3D-aware Image Generation using 2D Diffusion Models

Jianfeng Xiang, Jiaolong Yang, Binbin Huang, Xin Tong; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2023, pp. 2383-2393

In this paper, we introduce a novel 3D-aware image generation method that leverages 2D diffusion models. We formulate the 3D-aware image generation task as multiview 2D image set generation, and further to a sequential unconditional-conditional multiview image generation process. This allows us to utilize 2D diffusion models to boost the generative modelling power of the method. Additionally, we incorporate depth information from monocular depth estimators to construct the training data for the conditional diffusion model using only still images. We train our method on a large-scale unstructured dataset, i.e., ImageNet, which is not addressed by previous methods. It produces high-quality images that significantly outperform prior methods. Furthermore, our approach showcases its capability to generate instances with large view angles, even though the training images are diverse and unaligned, gathered from "in-the-wild" real-world environments.