Geometry-Aware Neural Rendering

• DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.1911.04554
• Publication Date: 2019-01-01
• Authors: Tobin, Josh; Robotics, OpenAI; Abbeel, Pieter
• Keywords: FOS: Computer and information sciences; Computer Science - Machine Learning; Statistics - Machine Learning; Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Computer Science - Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition; 0202 electrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineering; Machine Learning (stat.ML); 02 engineering and technology; Machine Learning (cs.LG)

16 pages, 13 figures<br/>Understanding the 3-dimensional structure of the world is a core challenge in computer vision and robotics. Neural rendering approaches learn an implicit 3D model by predicting what a camera would see from an arbitrary viewpoint. We extend existing neural rendering to more complex, higher dimensional scenes than previously possible. We propose Epipolar Cross Attention (ECA), an attention mechanism that leverages the geometry of the scene to perform efficient non-local operations, requiring only $O(n)$ comparisons per spatial dimension instead of $O(n^2)$. We introduce three new simulated datasets inspired by real-world robotics and demonstrate that ECA significantly improves the quantitative and qualitative performance of Generative Query Networks (GQN).<br/>