Differentiable rendering techniques have recently shown promising results for free-viewpoint video synthesis of characters. However, such methods, either Gaussian Splatting or neural implicit rendering, typically necessitate per-subject optimization which does not meet the requirement of real-time rendering in an interactive application. We propose a generalizable Gaussian Splatting approach for high-resolution image rendering under a sparse-view camera setting. To this end, we introduce Gaussian parameter maps defined on the source views and directly regress Gaussian properties for instant novel view synthesis without any fine-tuning or optimization. We train our Gaussian parameter regression module on human-only data or human-scene data, jointly with a depth estimation module to lift 2D parameter maps to 3D space. The proposed framework is fully differentiable with both depth and rendering supervision or with only rendering supervision. We further introduce a regularization term and an epipolar attention mechanism to preserve geometry consistency between two source views, especially when neglecting depth supervision. Experiments on several datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods while achieving an exceeding rendering speed. Our project page is available at https://yaourtb.github.io/GPS-Gaussian+.

In this paper, we present a low-budget and high-authenticity bidirectional telepresence system, Tele-Aloha, targeting peer-to-peer communication scenarios. Compared to previous systems, Tele-Aloha utilizes only four sparse RGB cameras, one consumer-grade GPU, and one autostereoscopic screen to achieve high-resolution (2048x2048), real-time (30 fps), low-latency (less than 150ms) and robust distant communication. As the core of Tele-Aloha, we propose an efficient novel view synthesis algorithm for upper-body. Firstly, we design a cascaded disparity estimator for obtaining a robust geometry cue. Additionally a neural rasterizer via Gaussian Splatting is introduced to project latent features onto target view and to decode them into a reduced resolution. Further, given the high-quality captured data, we leverage weighted blending mechanism to refine the decoded image into the final resolution of 2K. Exploiting world-leading autostereoscopic display and low-latency iris tracking, users are able to experience a strong three-dimensional sense even without any wearable head-mounted display device. Altogether, our telepresence system demonstrates the sense of co-presence in real-life experiments, inspiring the next generation of communication.

In contrast to images taken on land scenes, images taken over water are more prone to degradation due to the influence of the haze. However, existing image dehazing methods are mainly developed for land-scene images and perform poorly when applied to overwater images. To address this problem, we collect the first overwater image dehazing dataset and propose a Generative Adversial Network (GAN)-based method called OverWater Image Dehazing GAN (OWI-DehazeGAN). Due to the difficulties of collecting paired hazy and clean images, the dataset contains unpaired hazy and clean images taken over water. The proposed OWI-DehazeGAN is composed of an encoder–decoder framework, supervised by a forward-backward translation consistency loss for self-supervision and a perceptual loss for content preservation. In addition to qualitative evaluation, we design an image quality assessment neural network to rank the dehazed images. Experimental results on both real and synthetic test data demonstrate that the proposed method performs superiorly against several state-of-the-art land dehazing methods. Compared with the state-of-the-art, our method gains a significant improvement by 1.94% for SSIM, 7.13% for PSNR and 4.00% for CIEDE2000 on the synthetic test dataset.

Image-based virtual try-on aims to seamlessly fit in-shop clothing to a person image while maintaining pose consistency. Existing methods commonly employ the thin plate spline (TPS) transformation or appearance flow to deform in-shop clothing for aligning with the person's body. Despite their promising performance, these methods often lack precise control over fine details, leading to inconsistencies in shape between clothing and the person's body as well as distortions in exposed limb regions. To tackle these challenges, we propose a novel shape-guided clothing warping method for virtual try-on, dubbed SCW-VTON, which incorporates global shape constraints and additional limb textures to enhance the realism and consistency of the warped clothing and try-on results. To integrate global shape constraints for clothing warping, we devise a dual-path clothing warping module comprising a shape path and a flow path. The former path captures the clothing shape aligned with the person's body, while the latter path leverages the mapping between the pre- and post-deformation of the clothing shape to guide the estimation of appearance flow. Furthermore, to alleviate distortions in limb regions of try-on results, we integrate detailed limb guidance by developing a limb reconstruction network based on masked image modeling. Through the utilization of SCW-VTON, we are able to generate try-on results with enhanced clothing shape consistency and precise control over details. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our approach over state-of-the-art methods both qualitatively and quantitatively.