Neural Implicit Representations for Physical Parameter Inference from a Single Video

WACV 2023

Florian Hofherr¹    Lukas Koestler¹    Florian Bernard²    Daniel Cremers¹   

¹Technical University of Munich    ²University of Bonn.

Paper Code Poster

Abstract

Neural networks have recently been used to analyze diverse physical systems and to identify the underlying dynamics. While existing methods achieve impressive results, they are limited by their strong demand for training data and their weak generalization abilities to out-of-distribution data. To overcome these limitations, in this work we propose to combine neural implicit representations for appearance modeling with neural ordinary differential equations (ODEs) for modelling physical phenomena to obtain a dynamic scene representation that can be identified directly from visual observations. Our proposed model combines several unique advantages: (i) Contrary to existing approaches that require large training datasets, we are able to identify physical parameters from only a single video. (ii) The use of neural implicit representations enables the processing of high-resolution videos and the synthesis of photo-realistic images. (iii) The embedded neural ODE has a known parametric form that allows for the identification of interpretable physical parameters, and (iv) long-term prediction in state space. (v) Furthermore, the photo-realistic rendering of novel scenes with modified physical parameters becomes possible.

Supplementary Video

Cite

                    @inproceedings{hofherr2023neuralPhysParam,
                        author = {F Hofherr and L Koestler and F Bernard and D Cremers},
                        title = {Neural Implicit Representations for Physical Parameter Inference from a Single Video},
                        booktitle = {IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV)},
                        year = {2023},
                        }