skip to main content
US FlagAn official website of the United States government
dot gov icon
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
https lock icon
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( lock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.


Title: Neural Fields as Learnable Kernels for 3D Reconstruction
We present Neural Kernel Fields: a novel method for reconstructing implicit 3D shapes based on a learned kernel ridge regression. Our technique achieves state-of-the-art results when reconstructing 3D objects and large scenes from sparse oriented points, and can reconstruct shape categories outside the training set with almost no drop in accuracy. The core insight of our approach is that kernel methods are extremely effective for reconstructing shapes when the chosen kernel has an appropriate inductive bias. We thus factor the problem of shape reconstruction into two parts: (1) a backbone neural network which learns kernel parameters from data, and (2) a kernel ridge regression that fits the input points on-the-fly by solving a simple positive definite linear system using the learned kernel. As a result of this factorization, our reconstruction gains the benefits of datadriven methods under sparse point density while maintaining interpolatory behavior, which converges to the ground truth shape as input sampling density increases. Our experiments demonstrate a strong generalization capability to objects outside the train-set category and scanned scenes. Source code and pretrained models are available at https:// nv-tlabs.github.io/nkf.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1901091 1845360
PAR ID:
10329470
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ; ; ; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
ISSN:
2332-564X
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. In this paper, we present a novel network‐based approach for reconstructing signed distance functions from fluid particles. The method uses a weighting kernel to transfer particles to a regular grid, which forms the input to a convolutional neural network. We propose a regression‐based regularization to reduce surface noise without penalizing high‐curvature features. The reconstruction exhibits improved spatial surface smoothness and temporal coherence compared with existing state of the art surface reconstruction methods. The method is insensitive to particle sampling density and robustly handles thin features, isolated particles, and sharp edges. 
    more » « less
  2. We present a method for reconstructing 3D shape of arbitrary Lambertian objects based on measurements by miniature, energy-efficient, low-cost single-photon cameras. These cameras, operating as time resolved image sensors, illuminate the scene with a very fast pulse of diffuse light and record the shape of that pulse as it returns back from the scene at a high temporal resolution. We propose to model this image formation process, account for its non-idealities, and adapt neural rendering to reconstruct 3D geometry from a set of spatially distributed sensors with known poses. We show that our approach can successfully recover complex 3D shapes from simulated data. We further demonstrate 3D object reconstruction from real-world captures, utilizing measurements from a commodity proximity sensor. Our work draws a connection between image-based modeling and active range scanning and is a step towards 3D vision with single-photon cameras. 
    more » « less
  3. • This paper studies the problem of structured 3D reconstruction using wireframes that consist of line segments and junctions, focusing on the computation of structured boundary geometries of scenes. Instead of leveraging matching-based solutions from 2D wireframes (or line segments) for 3D wireframe reconstruction as done in prior arts, we present NEAT, a rendering-distilling formulation using neural fields to represent 3D line segments with 2D observations, and bipartite matching for perceiving and dis- tilling of a sparse set of 3D global junctions. The proposed NEAT enjoys the joint optimization of the neural fields and the global junctions from scratch, using view-dependent 2D observations without precomputed cross-view feature matching. Comprehensive experiments on the DTU and BlendedMVS datasets demonstrate our NEAT’s superiority over state-of-the-art alternatives for 3D wireframe reconstruction. Moreover, the distilled 3D global junctions by NEAT, are a better initialization than SfM points, for the recently-emerged 3D Gaussian Splatting for high-fidelity novel view synthesis using about 20 times fewer initial 3D points. 
    more » « less
  4. Reconstructing the 3D shape of objects observed in a single image is a challenging task. Recent approaches rely on visual cues extracted from a given image learned from a deep net. In this work, we leverage recent advances in monocular scene understanding to incorporate an additional geometric cue of surface normals. For this, we proposed a novel optimization layer that encourages the face normals of the reconstructed shape to be aligned with estimated surface normals. We develop a computationally efficient conjugate-gradient-based method that avoids the computation of a high-dimensional sparse matrix. We show this framework to achieve compelling shape reconstruction results on the challenging Pix3D and ShapeNet datasets. 
    more » « less
  5. null (Ed.)
    We propose PSSNet, a network architecture for generating diverse plausible 3D reconstructions from a single 2.5D depth image. Existing methods tend to produce only small variations on a single shape, even when multiple shapes are consistent with an observation. To obtain diversity we alter a Variational Auto Encoder by providing a learned shape bounding box feature as side information during training. Since these features are known during training, we are able to add a supervised loss to the encoder and noiseless values to the decoder. To evaluate, we sample a set of completions from a network, construct a set of plausible shape matches for each test observation, and compare using our plausible diversity metric defined over sets of shapes. We perform experiments using Shapenet mugs and partially-occluded YCB objects and find that our method performs comparably in datasets with little ambiguity, and outperforms existing methods when many shapes plausibly fit an observed depth image. We demonstrate one use for PSSNet on a physical robot when grasping objects in occlusion and clutter. 
    more » « less