On Unifying Video Generation and Camera Pose Estimation

Chun-Hao Paul Huang, Jae Shin Yoon, Hyeonho Jeong, Niloy J. Mitra, Duygu Ceylan

Abstract: Emergent capabilities of image generators have led to many impactful zero- or few-shot applications. Inspired by this success, we investigate whether video generators similarly exhibit 3D-awareness. Using structure-from-motion as a 3D-aware task, we test if intermediate features of a video generator - OpenSora in our case - can support camera pose estimation. Surprisingly, at first, we only find a weak correlation between the two tasks. Deeper investigation reveals that although the video generator produces plausible video frames, the frames themselves are not truly 3D-consistent. Instead, we propose to jointly train for the two tasks, using photometric generation and 3D aware errors. Specifically, we find that SoTA video generation and camera pose estimation (i.e.,DUSt3R [79]) networks share common structures, and propose an architecture that unifies the two. The proposed unified model, named \nameMethod, produces camera pose estimates with competitive quality while producing 3D-consistent videos. In summary, we propose the first unified video generator that is 3D-consistent, generates realistic video frames, and can potentially be repurposed for other 3D-aware tasks.