LiveView: Dynamic Target-Centered MPI for View Synthesis

Abstract: Existing Multi-Plane Image (MPI) based view-synthesis methods generate an MPI aligned with the input view using a fixed number of planes in one forward pass. These methods produce fast, high-quality rendering of novel views, but rely on slow and computationally expensive MPI generation methods unsuitable for real-time applications. In addition, most MPI techniques use fixed depth/disparity planes which cannot be modified once the training is complete, hence offering very little flexibility at run-time. We propose LiveView - a novel MPI generation and rendering technique that produces high-quality view synthesis in real-time. Our method can also offer the flexibility to select scene-dependent MPI planes (number of planes and spacing between them) at run-time. LiveView first warps input images to target view (target-centered) and then learns to generate a target view centered MPI, one depth plane at a time (dynamically). The method generates high-quality renderings, while also enabling fast MPI generation and novel view synthesis. As a result, LiveView enables real-time view synthesis applications where an MPI needs to be updated frequently based on a video stream of input views. We demonstrate that LiveView improves the quality of view synthesis while being 70 times faster at run-time compared to state-of-the-art MPI-based methods.