Real-time High-resolution View Synthesis of Complex Scenes with Explicit 3D Visibility Reasoning (2402.12886v1)

Abstract: 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.

• The paper introduces an explicit 3D visibility reasoning framework that significantly improves occlusion handling in both dynamic and static scenes.
• It integrates geometry and texture volumes to reconstruct scene structure and aggregate multi-view features, reducing reliance on computationally intensive MLP queries.
• The method achieves real-time, high-resolution rendering (up to 1920×1080) with competitive quality on benchmarks, fostering immersive applications.

Real-time High-resolution View Synthesis of Complex Scenes with Explicit 3D Visibility Reasoning

Introduction

The advancement of novel-view rendering has been a pivotal area of research in computer graphics, focusing on enabling immersive user experiences akin to real-world navigation. Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) have emerged as a leading approach, renowned for delivering photo-realistic results via MLP-based 3D scene representations. However, traditional NeRF methods require separate network training for each scene, posing challenges for dynamic scenes and high-resolution rendering with real-time constraints.

In "Real-time High-resolution View Synthesis of Complex Scenes with Explicit 3D Visibility Reasoning" (2402.12886), the authors propose a novel framework to address these constraints, offering real-time rendering of high-resolution images from sparse views of both static and dynamic scenes. The key innovation lies in explicit 3D visibility reasoning, which significantly improves visibility estimation and rendering quality, particularly in occluded regions.

Methodology

The proposed method distinguishes itself through several core components:

1. Explicit 3D Visibility Reasoning: The method efficiently estimates the visibility of sampled 3D points using an explicitly constructed volume. Unlike implicit methods relying on MLPs, this approach provides global consistency and fits seamlessly into the volume rendering pipeline.
2. Volume and Feature Integration: The pipeline is structured around discretized geometry volumes and continuous texture volumes. Geometry volumes facilitate initial geometry reconstruction, which informs visibility reasoning. In contrast, texture volumes use these insights for enhanced multi-view feature aggregation and rendering.
3. Ray Integration and Rendering: By integrating rays within the feature space and employing a 2D convolutional neural network (CNN) for final rendering, the approach bypasses computationally intensive MLP queries. This design choice markedly reduces rendering times while enhancing output quality.

   Figure 1: Our method generally shows competitive rendering results with the baselines, with better results in occluded areas due to explicit 3D visibility reasoning.

Results

The experimental evaluation demonstrates that the method outperforms traditional approaches in rendering quality and speed, particularly for complex scenes with significant occlusions:

• Static Scenes: On datasets such as DTU and Real Forward-facing, the method achieves competitive or superior performance with only brief fine-tuning, showcasing robustness across varied textures and illuminations.
• Dynamic Scenes: The explicit visibility reasoning enables superior handling of dynamic scenes with severe occlusions, as evidenced by comparative results against methods like ENeRF and NeuRay. The rendering speed remains real-time, even at high resolutions up to 1920×1080.

  Figure 2: Our method demonstrates high-quality rendering in dynamic scenes, especially on occluded edges and areas, outperforming methods using average pooling operations.

Implications and Future Directions

The research introduces significant advancements in rendering complex, dynamic scenes with high fidelity and reduced computational costs. Practical applications span VR environments, real-time visualization in media production, and advanced simulations requiring rapid scene adaptability.

Future research may explore further optimizations in volume integration techniques and explore adaptive learning strategies under varied input conditions. Extending support for even larger-scale dynamic scenes with more complex motion patterns remains an intriguing challenge.

Conclusion

The proposed method revolutionizes high-resolution view synthesis by integrating explicit 3D visibility reasoning into the rendering pipeline. This advancement not only enhances rendering quality but also significantly accelerates processing, paving the way for immersive real-time applications across diverse technical fields. By addressing occlusion challenges effectively, the framework sets new benchmarks for future innovations in computer graphics and visualization technologies.