Geometric Viewpoint Learning with Hyper-Rays and Harmonics Encoding

Viewpoint is a fundamental modality that carries the interaction between observers and their environment. This paper proposes the first deep-learning framework for the viewpoint modality. The challenge in formulating learning frameworks for viewpoints resides in a suitable multimodal representation that links across the camera viewing space and 3D environment. Traditional approaches reduce the problem to image analysis instances, making them computationally expensive and not adequately modelling the intrinsic geometry and environmental context of 6DoF viewpoints. We improve these issues in two ways. 1) We propose a generalized viewpoint representation forgoing the analysis of photometric pixels in favor of encoded viewing ray embeddings attained from point cloud learning frameworks. 2) We propose a novel SE(3)-bijective 6D viewing ray, hyper-ray, that addresses the DoF deficiency problem of using 5DoF viewing rays representing 6DoF viewpoints. We demonstrate our approach has both efficiency and accuracy superiority over existing methods in novel real-world environments.