Summary
The main contribution of the paper is the introduction of Relightable 3D-GS Generative Model (RGM), a novel framework for automatically generating high-fidelity 3D car assets from a single image. RGM addresses the limitations of existing models by enabling relighting under various lighting conditions. It achieves this through the use of 3D Gaussian primitives integrated with BRDF material properties and global illumination modeling. Additionally, the authors introduce the Carverse dataset, a large-scale synthetic collection of over 1,000 detailed 3D vehicle models, to train and benchmark their approach.
Strengths
The relightable 3DGS car model is interesting and worth exploring, The RGM method enables the creation of high-quality 3D car models from a single image, with realistic relighting features, addressing key shortcomings in existing 3D generation techniques.
The Carverse dataset offers a large-scale collection of 3D vehicle models, and what sets it apart is the inclusion of detailed material and normal information. This gives it a unique edge compared to older datasets, making it useful for robust training and improving the realism of generated 3D assets.
If the relighting capability works as well as claimed, this paper shows strong potential for practical applications, especially in fields like autonomous driving, where realistic lighting is crucial.
Weaknesses
For table 1, the use of terms like 'high' and 'low' for the quality and diversity metrics is very ambiguous and biased, especially when many of the datasets being compared are real-world datasets. From the images presented in the paper, I don't observe a significant quality improvement solely based on these visuals. However, I do recognize the added value that Carverse provides through its inclusion of normal and material information, which may not be available in the other datasets mentioned. That said, when comparing diversity and quality, datasets such as CarStudio visually appear much more diverse and of higher quality to me. Therefore, using 'high' to describe both Carverse and CarStudio can mislead readers into thinking their visual appearances in terms of diversity and quality is comparable, which doesn’t seem accurate. If we further consider the difference in instance numbers, CarStudio’s over 200k instances are much denser than the 1,000 instances introduced by Carverse.
The experimental section appears biased. If my understanding is correct, when the authors compared the RGM model’s ability to generate car models with other SOTA models, they used 50 car samples from their own Carverse dataset. However, only the RGM model was trained on the Carverse dataset, while the other models had no prior exposure to this dataset during training. This creates an inherent advantage for the RGM model, as it has a better understanding of the Carverse data distribution, which would inevitably lead to better quality metric scores compared to the other models.
The authors claim that the quality of existing synthetic car datasets is insufficient for modern real car rendering, but from visual inspection, I don’t see a significant quality improvement in Carverse compared to other synthetic datasets like Objaverse. In fact, in some instances, Objaverse’s car models even appear to have better visual quality. To truly demonstrate that Carverse is superior to previous datasets, a more convincing A/B test with identical conditions under RGM would be necessary.
I would also like to see more examples of scene insertion results to better assess how well the RGM model handles relighting. In Figure 6, both scenes shown are under bright daylight conditions. It would be more convincing to see examples in dimmer lighting environments to showcase how the relighting function performs under different lighting scenarios.
Questions
Q1. You mention that RGM supports relighting through spherical harmonics. How flexible is the lighting adjustment when integrating the 3D models into new scenarios? For example a scene with much dimmer environmental lighting. So far I only saw bright daylight insertion in the paper.
Q2. How does RGM handle complex lighting environments like dynamic or moving light sources?
Q3. In Table 1, terms like "high" and "low" are used to describe dataset quality and diversity. Can you clarify how these metrics are quantitatively defined? What specific attributes (maybe resolution, texture detail, polygon density) are used to distinguish between "high" and "low"?
Q4. When conducting comparison experiments with other SOTA models, were those models trained or fine-tuned on Carverse before testing? If not, and only RGM has prior knowledge of the distribution of the Carverse data, how do you address the potential bias in comparing RGM's performance to SOTA methods that were not trained on the Carverse dataset?