real-world scenarios. Therefore, we introduce DiffusionRenderer, a neural approach that addresses the dual problem of inverse and forward rendering within a holistic framework. Leveraging powerful video diffusion model priors, the inverse rendering model accurately estimates G-buffers from real-world videos, providing an interface for image editing tasks, and training data for the rendering model. Conversely, our rendering model generates photorealistic images from G-buffers without explicit light transport simulation. Experiments demonstrate that DiffusionRenderer effectively approximates inverse and forwards rendering, consistently outperforming the state-of-the-art. Our model enables practical applications from a single video input--including relighting, material editing, and realistic object insertion.

Recent efforts in Neural Rendering Fields (NeRF) have shown impressive results on novel view synthesis by utilizing implicit neural representation to represent 3D scenes. Due to the process of volumetric rendering, the inference speed for NeRF is extremely slow, limiting the application scenarios of utilizing NeRF on resource-constrained hardware, such as mobile devices. Many works have been conducted to reduce the latency of running NeRF models. However, most of them still require high-end GPU for acceleration or extra storage memory, which is all unavailable on mobile devices. Another emerging direction utilizes the neural light field (NeLF) for speedup, as only one forward pass is performed on a ray to predict the pixel color. Nevertheless, to reach a similar rendering quality as NeRF, the network in NeLF is designed with intensive computation, which is not mobile-friendly. In this work, we propose an efficient network that runs in real-time on mobile devices for neural rendering. We follow the setting of NeLF to train our network. Unlike existing works, we introduce a novel network architecture that runs efficiently on mobile devices with low latency and small size, i.e., saving 15times sim 24times storage compared with MobileNeRF. Our model achieves high-resolution generation while maintaining real-time inference for both synthetic and real-world scenes on mobile devices, e.g., 18.04ms (iPhone 13) for rendering one 1008times756 image of real 3D scenes. Additionally, we achieve similar image quality as NeRF and better quality than MobileNeRF (PSNR 26.15 vs. 25.91 on the real-world forward-facing dataset).

Full-reference image quality assessment (FR-IQA) generally assumes that reference images are of perfect quality. However, this assumption is flawed due to the sensor and optical limitations of modern imaging systems. Moreover, recent generative enhancement methods are capable of producing images of higher quality than their original. All of these challenge the effectiveness and applicability of current FR-IQA models. To relax the assumption of perfect reference image quality, we build a large-scale IQA database, namely DiffIQA, containing approximately 180,000 images generated by a diffusion-based image enhancer with adjustable hyper-parameters. Each image is annotated by human subjects as either worse, similar, or better quality compared to its reference. Building on this, we present a generalized FR-IQA model, namely Adaptive Fidelity-Naturalness Evaluator (A-FINE), to accurately assess and adaptively combine the fidelity and naturalness of a test image. A-FINE aligns well with standard FR-IQA when the reference image is much more natural than the test image. We demonstrate by extensive experiments that A-FINE surpasses standard FR-IQA models on well-established IQA datasets and our newly created DiffIQA. To further validate A-FINE, we additionally construct a super-resolution IQA benchmark (SRIQA-Bench), encompassing test images derived from ten state-of-the-art SR methods with reliable human quality annotations. Tests on SRIQA-Bench re-affirm the advantages of A-FINE. The code and dataset are available at https://tianhewu.github.io/A-FINE-page.github.io/.

We present an imaging and neural rendering technique that seeks to synthesize videos of light propagating through a scene from novel, moving camera viewpoints. Our approach relies on a new ultrafast imaging setup to capture a first-of-its kind, multi-viewpoint video dataset with picosecond-level temporal resolution. Combined with this dataset, we introduce an efficient neural volume rendering framework based on the transient field. This field is defined as a mapping from a 3D point and 2D direction to a high-dimensional, discrete-time signal that represents time-varying radiance at ultrafast timescales. Rendering with transient fields naturally accounts for effects due to the finite speed of light, including viewpoint-dependent appearance changes caused by light propagation delays to the camera. We render a range of complex effects, including scattering, specular reflection, refraction, and diffraction. Additionally, we demonstrate removing viewpoint-dependent propagation delays using a time warping procedure, rendering of relativistic effects, and video synthesis of direct and global components of light transport.

