We propose an alternative generator architecture for generative adversarial networks, borrowing from style transfer literature. The new architecture leads to an automatically learned, unsupervised separation of high-level attributes (e.g., pose and identity when trained on human faces) and stochastic variation in the generated images (e.g., freckles, hair), and it enables intuitive, scale-specific control of the synthesis. The new generator improves the state-of-the-art in terms of traditional distribution quality metrics, leads to demonstrably better interpolation properties, and also better disentangles the latent factors of variation. To quantify interpolation quality and disentanglement, we propose two new, automated methods that are applicable to any generator architecture. Finally, we introduce a new, highly varied and high-quality dataset of human faces.
We investigate conditional adversarial networks as a general-purpose solution to image-to-image translation problems. These networks not only learn the mapping from input image to output image, but also learn a loss function to train this mapping. This makes it possible to apply the same generic approach to problems that traditionally would require very different loss formulations. We demonstrate that this approach is effective at synthesizing photos from label maps, reconstructing objects from edge maps, and colorizing images, among other tasks. Indeed, since the release of the pix2pix software associated with this paper, a large number of internet users (many of them artists) have posted their own experiments with our system, further demonstrating its wide applicability and ease of adoption without the need for parameter tweaking. As a community, we no longer hand-engineer our mapping functions, and this work suggests we can achieve reasonable results without hand-engineering our loss functions either.
Related Works
Structured losses for image modeling; Conditional GANs
Image-to-image translation (I2I) aims to transfer images from a source domain to a target domain while preserving the content representations. I2I has drawn increasing attention and made tremendous progress in recent years because of its wide range of applications in many computer vision and image processing problems, such as image synthesis, segmentation, style transfer, restoration, and pose estimation. In this paper, we provide an overview of the I2I works developed in recent years. We will analyze the key techniques of the existing I2I works and clarify the main progress the community has made. Additionally, we will elaborate on the effect of I2I on the research and industry community and point out remaining challenges in related fields.
To cope with the richness in appearance variation found in real-world data under natural illumination, we propose to synthesize training data capturing these variations for material classification. Using synthetic training data created from separately acquired material and illumination characteristics allows to overcome the problems of existing material databases which only include a tiny fraction of the possible real-world conditions under controlled laboratory environments. However, it is essential to utilize a representation for material appearance which preserves fine details in the reflectance behavior of the digitized materials. As BRDFs are not sufficient for many materials due to the lack of modeling mesoscopic effects, we present a high-quality BTF database with 22,801 densely measured view-light configurations including surface geometry measurements for each of the 84 measured material samples. This representation is used to generate a database of synthesized images depicting the materials under different view-light conditions with their characteristic surface geometry using image-based lighting to simulate the complexity of real-world scenarios. We demonstrate that our synthesized data allows classifying materials under complex real-world scenarios.
Realistic rendering using discrete reflectance measurements is challenging, because arbitrary directions on the light and view hemispheres are queried at render time, incurring large memory requirements and the need for interpolation. This explains the desire for compact and continuously parametrized models akin to analytic BRDFs; however, fitting BRDF parameters to complex data such as BTF texels can prove challenging, as models tend to describe restricted function spaces that cannot encompass real-world behavior. Recent advances in this area have increasingly relied on neural representations that are trained to reproduce acquired reflectance data. The associated training process is extremely costly and must typically be repeated for each material. Inspired by autoencoders, we propose a unified network architecture that is trained on a variety of materials, and which projects reflectance measurements to a shared latent parameter space. Similarly to SVBRDF fitting, real-world materials are represented by parameter maps, and the decoder network is analog to the analytic BRDF expression (also parametrized on light and view directions for practical rendering application). With this approach, encoding and decoding materials becomes a simple matter of evaluating the network. We train and validate on BTF datasets of the University of Bonn, but there are no prerequisites on either the number of angular reflectance samples, or the sample positions. Additionally, we show that the latent space is well-behaved and can be sampled from, for applications such as mipmapping and texture synthesis.
Related Works
Fitting parametric models; Latent spaces of appearance; Neural encoding of appearance
The modern computer graphics pipeline can synthesize images at remarkable visual quality; however, it requires well-defined, high-quality 3D content as input. In this work, we explore the use of imperfect 3D content, for instance, obtained from photo-metric reconstructions with noisy and incomplete surface geometry, while still aiming to produce photo-realistic (re-)renderings. To address this challenging problem, we introduce Deferred Neural Rendering, a new paradigm for image synthesis that combines the traditional graphics pipeline with learnable components. Specifically, we propose Neural Textures, which are learned feature maps that are trained as part of the scene capture process. Similar to traditional textures, neural textures are stored as maps on top of 3D mesh proxies; however, the high-dimensional feature maps contain significantly more information, which can be interpreted by our new deferred neural rendering pipeline. Both neural textures and deferred neural renderer are trained end-to-end, enabling us to synthesize photo-realistic images even when the original 3D content was imperfect. In contrast to traditional, black-box 2D generative neural networks, our 3D representation gives us explicit control over the generated output, and allows for a wide range of application domains. For instance, we can synthesize temporally-consistent video re-renderings of recorded 3D scenes as our representation is inherently embedded in 3D space. This way, neural textures can be utilized to coherently re-render or manipulate existing video content in both static and dynamic environments at real-time rates. We show the effectiveness of our approach in several experiments on novel view synthesis, scene editing, and facial reenactment, and compare to state-of-the-art approaches that leverage the standard graphics pipeline as well as conventional generative neural networks.
Related Works
Novel-view Synthesis from RGB-D Scans; Image-based Rendering; Light-?eld Rendering; Image Synthesis using Neural Networks; View Synthesis using Neural Networks
We propose a deep inverse rendering framework for indoor scenes. From a single RGB image of an arbitrary indoor scene, we create a complete scene reconstruction, estimating shape, spatially-varying lighting, and spatially-varying, non-Lambertian surface reflectance. To train this network, we augment the SUNCG indoor scene dataset with real-world materials and render them with a fast, high-quality, physically-based GPU renderer to create a large-scale, photorealistic indoor dataset. Our inverse rendering network incorporates physical insights -- including a spatially-varying spherical Gaussian lighting representation, a differentiable rendering layer to model scene appearance, a cascade structure to iteratively refine the predictions and a bilateral solver for refinement -- allowing us to jointly reason about shape, lighting, and reflectance. Experiments show that our framework outperforms previous methods for estimating individual scene components, which also enables various novel applications for augmented reality, such as photorealistic object insertion and material editing. Code and data will be made publicly available.
Related Works
Single objects; Large-scale scenes; Datasets; Differentiable rendering
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// if coffee is not existed, enable Ultimate floating widgets plugin to create one
// https://docs.widgetbot.io/embed/crate/options
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