DiffusionSfM: Predicting Structure and Motion via Ray Origin and Endpoint Diffusion

Current Structure-from-Motion (SfM) methods often adopt a two-stage pipeline involving learned or geometric pairwise reasoning followed by a global optimization. We instead propose a data-driven multi-view reasoning approach that directly infers cameras and 3D geometry from multi-view images. Our proposed framework, DiffusionSfM, parametrizes scene geometry and cameras as pixel-wise ray origins and endpoints in a global frame, and learns a transformer-based denoising diffusion model to predict these from multi-view input. We develop mechanisms to overcome practical challenges in training diffusion models with missing data and unbounded scene coordinates, and demonstrate that DiffusionSfM allows accurate prediction of 3D and cameras. We empirically validate our approach on challenging real world data and find that DiffusionSfM improves over prior classical and learning-based methods, while also naturally modeling uncertainty and allowing external guidance to be incorporated in inference.