Photorealistic style transfer (PST) enables real-world color grading by adapting reference image colors while preserving content structure. Existing methods mainly follow either approaches: generation-based methods that prioritize stylistic fidelity at the cost of content integrity and efficiency, or global color transformation methods such as LUT, which preserve structure but lack local adaptability. To bridge this gap, we propose Spatial Adaptive 4D Look-Up Table (SA-LUT), combining LUT efficiency with neural network adaptability. SA-LUT features: (1) a Style-guided 4D LUT Generator that extracts multi-scale features from the style image to predict a 4D LUT, and (2) a Context Generator using content-style cross-attention to produce a context map. This context map enables spatially-adaptive adjustments, allowing our 4D LUT to apply precise color transformations while preserving structural integrity. To establish a rigorous evaluation framework for photorealistic style transfer, we introduce PST50, the first benchmark specifically designed for PST assessment. Experiments demonstrate that SA-LUT substantially outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving a 66.7% reduction in LPIPS score compared to 3D LUT approaches, while maintaining real-time performance at 16 FPS for video stylization. Our code and benchmark are available at https://github.com/Ry3nG/SA-LUT

3D Gaussian splatting (GS) has recently emerged as a transformative technique in the realm of explicit radiance field and computer graphics. This innovative approach, characterized by the utilization of millions of learnable 3D Gaussians, represents a significant departure from mainstream neural radiance field approaches, which predominantly use implicit, coordinate-based models to map spatial coordinates to pixel values. 3D GS, with its explicit scene representation and differentiable rendering algorithm, not only promises real-time rendering capability but also introduces unprecedented levels of editability. This positions 3D GS as a potential game-changer for the next generation of 3D reconstruction and representation. In the present paper, we provide the first systematic overview of the recent developments and critical contributions in the domain of 3D GS. We begin with a detailed exploration of the underlying principles and the driving forces behind the emergence of 3D GS, laying the groundwork for understanding its significance. A focal point of our discussion is the practical applicability of 3D GS. By enabling unprecedented rendering speed, 3D GS opens up a plethora of applications, ranging from virtual reality to interactive media and beyond. This is complemented by a comparative analysis of leading 3D GS models, evaluated across various benchmark tasks to highlight their performance and practical utility. The survey concludes by identifying current challenges and suggesting potential avenues for future research in this domain. Through this survey, we aim to provide a valuable resource for both newcomers and seasoned researchers, fostering further exploration and advancement in applicable and explicit radiance field representation.

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) have demonstrated remarkable potential in capturing complex 3D scenes with high fidelity. However, one persistent challenge that hinders the widespread adoption of NeRFs is the computational bottleneck due to the volumetric rendering. On the other hand, 3D Gaussian splatting (3DGS) has recently emerged as an alternative representation that leverages a 3D Gaussisan-based representation and adopts the rasterization pipeline to render the images rather than volumetric rendering, achieving very fast rendering speed and promising image quality. However, a significant drawback arises as 3DGS entails a substantial number of 3D Gaussians to maintain the high fidelity of the rendered images, which requires a large amount of memory and storage. To address this critical issue, we place a specific emphasis on two key objectives: reducing the number of Gaussian points without sacrificing performance and compressing the Gaussian attributes, such as view-dependent color and covariance. To this end, we propose a learnable mask strategy that significantly reduces the number of Gaussians while preserving high performance. In addition, we propose a compact but effective representation of view-dependent color by employing a grid-based neural field rather than relying on spherical harmonics. Finally, we learn codebooks to compactly represent the geometric attributes of Gaussian by vector quantization. In our extensive experiments, we consistently show over 10times reduced storage and enhanced rendering speed, while maintaining the quality of the scene representation, compared to 3DGS. Our work provides a comprehensive framework for 3D scene representation, achieving high performance, fast training, compactness, and real-time rendering. Our project page is available at https://maincold2.github.io/c3dgs/.

We address the dual problems of novel view synthesis and environment reconstruction from hand-held RGBD sensors. Our contributions include 1) modeling highly specular objects, 2) modeling inter-reflections and Fresnel effects, and 3) enabling surface light field reconstruction with the same input needed to reconstruct shape alone. In cases where scene surface has a strong mirror-like material component, we generate highly detailed environment images, revealing room composition, objects, people, buildings, and trees visible through windows. Our approach yields state of the art view synthesis techniques, operates on low dynamic range imagery, and is robust to geometric and calibration errors.

We present SuperNormal, a fast, high-fidelity approach to multi-view 3D reconstruction using surface normal maps. With a few minutes, SuperNormal produces detailed surfaces on par with 3D scanners. We harness volume rendering to optimize a neural signed distance function (SDF) powered by multi-resolution hash encoding. To accelerate training, we propose directional finite difference and patch-based ray marching to approximate the SDF gradients numerically. While not compromising reconstruction quality, this strategy is nearly twice as efficient as analytical gradients and about three times faster than axis-aligned finite difference. Experiments on the benchmark dataset demonstrate the superiority of SuperNormal in efficiency and accuracy compared to existing multi-view photometric stereo methods. On our captured objects, SuperNormal produces more fine-grained geometry than recent neural 3D reconstruction methods.

