Edgar Tretschk

Bio: Edgar Tretschk is an academic researcher from Max Planck Society. The author has contributed to research in topics: Polygon mesh & Autoencoder. The author has an hindex of 7, co-authored 13 publications receiving 156 citations.

Advances in neural rendering

Abstract: Loss functions for Neural Rendering Jun-Yan Zhu

Non-Rigid Neural Radiance Fields: Reconstruction and Novel View Synthesis of a Dynamic Scene From Monocular Video.

Abstract: We present Non-Rigid Neural Radiance Fields (NR-NeRF), a reconstruction and novel view synthesis approach for general non-rigid dynamic scenes. Our approach takes RGB images of a dynamic scene as input (e.g., from a monocular video recording), and creates a high-quality space-time geometry and appearance representation. We show that a single handheld consumer-grade camera is sufficient to synthesize sophisticated renderings of a dynamic scene from novel virtual camera views, e.g. a `bullet-time' video effect. NR-NeRF disentangles the dynamic scene into a canonical volume and its deformation. Scene deformation is implemented as ray bending, where straight rays are deformed non-rigidly. We also propose a novel rigidity network to better constrain rigid regions of the scene, leading to more stable results. The ray bending and rigidity network are trained without explicit supervision. Our formulation enables dense correspondence estimation across views and time, and compelling video editing applications such as motion exaggeration. Our code will be open sourced.

PatchNets: Patch-Based Generalizable Deep Implicit 3D Shape Representations

Abstract: Implicit surface representations, such as signed-distance functions, combined with deep learning have led to impressive models which can represent detailed shapes of objects with arbitrary topology. Since a continuous function is learned, the reconstructions can also be extracted at any arbitrary resolution. However, large datasets such as ShapeNet are required to train such models.

Neural dense non-rigid structure from motion with latent space constraints

Abstract: We introduce the first dense neural non-rigid structure from motion (N-NRSfM) approach, which can be trained end-to-end in an unsupervised manner from 2D point tracks. Compared to the competing methods, our combination of loss functions is fully-differentiable and can be readily integrated into deep-learning systems. We formulate the deformation model by an auto-decoder and impose subspace constraints on the recovered latent space function in a frequency domain. Thanks to the state recurrence cue, we classify the reconstructed non-rigid surfaces based on their similarity and recover the period of the input sequence. Our N-NRSfM approach achieves competitive accuracy on widely-used benchmark sequences and high visual quality on various real videos. Apart from being a standalone technique, our method enables multiple applications including shape compression, completion and interpolation, among others. Combined with an encoder trained directly on 2D images, we perform scenario-specific monocular 3D shape reconstruction at interactive frame rates. To facilitate the reproducibility of the results and boost the new research direction, we open-source our code and provide trained models for research purposes (http://gvv.mpi-inf.mpg.de/projects/Neural_NRSfM/).

Sequential Attacks on Agents for Long-Term Adversarial Goals

Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) has advanced greatly in the past few years with the employment of effective deep neural networks (DNNs) on the policy networks. With the great effectiveness came serious vulnerability issues with DNNs that small adversarial perturbations on the input can change the output of the network. Several works have pointed out that learned agents with a DNN policy network can be manipulated against achieving the original task through a sequence of small perturbations on the input states. In this paper, we demonstrate furthermore that it is also possible to impose an arbitrary adversarial reward on the victim policy network through a sequence of attacks. Our method involves the latest adversarial attack technique, Adversarial Transformer Network (ATN), that learns to generate the attack and is easy to integrate into the policy network. As a result of our attack, the victim agent is misguided to optimise for the adversarial reward over time. Our results expose serious security threats for RL applications in safety-critical systems including drones, medical analysis, and self-driving cars.

Neural Geometric Level of Detail: Real-time Rendering with Implicit 3D Shapes

Abstract: Neural signed distance functions (SDFs) are emerging as an effective representation for 3D shapes. State-of-the-art methods typically encode the SDF with a large, fixed-size neural network to approximate complex shapes with implicit surfaces. Rendering with these large networks is, however, computationally expensive since it requires many forward passes through the network for every pixel, making these representations impractical for real-time graphics. We introduce an efficient neural representation that, for the first time, enables real-time rendering of high-fidelity neural SDFs, while achieving state-of-the-art geometry reconstruction quality. We represent implicit surfaces using an octree-based feature volume which adaptively fits shapes with multiple discrete levels of detail (LODs), and enables continuous LOD with SDF interpolation. We further develop an efficient algorithm to directly render our novel neural SDF representation in real-time by querying only the necessary LODs with sparse octree traversal. We show that our representation is 2–3 orders of magnitude more efficient in terms of rendering speed compared to previous works. Furthermore, it produces state-of-the-art reconstruction quality for complex shapes under both 3D geometric and 2D image-space metrics.

D-NeRF: Neural Radiance Fields for Dynamic Scenes

Abstract: Neural rendering techniques combining machine learning with geometric reasoning have arisen as one of the most promising approaches for synthesizing novel views of a scene from a sparse set of images. Among these, stands out the Neural radiance fields (NeRF) [31], which trains a deep network to map 5D input coordinates (representing spatial location and viewing direction) into a volume density and view-dependent emitted radiance. However, despite achieving an unprecedented level of photorealism on the generated images, NeRF is only applicable to static scenes, where the same spatial location can be queried from different images. In this paper we introduce D-NeRF, a method that extends neural radiance fields to a dynamic domain, allowing to reconstruct and render novel images of objects under rigid and non-rigid motions from a single camera moving around the scene. For this purpose we consider time as an additional input to the system, and split the learning process in two main stages: one that encodes the scene into a canonical space and another that maps this canonical representation into the deformed scene at a particular time. Both mappings are simultaneously learned using fully-connected networks. Once the networks are trained, D-NeRF can render novel images, controlling both the camera view and the time variable, and thus, the object movement. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on scenes with objects under rigid, articulated and non-rigid motions. Code, model weights and the dynamic scenes dataset will be available at [1].

A Survey of Safety and Trustworthiness of Deep Neural Networks: Verification, Testing, Adversarial Attack and Defence, and Interpretability

Abstract: In the past few years, significant progress has been made on deep neural networks (DNNs) in achieving human-level performance on several long-standing tasks. With the broader deployment of DNNs on various applications, the concerns over their safety and trustworthiness have been raised in public, especially after the widely reported fatal incidents involving self-driving cars. Research to address these concerns is particularly active, with a significant number of papers released in the past few years. This survey paper conducts a review of the current research effort into making DNNs safe and trustworthy, by focusing on four aspects: verification, testing, adversarial attack and defence, and interpretability. In total, we survey 202 papers, most of which were published after 2017.

Advances in neural rendering

Abstract: Loss functions for Neural Rendering Jun-Yan Zhu