No Arabic abstract
Real-time rendering and animation of humans is a core function in games, movies, and telepresence applications. Existing methods have a number of drawbacks we aim to address with our work. Triangle meshes have difficulty modeling thin structures like hair, volumetric representations like Neural Volumes are too low-resolution given a reasonable memory budget, and high-resolution implicit representations like Neural Radiance Fields are too slow for use in real-time applications. We present Mixture of Volumetric Primitives (MVP), a representation for rendering dynamic 3D content that combines the completeness of volumetric representations with the efficiency of primitive-based rendering, e.g., point-based or mesh-based methods. Our approach achieves this by leveraging spatially shared computation with a deconvolutional architecture and by minimizing computation in empty regions of space with volumetric primitives that can move to cover only occupied regions. Our parameterization supports the integration of correspondence and tracking constraints, while being robust to areas where classical tracking fails, such as around thin or translucent structures and areas with large topological variability. MVP is a hybrid that generalizes both volumetric and primitive-based representations. Through a series of extensive experiments we demonstrate that it inherits the strengths of each, while avoiding many of their limitations. We also compare our approach to several state-of-the-art methods and demonstrate that MVP produces superior results in terms of quality and runtime performance.
Recent work has demonstrated that volumetric scene representations combined with differentiable volume rendering can enable photo-realistic rendering for challenging scenes that mesh reconstruction fails on. However, these methods entangle geometry and appearance in a black-box volume that cannot be edited. Instead, we present an approach that explicitly disentangles geometry--represented as a continuous 3D volume--from appearance--represented as a continuous 2D texture map. We achieve this by introducing a 3D-to-2D texture mapping (or surface parameterization) network into volumetric representations. We constrain this texture mapping network using an additional 2D-to-3D inverse mapping network and a novel cycle consistency loss to make 3D surface points map to 2D texture points that map back to the original 3D points. We demonstrate that this representation can be reconstructed using only multi-view image supervision and generates high-quality rendering results. More importantly, by separating geometry and texture, we allow users to edit appearance by simply editing 2D texture maps.
We present a technique for rendering point clouds using a neural network. Existing point rendering techniques either use splatting, or first reconstruct a surface mesh that can then be rendered. Both of these techniques require solving for global point normal orientation, which is a challenging problem on its own. Furthermore, splatting techniques result in holes and overlaps, whereas mesh reconstruction is particularly challenging, especially in the cases of thin surfaces and sheets. We cast the rendering problem as a conditional image-to-image translation problem. In our formulation, Z2P, i.e., depth-augmented point features as viewed from target camera view, are directly translated by a neural network to rendered images, conditioned on control variables (e.g., color, light). We avoid inevitable issues with splatting (i.e., holes and overlaps), and bypass solving the notoriously challenging surface reconstruction problem or estimating oriented normals. Yet, our approach results in a rendered image as if a surface mesh was reconstructed. We demonstrate that our framework produces a plausible image, and can effectively handle noise, non-uniform sampling, thin surfaces / sheets, and is fast.
The spatial anti-aliasing technique for line joins (intersections of the road segments) on vector maps is exclusively crucial to visual experience and system performance. Due to limitations of OpenGL API, one common practice to achieve the anti-aliased effect is splicing multiple triangles at varying scale levels to approximate the fan-shaped line joins. However, this approximation inevitably produces some unreality, and the system rendering performance is not optimal. To circumvent these drawbacks, in this paper, we propose a simple but efficient algorithm which uses only two triangles to substitute the multiple triangles approximation and then renders a realistic fan-shaped curve with alpha operation based on geometrical relation computing. Our experiment shows it has advantages of a realistic anti-aliasing effect, less memory cost, higher frame rate, and drawing line joins without overlapping rendering. Our proposed spatial anti-aliasing technique has been widely used in Internet Maps such as Tencent Mobile Maps and Tencent Automotive Maps.
We present multispectral rendering techniques for visualizing layered materials found in biological specimens. We are the first to use acquired data from the near-infrared and ultraviolet spectra for non-photorealistic rendering (NPR). Several plant and animal species are more comprehensively understood by multispectral analysis. However, traditional NPR techniques ignore unique information outside the visible spectrum. We introduce algorithms and principles for processing wavelength dependent surface normals and reflectance. Our registration and feature detection methods are used to formulate stylization effects not considered by current NPR methods including: Spectral Band Shading which isolates and emphasizes shape features at specific wavelengths at multiple scales. Experts in our user study demonstrate the effectiveness of our system for applications in the biological sciences.
We present a method for differentiable rendering of 3D surfaces that supports both explicit and implicit representations, provides derivatives at occlusion boundaries, and is fast and simple to implement. The method first samples the surface using non-differentiable rasterization, then applies differentiable, depth-aware point splatting to produce the final image. Our approach requires no differentiable meshing or rasterization steps, making it efficient for large 3D models and applicable to isosurfaces extracted from implicit surface definitions. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method for implicit-, mesh-, and parametric-surface-based inverse rendering and neural-network training applications. In particular, we show for the first time efficient, differentiable rendering of an isosurface extracted from a neural radiance field (NeRF), and demonstrate surface-based, rather than volume-based, rendering of a NeRF.