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We use neural radiance fields (NeRFs) to build interactive 3D environments from large-scale visual captures spanning buildings or even multiple city blocks collected primarily from drones. In contrast to single object scenes (on which NeRFs are traditionally evaluated), our scale poses multiple challenges including (1) the need to model thousands of images with varying lighting conditions, each of which capture only a small subset of the scene, (2) prohibitively large model capacities that make it infeasible to train on a single GPU, and (3) significant challenges for fast rendering that would enable interactive fly-throughs. To address these challenges, we begin by analyzing visibility statistics for large-scale scenes, motivating a sparse network structure where parameters are specialized to different regions of the scene. We introduce a simple geometric clustering algorithm for data parallelism that partitions training images (or rather pixels) into different NeRF sub-modules that can be trained in parallel. We evaluate our approach on existing datasets (Quad 6k and UrbanScene3D) as well as against our own drone footage, improving training speed by 3x and PSNR by 12%. We also evaluate recent NeRF fast renderers on top of Mega-NeRF and introduce a novel method that exploits temporal coherence. Our technique achieves a 40x speedup over conventional NeRF rendering while remaining within 0.8 db in PSNR quality, exceeding the fidelity of existing fast renderers.
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Strata-NeRF: Neural Radiance Fields for Stratified Scenes
Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) approaches learn the underlying 3D representation of a scene and generate photorealistic novel views with high fidelity. However, most proposed settings concentrate on modelling a single object or a single level of a scene. However, in the real world, we may capture a scene at multiple levels, resulting in a layered capture. For example, tourists usually capture a monument’s exterior structure before capturing the inner structure. Modelling such scenes in 3D with seamless switching between levels can drastically improve immersive experiences. However, most existing techniques struggle in modelling such scenes. We propose Strata-NeRF, a single neural radiance field that implicitly captures a scene with multiple levels. Strata-NeRF achieves this by conditioning the NeRFs on Vector Quantized (VQ) latent representations which allow sudden changes in scene structure. We evaluate the effectiveness of our approach in multi-layered synthetic dataset comprising diverse scenes and then further validate its generalization on the real-world RealEstate 10k dataset. We find that Strata-NeRF effectively captures stratified scenes, minimizes artifacts, and synthesizes high-fidelity views compared to existing approaches.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2038897
- PAR ID:
- 10514730
- Publisher / Repository:
- ICCV 2023
- Date Published:
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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