Novel view synthesis aims to synthesize new images from different viewpoints of given images. Most of previous works focus on generating novel views of certain objects with a fixed background. However, for some applications, such as virtual reality or robotic manipulations, large changes in background may occur due to the egomotion of the camera. Generated images of a large-scale environment from novel views may be distorted if the structure of the environment is not considered. In this work, we propose a novel fully convolutional network, that can take advantage of the structural information explicitly by incorporating the inverse depth features. The inverse depth features are obtained from CNNs trained with sparse labeled depth values. This framework can easily fuse multiple images from different viewpoints. To fill the missing textures in the generated image, adversarial loss is applied, which can also improve the overall image quality. Our method is evaluated on the KITTI dataset. The results show that our method can generate novel views of large-scale scene without distortion. The effectiveness of our approach is demonstrated through qualitative and quantitative evaluation.
A core challenge for an agent learning to interact with the world is to predict how its actions affect objects in its environment. Many existing methods for learning the dynamics of physical interactions require labeled object information. However, to scale real-world interaction learning to a variety of scenes and objects, acquiring labeled data becomes increasingly impractical. To learn about physical object motion without labels, we develop an action-conditioned video prediction model that explicitly models pixel motion, by predicting a distribution over pixel motion from previous frames. Because our model explicitly predicts motion, it is partially invariant to object appearance, enabling it to generalize to previously unseen objects. To explore video prediction for real-world interactive agents, we also introduce a dataset of 59,000 robot interactions involving pushing motions, including a test set with novel objects. In this dataset, accurate prediction of videos conditioned on the robot's future actions amounts to learning a "visual imagination" of different futures based on different courses of action. Our experiments show that our proposed method produces more accurate video predictions both quantitatively and qualitatively, when compared to prior methods.