  Generating novel views of an object from a single image is a challenging
task. It requires an understanding of the underlying 3D structure of the object
from an image and rendering high-quality, spatially consistent new views. While
recent methods for view synthesis based on diffusion have shown great progress,
achieving consistency among various view estimates and at the same time abiding
by the desired camera pose remains a critical problem yet to be solved. In this
work, we demonstrate a strikingly simple method, where we utilize a pre-trained
video diffusion model to solve this problem. Our key idea is that synthesizing
a novel view could be reformulated as synthesizing a video of a camera going
around the object of interest -- a scanning video -- which then allows us to
leverage the powerful priors that a video diffusion model would have learned.
Thus, to perform novel-view synthesis, we create a smooth camera trajectory to
the target view that we wish to render, and denoise using both a
view-conditioned diffusion model and a video diffusion model. By doing so, we
obtain a highly consistent novel view synthesis, outperforming the state of the
art.
