This study addresses the challenging problem of active view selection and uncertainty quantification within the domain of Radiance Fields. Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) have greatly advanced image rendering and reconstruction, but the cost of acquiring images poses the need to select the most informative viewpoints efficiently. Existing approaches depend on modifying the model architecture or hypothetical perturbation field to indirectly approximate the model uncertainty. However, selecting views from indirect approximation does not guarantee optimal information gain for the model. By leveraging Fisher Information, we directly quantify observed information on the parameters of Radiance Fields and select candidate views by maximizing the Expected Information Gain (EIG). Our method achieves state-of-the-art results on multiple tasks, including view selection, active mapping, and uncertainty quantification, demonstrating its potential to advance the field of Radiance Fields.
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Neural Visibility Field for Uncertainty-Driven Active Mapping
This paper presents Neural Visibility Field (NVF), a novel uncertainty quantification method for Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) applied to active mapping. Our key insight is that regions not visible in the training views lead to inherently unreliable color predictions by NeRF at this region, resulting in increased uncertainty in the synthesized views. To address this, we propose to use Bayesian Networks to composite position-based field uncertainty into ray-based uncertainty in camera observations. Consequently, NVF naturally assigns higher uncertainty to unobserved regions, aiding robots to select the most informative next viewpoints. Extensive evaluations show that NVF excels not only in uncertainty quantification but also in scene reconstruction for active mapping, outperforming existing methods.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2101250
- PAR ID:
- 10639391
- Publisher / Repository:
- IEEE
- Date Published:
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 18122 to 18132
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- Seattle, WA
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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