17 accepted papers
We introduce a probabilistic splat-based radiance field framework that retains the fast rasterization and test-time efficiency of 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) while replacing heuristic primitive manipulation with gradient-based optimization of a volumetric probability density. Rather than relocating
Dense 4D reconstruction from unposed images remains a critical challenge, with current methods relying on slow test-time optimization or fragmented, task-specific feedforward models. We introduce UFO-4D, a unified feedforward framework to reconstruct a dense, explicit 4D representation from just a p…
Vision benefits from grouping pixels into objects and understanding their spatial relationships, both laterally and in depth. We capture this with a scene representation comprising an occlusion-ordered stack of "object layers," each containing an isolated and amodally-completed object. To infer this…
Perceiving the shape and material of an object from a single image is inherently ambiguous, especially when lighting is unknown and unconstrained. Despite this, humans can often disentangle shape and material, and when they are uncertain, they often move their head slightly or rotate the object to h…
Decomposing an object's appearance into representations of its materials and the surrounding illumination is difficult even when the object's 3D shape is known beforehand. This problem is especially challenging for diffuse objects: it is ill-conditioned because diffuse materials severely blur incomi…
Models for inferring monocular shape of surfaces with diffuse reflection---shape from shading---ought to produce distributions of outputs, because there are fundamental mathematical ambiguities of both continuous (e.g., bas-relief) and discrete (e.g., convex/concave) types that are also experienced…
Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) is a popular view synthesis technique that represents a scene as a continuous volumetric function, parameterized by multilayer perceptrons that provide the volume density and view-dependent emitted radiance at each location. While NeRF-based techniques excel at represen…
We introduce a bottom-up model for simultaneously finding many boundary elements in an image, including contours, corners and junctions. The model explains boundary shape in each small patch using a 'generalized M-junction' comprising M angles and a freely-moving vertex. Images are analyzed using no…
Under the conventional diffuse shading model with unknown directional lighting, the set of quadratic surface shapes that are consistent with the spatial derivatives of intensity at a single image point is a two-dimensional algebraic variety embedded in the five-dimensional space of quadratic shapes.…
We consider the shape from texture problem, where the input is a single image of a curved, textured surface, and the texture and shape are both a priori unknown. We formulate this task as a three-player game between a shape process, a texture process, and a discriminator. The discriminator adapts a…
Stereo occlusion boundaries are one-dimensional structures in the visual field that separate foreground regions of a scene that are visible to both eyes (binocular regions) from background regions of a scene that are visible to only one eye (monocular regions). Stereo occlusion boundaries often coin…
Scene motion, multiple reflections, and sensor noise introduce artifacts in the depth reconstruction performed by time-of-flight cameras. We propose a two-stage, deep-learning approach to address all of these sources of artifacts simultaneously. We also introduce FLAT, a synthetic dataset of 2000 To…
The focal track sensor is a monocular and computationally efficient depth sensor that is based on defocus controlled by a liquid membrane lens. It synchronizes small lens oscillations with a photosensor to produce real-time depth maps by means of differential defocus, and it couples these oscillatio…
Two types of information exist in a stereo pair: correlation (matching) and decorrelation (half-occlusion). Vision science has shown that both types of information are used in the visual cortex, and that people can perceive depth even when correlation cues are absent or very weak, a capability that…
In this paper we explore interactions between the appearance of an outdoor scene and the ambient temperature. By studying statistical correlations between image sequences from outdoor cameras and temperature measurements we identify two interesting interactions. First, semantically meaningful region…
We introduce a multi-scale framework for low-level vision, where the goal is estimating physical scene values from image data---such as depth from stereo image pairs. The framework uses a dense, overlapping set of image regions at multiple scales and a ``local model,'' such as a slanted-plane model…
Edges in images of translucent objects are very different from edges in images of opaque objects. The physical causes for these differences are hard to characterize analytically and are not well understood. This paper considers one class of translucency edges---those caused by a discontinuity in sur…