Diffuse3D: Wide-Angle 3D Photography via Bilateral Diffusion

This paper aims to resolve the challenging problem of wide-angle novel view synthesis from a single image, a.k.a. wide-angle 3D photography. Existing approaches rely on local context and treat them equally to inpaint occluded RGB and depth regions, which fail to deal with large-region occlusion (i.e., observing from an extreme angle) and foreground layers might blend into background inpainting. To address the above issues, we propose Diffuse3D which employs a pre-trained diffusion model for global synthesis, while amending the model to activate depth-aware inference. Our key insight is to alter the convolution mechanism in the denoising process. We inject depth information into the denoising convolution operation with bilateral kernels, i.e., a depth kernel and a spatial kernel, to consider layered correlations among pixels. In this way, foreground regions are overlooked in background inpainting and only pixels close in depth are leveraged. On the other hand, we propose a global-local balancing approach to maximize both contextual understandings. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods in novel view synthesis, especially in wide-angle scenarios. More importantly, our method does not require any training and is a plug-and-play module that can be integrated with any diffusion model. Our code can be found at https://github.com/yutaojiang1/Diffuse3D.