Adding 3D Geometry Control to Diffusion Models

Diffusion models have emerged as a powerful method of generative modeling across a range of fields, capable of producing stunning photo-realistic images from natural language descriptions. However, these models lack explicit control over the 3D structure in the generated images. Consequently, this hinders our ability to obtain detailed 3D annotations for the generated images or to craft instances with specific poses and distances. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective method that incorporates 3D geometry control into diffusion models. Our method exploits ControlNet, which extends diffusion models by using visual prompts in addition to text prompts. We generate images of the 3D objects taken from 3D shape repositories (e.g., ShapeNet and Objaverse), render them from a variety of poses and viewing directions, compute the edge maps of the rendered images, and use these edge maps as visual prompts to generate realistic images. With explicit 3D geometry control, we can easily change the 3D structures of the objects in the generated images and obtain ground-truth 3D annotations automatically. This allows us to improve a wide range of vision tasks, e.g., classification and 3D pose estimation, in both in-distribution (ID) and out-of-distribution (OOD) settings. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method through extensive experiments on ImageNet-100, ImageNet-R, PASCAL3D+, ObjectNet3D, and OOD-CV. The results show that our method significantly outperforms existing methods across multiple benchmarks, e.g., 3.8 percentage points on ImageNet-100 using DeiT-B and 3.5 percentage points on PASCAL3D+ & ObjectNet3D using NeMo.