Pointmap-Conditioned Diffusion for Consistent Novel View Synthesis

Abstract

Synthesizing extrapolated views remains a difficult task, especially in urban driving scenes, where the only reliable sources of data are limited RGB captures and sparse LiDAR points. To address this problem, we present PointmapDiff, a framework for novel view synthesis that utilizes pre-trained 2D diffusion models. Our method leverages point maps (i.e., rasterized 3D scene coordinates) as a conditioning signal, capturing geometric and photometric priors from the reference images to guide the image generation process. With the proposed reference attention layers and ControlNet for point map features, PointmapDiff can generate accurate and consistent results across varying viewpoints while respecting geometric fidelity. Experiments on real-life driving data demonstrate that our method achieves high-quality generation with flexibility over point map conditioning signals (e.g., dense depth map or even sparse LiDAR points) and can be used to distill to 3D representations such as 3D Gaussian Splatting for improving view extrapolation.