2023/01/18 by Felix Wimbauer, Nan Yang, Wimbauer, Felix +5 · 11 citations
Computer Science · Engineering · #3D Shape Modeling and Analysis #Advanced Vision and Imaging #Computer Graphics and Visualization Techniques #Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV) #FOS: Computer and information sciences
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2301.07668
openalex publication_date 2023/01/18 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Inferring a meaningful geometric scene representation from a single image is a fundamental problem in computer vision. Approaches based on traditional depth map prediction can only reason about areas that are visible in the image. Currently, neural radiance fields (NeRFs) can capture true 3D including color, but are too complex to be generated from a single image. As an alternative, we propose to predict implicit density fields. A density field maps every location in the frustum of the input image to volumetric density. By directly sampling color from the available views instead of storing color in the density field, our scene representation becomes significantly less complex compared to NeRFs, and a neural network can predict it in a single forward pass. The prediction network is trained through self-supervision from only video data. Our formulation allows volume rendering to perform both depth prediction and novel view synthesis. Through experiments, we show that our method is able to predict meaningful geometry for regions that are occluded in the input image. Additionally, we demonstrate the potential of our approach on three datasets for depth prediction and novel-view synthesis.