Yufeng Zhu
Mesh distortion optimization is a popular research topic and has wide range of applications in computer graphics, including geometry modeling, variational shape interpolation, UV parameterization, elastoplastic simulation, etc. In recent years, many solvers have been proposed to solve this nonlinear optimization efficiently, among which projected Newton has been shown to have best convergence rate and work well in both 2D and 3D applications. Traditional Newton approach suffers from ill conditioning and indefiniteness of local energy approximation. A crucial step in projected Newton is to fix this issue by projecting energy Hessian onto symmetric positive definite (SPD) cone so as to guarantee the search direction always pointing to decrease the energy locally. Such step relies on time consuming eigen decomposition of element Hessian, which has been addressed by several work before on how to obtain a conjugacy that is as diagonal as possible. In this report, we demonstrate an analytic form of Hessian eigen system for distortion energy defined using principal stretches, which is the most general representation. Compared with existing projected Newton diagonalization approaches, our formulation is more general as it doesn't require the energy to be representable by tensor invariants. In this report, we will only show the derivation for 3D and the extension to 2D case is straightforward.
Yufeng Zhu
The head-mounted display is a vital component of augmented reality, incorporating optics with complex display and see-through optical behavior. Computationally modeling these optical behaviors requires meeting three key criteria: accuracy, efficiency, and accessibility. In recent years, various approaches have been proposed to model display and see-through optics, which can broadly be classified into black-box and white-box models. However, both categories face significant limitations that hinder their adoption in commercial applications. To overcome these challenges, we leveraged prior knowledge of ray bundle properties outside the optical hardware and proposed a novel bundle-fit-based model. In this approach, the ray paths within the optics are treated as a black box, while a lightweight optimization problem is solved to fit the ray bundle outside the optics. This method effectively addresses the accuracy issues of black-box models and the accessibility challenges of white-box models. Although our model involves runtime optimization, this is typically not a concern, as it can use the solution from a previous query to initialize the optimization for the current query. We evaluated the performance of our proposed method through both simulations and experiments on real hardware, demonstrating its effectiveness.
Zhengqin Li, Dilin Wang, Ka Chen, Zhaoyang Lv, Thu Nguyen-Phuoc, Milim Lee, Jia-Bin Huang, Lei Xiao, Cheng Zhang, Yufeng Zhu, Carl S. Marshall, Yufeng Ren, Richard Newcombe, Zhao Dong
We present Large Inverse Rendering Model (LIRM), a transformer architecture that jointly reconstructs high-quality shape, materials, and radiance fields with view-dependent effects in less than a second. Our model builds upon the recent Large Reconstruction Models (LRMs) that achieve state-of-the-art sparse-view reconstruction quality. However, existing LRMs struggle to reconstruct unseen parts accurately and cannot recover glossy appearance or generate relightable 3D contents that can be consumed by standard Graphics engines. To address these limitations, we make three key technical contributions to build a more practical multi-view 3D reconstruction framework. First, we introduce an update model that allows us to progressively add more input views to improve our reconstruction. Second, we propose a hexa-plane neural SDF representation to better recover detailed textures, geometry and material parameters. Third, we develop a novel neural directional-embedding mechanism to handle view-dependent effects. Trained on a large-scale shape and material dataset with a tailored coarse-to-fine training scheme, our model achieves compelling results. It compares favorably to optimization-based dense-view inverse rendering methods in terms of geometry and relighting accuracy, while requiring only a fraction of the inference time.
Yufeng Zhu, Robert Bridson, Danny M. Kaufman
Optimizing deformation energies over a mesh, in two or three dimensions, is a common and critical problem in physical simulation and geometry processing. We present three new improvements to the state of the art: a barrier-aware line-search filter that cures blocked descent steps due to element barrier terms and so enables rapid progress; an energy proxy model that adaptively blends the Sobolev (inverse-Laplacian-processed) gradient and L-BFGS descent to gain the advantages of both, while avoiding L-BFGS's current limitations in geometry optimization tasks; and a characteristic gradient norm providing a robust and largely mesh- and energy-independent convergence criterion that avoids wrongful termination when algorithms temporarily slow their progress. Together these improvements form the basis for Blended Cured Quasi-Newton (BCQN), a new geometry optimization algorithm. Over a wide range of problems over all scales we show that BCQN is generally the fastest and most robust method available, making some previously intractable problems practical while offering up to an order of magnitude improvement in others.
