Reference-guided Controllable Inpainting of Neural Radiance Fields

Ashkan Mirzaei, Tristan Aumentado-Armstrong, Marcus A. Brubaker, Jonathan Kelly, Alex Levinshtein, Konstantinos G. Derpanis, Igor Gilitschenski; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2023, pp. 17815-17825

The popularity of Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) for view synthesis has led to a desire for NeRF editing tools. Here, we focus on inpainting regions in a view-consistent and controllable manner. In addition to the typical NeRF inputs and masks delineating the unwanted region in each view, we require only a single inpainted view of the scene, i.e., a reference view. We use monocular depth estimators to back-project the inpainted view to the correct 3D positions. Then, via a novel rendering technique, a bilateral solver can construct view-dependent effects in non-reference views, making the inpainted region appear consistent from any view. For non-reference disoccluded regions, which cannot be supervised by the single reference view, we devise a method based on image inpainters to guide both the geometry and appearance. Our approach shows superior performance to NeRF inpainting baselines, with the additional advantage that a user can control the generated scene via a single inpainted image.