Michael Niemeyer

selected publications

Please see the publications tab or Google Scholar for a complete list.

1. 

   Occupancy Networks: Learning 3D Reconstruction in Function Space

   Mescheder, Lars, Oechsle, Michael, Niemeyer, Michael, Nowozin, Sebastian, and Geiger, Andreas

   In Proc. IEEE Conf. on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2019

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   With the advent of deep neural networks, learning-based approaches for 3D reconstruction have gained popularity. However, unlike for images, in 3D there is no canonical representation which is both computationally and memory efficient yet allows for representing high-resolution geometry of arbitrary topology. Many of the state-of-the-art learning-based 3D reconstruction approaches can hence only represent very coarse 3D geometry or are limited to a restricted domain. In this paper, we propose Occupancy Networks, a new representation for learning-based 3D reconstruction methods. Occupancy networks implicitly represent the 3D surface as the continuous decision boundary of a deep neural network classifier. In contrast to existing approaches, our representation encodes a description of the 3D output at infinite resolution without excessive memory footprint. We validate that our representation can efficiently encode 3D structure and can be inferred from various kinds of input. Our experiments demonstrate competitive results, both qualitatively and quantitatively, for the challenging tasks of 3D reconstruction from single images, noisy point clouds and coarse discrete voxel grids. We believe that occupancy networks will become a useful tool in a wide variety of learning-based 3D tasks.

2. 

   Occupancy Flow: 4D Reconstruction by Learning Particle Dynamics

   Niemeyer, Michael, Mescheder, Lars, Oechsle, Michael, and Geiger, Andreas

   In Proc. of the IEEE International Conf. on Computer Vision (ICCV) 2019

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   Deep learning based 3D reconstruction techniques have recently achieved impressive results. However, while state-of-the-art methods are able to output complex 3D geometry, it is not clear how to extend these results to time-varying topologies. Approaches treating each time step individually lack continuity and exhibit slow inference, while traditional 4D reconstruction methods often utilize a template model or discretize the 4D space at fixed resolution. In this work, we present Occupancy Flow, a novel spatio-temporal representation of time-varying 3D geometry with implicit correspondences. Towards this goal, we learn a temporally and spatially continuous vector field which assigns a motion vector to every point in space and time. In order to perform dense 4D reconstruction from images or sparse point clouds, we combine our method with a continuous 3D representation. Implicitly, our model yields correspondences over time, thus enabling fast inference while providing a sound physical description of the temporal dynamics. We show that our method can be used for interpolation and reconstruction tasks, and demonstrate the accuracy of the learned correspondences. We believe that Occupancy Flow is a promising new 4D representation which will be useful for a variety of spatio-temporal reconstruction tasks.

3. 

   Differentiable Volumetric Rendering: Learning Implicit 3D Representations without 3D Supervision

   Niemeyer, Michael, Mescheder, Lars, Oechsle, Michael, and Geiger, Andreas

   In Proc. IEEE Conf. on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2020

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   Learning-based 3D reconstruction methods have shown impressive results. However, most methods require 3D supervision which is often hard to obtain for real-world datasets. Recently, several works have proposed differentiable rendering techniques to train reconstruction models from RGB images. Unfortunately, these approaches are currently restricted to voxel- and mesh-based representations, suffering from discretization or low resolution. In this work, we propose a differentiable rendering formulation for implicit shape and texture representations. Implicit representations have recently gained popularity as they represent shape and texture continuously. Our key insight is that depth gradients can be derived analytically using the concept of implicit differentiation. This allows us to learn implicit shape and texture representations directly from RGB images. We experimentally show that our single-view reconstructions rival those learned with full 3D supervision. Moreover, we find that our method can be used for multi-view 3D reconstruction, directly resulting in watertight meshes.

4. 

   GRAF: Generative Radiance Fields for 3D-Aware Image Synthesis

   Schwarz, Katja, Liao, Yiyi, Niemeyer, Michael, and Geiger, Andreas

   In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) 2020

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   While 2D generative adversarial networks have enabled high-resolution image synthesis, they largely lack an understanding of the 3D world and the image formation process. Thus, they do not provide precise control over camera viewpoint or object pose. To address this problem, several recent approaches leverage intermediate voxel-based representations in combination with differentiable rendering. However, existing methods either produce low image resolution or fall short in disentangling camera and scene properties, eg, the object identity may vary with the viewpoint. In this paper, we propose a generative model for radiance fields which have recently proven successful for novel view synthesis of a single scene. In contrast to voxel-based representations, radiance fields are not confined to a coarse discretization of the 3D space, yet allow for disentangling camera and scene properties while degrading gracefully in the presence of reconstruction ambiguity. By introducing a multi-scale patch-based discriminator, we demonstrate synthesis of high-resolution images while training our model from unposed 2D images alone. We systematically analyze our approach on several challenging synthetic and real-world datasets. Our experiments reveal that radiance fields are a powerful representation for generative image synthesis, leading to 3D consistent models that render with high fidelity.

5. 

   GIRAFFE: Representing Scenes as Compositional Generative Neural Feature Fields

   Niemeyer, Michael, and Geiger, Andreas

   In Proc. IEEE Conf. on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2021

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   Deep generative models allow for photorealistic image synthesis at high resolutions. But for many applications, this is not enough: content creation also needs to be controllable. While several recent works investigate how to disentangle underlying factors of variation in the data, most of them operate in 2D and hence ignore that our world is three-dimensional. Further, only few works consider the compositional nature of scenes. Our key hypothesis is that incorporating a compositional 3D scene representation into the generative model leads to more controllable image synthesis. Representing scenes as compositional generative neural feature fields allows us to disentangle one or multiple objects from the background as well as individual objects’ shapes and appearances while learning from unstructured and unposed image collections without any additional supervision. Combining this scene representation with a neural rendering pipeline yields a fast and realistic image synthesis model. As evidenced by our experiments, our model is able to disentangle individual objects and allows for translating and rotating them in the scene as well as changing the camera pose.

6. 

   RegNeRF: Regularizing Neural Radiance Fields for View Synthesis from Sparse Inputs

   Niemeyer, Michael, Barron, Jonathan T., Mildenhall, Ben, Sajjadi, Mehdi S. M., Geiger, Andreas, and Radwan, Noha

   In Proc. IEEE Conf. on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2022

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   Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) have emerged as a powerful representation for the task of novel view synthesis due to their simplicity and state-of-the-art performance. Though NeRF can produce photorealistic renderings of unseen viewpoints when many input views are available, its performance drops significantly when this number is reduced. We observe that the majority of artifacts in sparse input scenarios are caused by errors in the estimated scene geometry, and by divergent behavior at the start of training. We address this by regularizing the geometry and appearance of patches rendered from unobserved viewpoints, and annealing the ray sampling space during training. We additionally use a normalizing flow model to regularize the color of unobserved viewpoints. Our model outperforms not only other methods that optimize over a single scene, but in many cases also conditional models that are extensively pre-trained on large multi-view datasets.