Iterative Geometry-Aware Cross Guidance Network for Stereo Image Inpainting

Currently, single image inpainting has achieved promising results based on deep convolutional neural networks. However, inpainting on stereo images with missing regions has not been explored thoroughly, which is also a significant but different problem. One crucial requirement for stereo image inpainting is stereo consistency. To achieve it, we propose an Iterative Geometry-Aware Cross Guidance Network (IGGNet). The IGGNet contains two key ingredients, i.e., a Geometry-Aware Attention (GAA) module and an Iterative Cross Guidance (ICG) strategy. The GAA module relies on the epipolar geometry cues and learns the geometry-aware guidance from one view to another, which is beneficial to make the corresponding regions in two views consistent. However, learning guidance from co-existing missing regions is challenging. To address this issue, the ICG strategy is proposed, which can alternately narrow down the missing regions of the two views in an iterative manner. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed network outperforms the latest stereo image inpainting model and state-of-the-art single image inpainting models.Comment: Accepted by IJCAI 202

Enhancing Perception and Immersion in Pre-Captured Environments through Learning-Based Eye Height Adaptation

Pre-captured immersive environments using omnidirectional cameras provide a wide range of virtual reality applications. Previous research has shown that manipulating the eye height in egocentric virtual environments can significantly affect distance perception and immersion. However, the influence of eye height in pre-captured real environments has received less attention due to the difficulty of altering the perspective after finishing the capture process. To explore this influence, we first propose a pilot study that captures real environments with multiple eye heights and asks participants to judge the egocentric distances and immersion. If a significant influence is confirmed, an effective image-based approach to adapt pre-captured real-world environments to the user's eye height would be desirable. Motivated by the study, we propose a learning-based approach for synthesizing novel views for omnidirectional images with altered eye heights. This approach employs a multitask architecture that learns depth and semantic segmentation in two formats, and generates high-quality depth and semantic segmentation to facilitate the inpainting stage. With the improved omnidirectional-aware layered depth image, our approach synthesizes natural and realistic visuals for eye height adaptation. Quantitative and qualitative evaluation shows favorable results against state-of-the-art methods, and an extensive user study verifies improved perception and immersion for pre-captured real-world environments.Comment: 10 pages, 13 figures, 3 tables, submitted to ISMAR 202

Motion parallax for 360° RGBD video

We present a method for adding parallax and real-time playback of 360° videos in Virtual Reality headsets. In current video players, the playback does not respond to translational head movement, which reduces the feeling of immersion, and causes motion sickness for some viewers. Given a 360° video and its corresponding depth (provided by current stereo 360° stitching algorithms), a naive image-based rendering approach would use the depth to generate a 3D mesh around the viewer, then translate it appropriately as the viewer moves their head. However, this approach breaks at depth discontinuities, showing visible distortions, whereas cutting the mesh at such discontinuities leads to ragged silhouettes and holes at disocclusions. We address these issues by improving the given initial depth map to yield cleaner, more natural silhouettes. We rely on a three-layer scene representation, made up of a foreground layer and two static background layers, to handle disocclusions by propagating information from multiple frames for the first background layer, and then inpainting for the second one. Our system works with input from many of today''s most popular 360° stereo capture devices (e.g., Yi Halo or GoPro Odyssey), and works well even if the original video does not provide depth information. Our user studies confirm that our method provides a more compelling viewing experience than without parallax, increasing immersion while reducing discomfort and nausea

Single-image Tomography: 3D Volumes from 2D Cranial X-Rays

As many different 3D volumes could produce the same 2D x-ray image, inverting this process is challenging. We show that recent deep learning-based convolutional neural networks can solve this task. As the main challenge in learning is the sheer amount of data created when extending the 2D image into a 3D volume, we suggest firstly to learn a coarse, fixed-resolution volume which is then fused in a second step with the input x-ray into a high-resolution volume. To train and validate our approach we introduce a new dataset that comprises of close to half a million computer-simulated 2D x-ray images of 3D volumes scanned from 175 mammalian species. Applications of our approach include stereoscopic rendering of legacy x-ray images, re-rendering of x-rays including changes of illumination, view pose or geometry. Our evaluation includes comparison to previous tomography work, previous learning methods using our data, a user study and application to a set of real x-rays

Detecting and removing visual distractors for video aesthetic enhancement

Personal videos often contain visual distractors, which are objects that are accidentally captured that can distract viewers from focusing on the main subjects. We propose a method to automatically detect and localize these distractors through learning from a manually labeled dataset. To achieve spatially and temporally coherent detection, we propose extracting features at the Temporal-Superpixel (TSP) level using a traditional SVM-based learning framework. We also experiment with end-to-end learning using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), which achieves slightly higher performance than other methods. The classification result is further refined in a post-processing step based on graph-cut optimization. Experimental results show that our method achieves an accuracy of 81% and a recall of 86%. We demonstrate several ways of removing the detected distractors to improve the video quality, including video hole filling; video frame replacement; and camera path re-planning. The user study results show that our method can significantly improve the aesthetic quality of videos

A New Dataset and Transformer for Stereoscopic Video Super-Resolution

Stereo video super-resolution (SVSR) aims to enhance the spatial resolution of the low-resolution video by reconstructing the high-resolution video. The key challenges in SVSR are preserving the stereo-consistency and temporal-consistency, without which viewers may experience 3D fatigue. There are several notable works on stereoscopic image super-resolution, but there is little research on stereo video super-resolution. In this paper, we propose a novel Transformer-based model for SVSR, namely Trans-SVSR. Trans-SVSR comprises two key novel components: a spatio-temporal convolutional self-attention layer and an optical flow-based feed-forward layer that discovers the correlation across different video frames and aligns the features. The parallax attention mechanism (PAM) that uses the cross-view information to consider the significant disparities is used to fuse the stereo views. Due to the lack of a benchmark dataset suitable for the SVSR task, we collected a new stereoscopic video dataset, SVSR-Set, containing 71 full high-definition (HD) stereo videos captured using a professional stereo camera. Extensive experiments on the collected dataset, along with two other datasets, demonstrate that the Trans-SVSR can achieve competitive performance compared to the state-of-the-art methods. Project code and additional results are available at https://github.com/H-deep/Trans-SVSR/Comment: Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR 2022