Response to common questions (1/2)
We thank all the reviewers for valuable comments and feedback. Here we address the common questions raised by most of the reviewers, mainly including the absence of ablation studies regarding various aspects, and the novelty of our work. During the rebuttal, we have conducted additional experiments and revised the paper accordingly. We briefly summarize these experiments and changes in the following.
# More ablation studies (R#Q6rV, R#nptq, R#uDHT, and R#UgSj)
Regarding the geometric representation, we agree that, besides our CCM, both depth and normal representations can serve a similar purpose of conveying the geometric information during fine-tuning the process. In the rebuttal, we have also derived variants of our method using these geometric representations and obtained the results, which show that, while these two geometric representations can also be incorporated into our pipeline for aligning the geometric priors in 2D diffusion, they indeed fail in producing 3D results as high-quality as CCM.
On one hand, a depth map is a single-channel map storing the per-pixel distance between the surface to the camera. Compared to CCM, the depth map alone does not contain essential information about the relative orientation of the 3D object and the camera, so the network can solely rely on the camera information for learning 3D-aware priors, consequently leading to degraded robustness of the learned 3D priors. In stark contrast, the CCM alone has actually encoded the information of the orientation to some extent. This is manifested by the distinct color coding results of CCMs from different viewpoints. As a result, the variant using depth maps is more prone to multi-view inconsistent issues, compared to our method using CCM.
On the other hand, a normal map stores the local directions of fragments on the 3D surface, we use normal maps obtained from the canonical coordinate space for fair comparisons. Our experimental results show that, while the normal map can also be seamlessly integrated into our pipeline, the text-to-3D optimization process has difficulty in generating a 3D world, of which the derivative follows faithfully the generated normal maps, and may fail to generate meaningful 3D results. Those successfully generated 3D results tend to be slightly smoother regarding the geometric and appearance details of the surface.
In addition, although the point cloud is also an important geometric representation, it is non-trivial to integrate it into the powerful 2D diffusion models as it is not compatible with the U-Net network architecture. So we could not manage to obtain the results using point clouds during the rebuttal.
Last, we have also conducted an ablation study where the camera information injection is removed from our method. The ablation results demonstrate that removing those extrinsic parameters leads to a significant decrease of the consistency in the generated results, due to the lack of critical camera information.
We have included all these results and discussions into the revised version of our paper (See Section 4 ablation part, A.6, etc).
We also prepared an anonymous link: http://3dsweetdreamer.github.io/ablation.html for better visualization in the 360° video.