RI: NSF-BSF: Small: Reconstructing Shape, Lighting and Reflectance Properties of Indoor Scenes from Video

University Of Maryland, College Park, College Park MD

Investigators

Abstract

The goal of this project is to allow someone to use a video of an indoor scene, such as a room in a house, to reconstruct the scene. The reconstruction will contain all scene properties needed to enable images of the scene to be rendered from new viewpoints, with new lighting. To do this it is necessary to recover the depth and shape of every point in the scene. It is also necessary to describe how each point in the scene reflects light, and to recover the lighting in the scene. This technology will enable a wide range of applications in virtual and augmented reality. For example, it will assist in generating images that show what a room would look like if the furniture were changed, or to allow augmented reality teleconferencing, in which physically separated speakers appear to chat in the same room. The project will educate several graduate students. The investigators will also develop related undergraduate research projects, and projects for an AI summer camp for high school students. One reason such inverse rendering is challenging is the lack of labeled real data. The investigators will address this deficit by using multi-view input for training and solving jointly for all components of the scene. This will allow them to use a self-supervised multi-view photometric reconstruction loss, enforcing consistency across views. They will combine this real data with a large new dataset of highly realistic synthetic data. They will also develop a unified architecture that recovers pose between views and combines geometric and photometric information. This will allow the system to predict appearance changes across viewpoints and to determine whether measured appearance is consistent with recovered lighting and reflectance properties. They will also develop novel representations of lighting in scenes, and of the way that objects reflect this light that are compact and effective. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.