Zhaoyang Lv, Maurizio Monge, Ka Chen, Yufeng Zhu, Michael Goesele, Jakob Engel, Zhao Dong, Richard Newcombe
In this paper, we investigate the challenges associated with using egocentric devices to photorealistic reconstruct the scene in high dynamic range. Existing methodologies typically assume using frame-rate 6DoF pose estimated from the device's visual-inertial odometry system, which may neglect crucial details necessary for pixel-accurate reconstruction. This study presents two significant findings. Firstly, in contrast to mainstream work treating RGB camera as global shutter frame-rate camera, we emphasize the importance of employing visual-inertial bundle adjustment (VIBA) to calibrate the precise timestamps and movement of the rolling shutter RGB sensing camera in a high frequency trajectory format, which ensures an accurate calibration of the physical properties of the rolling-shutter camera. Secondly, we incorporate a physical image formation model based into Gaussian Splatting, which effectively addresses the sensor characteristics, including the rolling-shutter effect of RGB cameras and the dynamic ranges measured by sensors. Our proposed formulation is applicable to the widely-used variants of Gaussian Splats representation. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation of our pipeline using the open-source Project Aria device under diverse indoor and outdoor lighting conditions, and further validate it on a Meta Quest3 device. Across all experiments, we observe a consistent visual enhancement of +1 dB in PSNR by incorporating VIBA, with an additional +1 dB achieved through our proposed image formation model. Our complete implementation, evaluation datasets, and recording profile are available at http://www.projectaria.com/photoreal-reconstruction/
Songyin Wu, Zhaoyang Lv, Yufeng Zhu, Duncan Frost, Zhengqin Li, Ling-Qi Yan, Carl Ren, Richard Newcombe, Zhao Dong
We propose an online 3D Gaussian-based dense mapping framework for photorealistic details reconstruction from a monocular image stream. Our approach addresses two key challenges in monocular online reconstruction: distributing Gaussians without relying on depth maps and ensuring both local and global consistency in the reconstructed maps. To achieve this, we introduce two key modules: the Hierarchical Gaussian Management Module for effective Gaussian distribution and the Global Consistency Optimization Module for maintaining alignment and coherence at all scales. In addition, we present the Multi-level Occupancy Hash Voxels (MOHV), a structure that regularizes Gaussians for capturing details across multiple levels of granularity. MOHV ensures accurate reconstruction of both fine and coarse geometries and textures, preserving intricate details while maintaining overall structural integrity. Compared to state-of-the-art RGB-only and even RGB-D methods, our framework achieves superior reconstruction quality with high computational efficiency. Moreover, it integrates seamlessly with various tracking systems, ensuring generality and scalability.
Zhao Dong, Ka Chen, Zhaoyang Lv, Hong-Xing Yu, Yunzhi Zhang, Cheng Zhang, Yufeng Zhu, Stephen Tian, Zhengqin Li, Geordie Moffatt, Sean Christofferson, James Fort, Xiaqing Pan, Mingfei Yan, Jiajun Wu, Carl Yuheng Ren, Richard Newcombe
We introduce the Digital Twin Catalog (DTC), a new large-scale photorealistic 3D object digital twin dataset. A digital twin of a 3D object is a highly detailed, virtually indistinguishable representation of a physical object, accurately capturing its shape, appearance, physical properties, and other attributes. Recent advances in neural-based 3D reconstruction and inverse rendering have significantly improved the quality of 3D object reconstruction. Despite these advancements, there remains a lack of a large-scale, digital twin-quality real-world dataset and benchmark that can quantitatively assess and compare the performance of different reconstruction methods, as well as improve reconstruction quality through training or fine-tuning. Moreover, to democratize 3D digital twin creation, it is essential to integrate creation techniques with next-generation egocentric computing platforms, such as AR glasses. Currently, there is no dataset available to evaluate 3D object reconstruction using egocentric captured images. To address these gaps, the DTC dataset features 2,000 scanned digital twin-quality 3D objects, along with image sequences captured under different lighting conditions using DSLR cameras and egocentric AR glasses. This dataset establishes the first comprehensive real-world evaluation benchmark for 3D digital twin creation tasks, offering a robust foundation for comparing and improving existing reconstruction methods. The DTC dataset is already released at https://www.projectaria.com/datasets/dtc/ and we will also make the baseline evaluations open-source.
Jie Wu, Yufeng Zhu, Lei Shen, Xuqing Lu
Recently developed large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Llama have demonstrated impressive abilities, and even surpass human-level performance in several tasks. Despite their success, the resource-intensive demands of these models, requiring significant computational power for both training and inference, limit their deployment to high-performance servers. Additionally, the extensive calculation requirements of the models often lead to increased latency in response times. With the increasing need for LLMs to operate efficiently on CPUs, research about lightweight models that are optimized for CPU inference has emerged. In this work, we introduce GEB-1.3B, a lightweight LLM trained on 550 billion tokens in both Chinese and English languages. We employ novel training techniques, including ROPE, Group-Query-Attention, and FlashAttention-2, to accelerate training while maintaining model performance. Additionally, we fine-tune the model using 10 million samples of instruction data to enhance alignment. GEB-1.3B exhibits outstanding performance on general benchmarks such as MMLU, C-Eval, and CMMLU, outperforming comparative models such as MindLLM-1.3B and TinyLLaMA-1.1B. Notably, the FP32 version of GEB-1.3B achieves commendable inference times on CPUs, with ongoing efforts to further enhance speed through advanced quantization techniques. The release of GEB-1.3B as an open-source model marks a significant contribution to the development of lightweight LLMs, promising to foster further research and innovation in the field.