SynSin: End-to-end View Synthesis from a Single Image

Abstract

View synthesis allows for the generation of new views of a scene given one or more images. This is challenging; it requires comprehensively understanding the 3D scene from images. As a result, current methods typically use multiple images, train on ground-truth depth, or are limited to synthetic data. We propose a novel end-to-end model for this task using a single image at test time; it is trained on real images without any ground-truth 3D information. To this end, we introduce a novel differentiable point cloud renderer that is used to transform a latent 3D point cloud of features into the target view. The projected features are decoded by our refinement network to inpaint missing regions and generate a realistic output image. The 3D component inside of our generative model allows for interpretable manipulation of the latent feature space at test time, e.g. we can animate trajectories from a single image. Additionally, we can generate high resolution images and generalise to other input resolutions. We outperform baselines and prior work on the Matterport, Replica, and RealEstate10K datasets.