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. We will release the code for reproducibility.

We present a method that achieves state-of-the-art results for synthesizing novel views of complex scenes by optimizing an underlying continuous volumetric scene function using a sparse set of input views. Our algorithm represents a scene using a fully-connected (non-convolutional) deep network, whose input is a single continuous 5D coordinate (spatial location (x,y,z) and viewing direction (theta, phi)) and whose output is the volume density and view-dependent emitted radiance at that spatial location. We synthesize views by querying 5D coordinates along camera rays and use classic volume rendering techniques to project the output colors and densities into an image. Because volume rendering is naturally differentiable, the only input required to optimize our representation is a set of images with known camera poses. We describe how to effectively optimize neural radiance fields to render photorealistic novel views of scenes with complicated geometry and appearance, and demonstrate results that outperform prior work on neural rendering and view synthesis. View synthesis results are best viewed as videos, so we urge readers to view our supplementary video for convincing comparisons.

While recent text-to-image models can generate photorealistic images from text prompts that reflect detailed instructions, they still face significant challenges in accurately rendering words in the image. In this paper, we propose to retouch erroneous text renderings in the post-processing pipeline. Our approach, called Type-R, identifies typographical errors in the generated image, erases the erroneous text, regenerates text boxes for missing words, and finally corrects typos in the rendered words. Through extensive experiments, we show that Type-R, in combination with the latest text-to-image models such as Stable Diffusion or Flux, achieves the highest text rendering accuracy while maintaining image quality and also outperforms text-focused generation baselines in terms of balancing text accuracy and image quality.

We propose a fast and generalizable solution to Multi-view Photometric Stereo (MVPS), called MVPSNet. The key to our approach is a feature extraction network that effectively combines images from the same view captured under multiple lighting conditions to extract geometric features from shading cues for stereo matching. We demonstrate these features, termed `Light Aggregated Feature Maps' (LAFM), are effective for feature matching even in textureless regions, where traditional multi-view stereo methods fail. Our method produces similar reconstruction results to PS-NeRF, a state-of-the-art MVPS method that optimizes a neural network per-scene, while being 411times faster (105 seconds vs. 12 hours) in inference. Additionally, we introduce a new synthetic dataset for MVPS, sMVPS, which is shown to be effective to train a generalizable MVPS method.

No-Reference Image Quality Assessment (NR-IQA) aims to develop methods to measure image quality in alignment with human perception without the need for a high-quality reference image. In this work, we propose a self-supervised approach named ARNIQA (leArning distoRtion maNifold for Image Quality Assessment) for modeling the image distortion manifold to obtain quality representations in an intrinsic manner. First, we introduce an image degradation model that randomly composes ordered sequences of consecutively applied distortions. In this way, we can synthetically degrade images with a large variety of degradation patterns. Second, we propose to train our model by maximizing the similarity between the representations of patches of different images distorted equally, despite varying content. Therefore, images degraded in the same manner correspond to neighboring positions within the distortion manifold. Finally, we map the image representations to the quality scores with a simple linear regressor, thus without fine-tuning the encoder weights. The experiments show that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on several datasets. In addition, ARNIQA demonstrates improved data efficiency, generalization capabilities, and robustness compared to competing methods. The code and the model are publicly available at https://github.com/miccunifi/ARNIQA.

3D reconstruction and relighting of objects made from scattering materials present a significant challenge due to the complex light transport beneath the surface. 3D Gaussian Splatting introduced high-quality novel view synthesis at real-time speeds. While 3D Gaussians efficiently approximate an object's surface, they fail to capture the volumetric properties of subsurface scattering. We propose a framework for optimizing an object's shape together with the radiance transfer field given multi-view OLAT (one light at a time) data. Our method decomposes the scene into an explicit surface represented as 3D Gaussians, with a spatially varying BRDF, and an implicit volumetric representation of the scattering component. A learned incident light field accounts for shadowing. We optimize all parameters jointly via ray-traced differentiable rendering. Our approach enables material editing, relighting and novel view synthesis at interactive rates. We show successful application on synthetic data and introduce a newly acquired multi-view multi-light dataset of objects in a light-stage setup. Compared to previous work we achieve comparable or better results at a fraction of optimization and rendering time while enabling detailed control over material attributes. Project page https://sss.jdihlmann.com/

