D-NPC: Dynamic Neural Point Clouds for Non-Rigid View Synthesis from Monocular Video

Dynamic reconstruction and spatiotemporal novel-view synthesis of non-rigidly deforming scenes recently gained increased attention. While existing work achieves impressive quality and performance on multi-view or teleporting camera setups, most methods fail to efficiently and faithfully recover motion and appearance from casual monocular captures. This paper contributes to the field by introducing a new method for dynamic novel view synthesis from monocular video, such as casual smartphone captures. Our approach represents the scene as a dynamic neural point cloud, an implicit time-conditioned point distribution that encodes local geometry and appearance in separate hash-encoded neural feature grids for static and dynamic regions. By sampling a discrete point cloud from our model, we can efficiently render high-quality novel views using a fast differentiable rasterizer and neural rendering network. Similar to recent work, we leverage advances in neural scene analysis by incorporating data-driven priors like monocular depth estimation and object segmentation to resolve motion and depth ambiguities originating from the monocular captures. In addition to guiding the optimization process, we show that these priors can be exploited to explicitly initialize our scene representation to drastically improve optimization speed and final image quality. As evidenced by our experimental evaluation, our dynamic point cloud model not only enables fast optimization and real-time frame rates for interactive applications, but also achieves competitive image quality on monocular benchmark sequences.
Author(s): | Moritz Kappel, Florian Hahlbohm, Timon Scholz, Susana Castillo, Christian Theobalt, Martin Eisemann, Vladislav Golyanik, Marcus Magnor |
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Published: | to appear |
Type: | Article in conference proceedings |
Book: | Proc. Eurographics |
Presented at: | Eurographics 2025 |
Note: | To appear |
Project(s): | Immersive Digital Reality Real-Action VR Neural Reconstruction and Rendering of Dynamic Real-World Scenes Point-Based Neural Rendering |
@inproceedings{kappel2024d-npc, title = {D-{NPC}: Dynamic Neural Point Clouds for Non-Rigid View Synthesis from Monocular Video}, author = {Kappel, Moritz and Hahlbohm, Florian and Scholz, Timon and Castillo, Susana and Theobalt, Christian and Eisemann, Martin and Golyanik, Vladislav and Magnor, Marcus}, booktitle = {Proc. Eurographics}, note = {To appear}, year = {2025} }
Authors
Moritz Kappel
ResearcherFlorian Hahlbohm
ResearcherTimon Scholz
Research AssistantSusana Castillo
Senior ResearcherChristian Theobalt
ExternalMartin Eisemann
DirectorVladislav Golyanik
ExternalMarcus Magnor
Director, Chair