Worldsheet: Wrapping the World in a 3D Sheet for View Synthesis from a Single Image

We present Worldsheet, a method for novel view synthesis using just a single RGB image as input. This is a challenging problem as it requires an understanding of the 3D geometry of the scene as well as texture mapping to generate both visible and occluded regions from new view-points. Our main insight is that simply shrink-wrapping a planar mesh sheet onto the input image, consistent with the learned intermediate depth, captures underlying geometry sufficient enough to generate photorealistic unseen views with arbitrarily large view-point changes. To operationalize this, we propose a novel differentiable texture sampler that allows our wrapped mesh sheet to be textured; which is then transformed into a target image via differentiable rendering. Our approach is category-agnostic, end-to-end trainable without using any 3D supervision and requires a single image at test time. Worldsheet consistently outperforms prior state-of-the-art methods on single-image view synthesis across several datasets. Furthermore, this simple idea captures novel views surprisingly well on a wide range of high resolution in-the-wild images in converting them into a navigable 3D pop-up. Video results and code at https://worldsheet.github.io