FreeSim: Toward Free-viewpoint Camera Simulation in Driving Scenes

Lue Fan, Hao Zhang, Qitai Wang, Hongsheng Li, Zhaoxiang Zhang; Proceedings of the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference (CVPR), 2025, pp. 12004-12014

We propose FreeSim, a camera simulation method for driving scenes via 3D Gaussian Splatting and diffusion-based image generation. FreeSim emphasizes high-quality rendering from viewpoints beyond the recorded ego trajectories. In such viewpoints, previous methods have unacceptable degradation because the training data of these viewpoints is unavailable. To address such data scarcity, we first propose a generative enhancement model with a matched data construction strategy. The resulting model can generate high-quality images in a viewpoint slightly deviated from the recorded trajectories, conditioned on the degraded rendering of this viewpoint. We then propose a progressive reconstruction strategy, which progressively adds generated images in unrecorded views into the reconstruction process, starting from slightly off-trajectory viewpoints and moving progressively farther away. With this progressive generation-reconstruction pipeline, FreeSim supports high-quality off-trajectory view synthesis under large deviations of more than 3 meters.