The fidelity of relighting is bounded by both geometry and appearance representations. For geometry, both mesh and volumetric approaches have difficulty modeling intricate structures like 3D hair geometry. For appearance, existing relighting models are limited in fidelity and often too slow to render in real-time with high-resolution continuous environments. In this work, we present Relightable Gaussian Codec Avatars, a method to build high-fidelity relightable head avatars that can be animated to generate novel expressions. Our geometry model based on 3D Gaussians can capture 3D-consistent sub-millimeter details such as hair strands and pores on dynamic face sequences. To support diverse materials of human heads such as the eyes, skin, and hair in a unified manner, we present a novel relightable appearance model based on learnable radiance transfer. Together with global illumination-aware spherical harmonics for the diffuse components, we achieve real-time relighting with spatially all-frequency reflections using spherical Gaussians. This appearance model can be efficiently relit under both point light and continuous illumination. We further improve the fidelity of eye reflections and enable explicit gaze control by introducing relightable explicit eye models. Our method outperforms existing approaches without compromising real-time performance. We also demonstrate real-time relighting of avatars on a tethered consumer VR headset, showcasing the efficiency and fidelity of our avatars.

In recent years, the underwater image formation model has found extensive use in the generation of synthetic underwater data. Although many approaches focus on scenes primarily affected by discoloration, they often overlook the model's ability to capture the complex, distance-dependent visibility loss present in highly turbid environments. In this work, we propose an improved synthetic data generation pipeline that includes the commonly omitted forward scattering term, while also considering a nonuniform medium. Additionally, we collected the BUCKET dataset under controlled turbidity conditions to acquire real turbid footage with the corresponding reference images. Our results demonstrate qualitative improvements over the reference model, particularly under increasing turbidity, with a selection rate of 82. 5\% by survey participants. Data and code can be accessed on the project page: vap.aau.dk/sea-ing-through-scattered-rays.

What is the current state-of-the-art for image restoration and enhancement applied to degraded images acquired under less than ideal circumstances? Can the application of such algorithms as a pre-processing step to improve image interpretability for manual analysis or automatic visual recognition to classify scene content? While there have been important advances in the area of computational photography to restore or enhance the visual quality of an image, the capabilities of such techniques have not always translated in a useful way to visual recognition tasks. Consequently, there is a pressing need for the development of algorithms that are designed for the joint problem of improving visual appearance and recognition, which will be an enabling factor for the deployment of visual recognition tools in many real-world scenarios. To address this, we introduce the UG^2 dataset as a large-scale benchmark composed of video imagery captured under challenging conditions, and two enhancement tasks designed to test algorithmic impact on visual quality and automatic object recognition. Furthermore, we propose a set of metrics to evaluate the joint improvement of such tasks as well as individual algorithmic advances, including a novel psychophysics-based evaluation regime for human assessment and a realistic set of quantitative measures for object recognition performance. We introduce six new algorithms for image restoration or enhancement, which were created as part of the IARPA sponsored UG^2 Challenge workshop held at CVPR 2018. Under the proposed evaluation regime, we present an in-depth analysis of these algorithms and a host of deep learning-based and classic baseline approaches. From the observed results, it is evident that we are in the early days of building a bridge between computational photography and visual recognition, leaving many opportunities for innovation in this area.

We present a pipeline for generating defurnished replicas of indoor spaces represented as textured meshes and corresponding multi-view panoramic images. To achieve this, we first segment and remove furniture from the mesh representation, extend planes, and fill holes, obtaining a simplified defurnished mesh (SDM). This SDM acts as an ``X-ray'' of the scene's underlying structure, guiding the defurnishing process. We extract Canny edges from depth and normal images rendered from the SDM. We then use these as a guide to remove the furniture from panorama images via ControlNet inpainting. This control signal ensures the availability of global geometric information that may be hidden from a particular panoramic view by the furniture being removed. The inpainted panoramas are used to texture the mesh. We show that our approach produces higher quality assets than methods that rely on neural radiance fields, which tend to produce blurry low-resolution images, or RGB-D inpainting, which is highly susceptible to hallucinations.

Volumetric (4D) performance capture is fundamental for AR/VR content generation. Whereas previous work in 4D performance capture has shown impressive results in studio settings, the technology is still far from being accessible to a typical consumer who, at best, might own a single RGBD sensor. Thus, in this work, we propose a method to synthesize free viewpoint renderings using a single RGBD camera. The key insight is to leverage previously seen "calibration" images of a given user to extrapolate what should be rendered in a novel viewpoint from the data available in the sensor. Given these past observations from multiple viewpoints, and the current RGBD image from a fixed view, we propose an end-to-end framework that fuses both these data sources to generate novel renderings of the performer. We demonstrate that the method can produce high fidelity images, and handle extreme changes in subject pose and camera viewpoints. We also show that the system generalizes to performers not seen in the training data. We run exhaustive experiments demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed semi-parametric model (i.e. calibration images available to the neural network) compared to other state of the art machine learned solutions. Further, we compare the method with more traditional pipelines that employ multi-view capture. We show that our framework is able to achieve compelling results, with substantially less infrastructure than previously required.