Novel view synthesis of dynamic scenes with globally coherent depths from a monocular camera

This paper presents a new method to synthesize an image from arbitrary views and times given a collection of images of a dynamic scene. A key challenge for the novel view synthesis arises from dynamic scene reconstruction where epipolar geometry does not apply to the local motion of dynamic contents. To address this challenge, we propose to combine the depth from single view (DSV) and the depth from multi-view stereo (DMV), where DSV is complete, i.e., a depth is assigned to every pixel, yet view-variant in its scale, while DMV is view-invariant yet incomplete. Our insight is that although its scale and quality are inconsistent with other views, the depth estimation from a single view can be used to reason about the globally coherent geometry of dynamic contents. We cast this problem as learning to correct the scale of DSV, and to refine each depth with locally consistent motions between views to form a coherent depth estimation. We integrate these tasks into a depth fusion network in a self-supervised fashion. Given the fused depth maps, we synthesize a photorealistic virtual view in a specific location and time with our deep blending network that completes the scene and renders the virtual view. We evaluate our method of depth estimation and view synthesis on diverse real-world dynamic scenes and show the outstanding performance over existing methods.