Stereo Magnification with Multi-Layer Images

Representing scenes with multiple semitransparent colored layers has been a popular and successful choice for real-time novel view synthesis. Existing approaches infer colors and transparency values over regularly spaced layers of planar or spherical shape. In this work, we introduce a new view synthesis approach based on multiple semitransparent layers with scene-adapted geometry. Our approach infers such representations from stereo pairs in two stages. The first stage produces the geometry of a small number of data-adaptive layers from a given pair of views. The second stage infers the color and transparency values for these layers, producing the final representation for novel view synthesis. Importantly, both stages are connected through a differentiable renderer and are trained end-to-end. In the experiments, we demonstrate the advantage of the proposed approach over the use of regularly spaced layers without adaptation to scene geometry. Despite being orders of magnitude faster during rendering, our approach also outperforms the recently proposed IBRNet system based on implicit geometry representation.