Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) is an implicit 3D reconstruction method that has shown immense potential and has gained significant attention for its ability to reconstruct 3D scenes solely from a set of photographs. However, its real-time rendering capability, especially for interactive real-time rendering of large-scale scenes, has significant limitations. To address this challenge, we propose a novel neural rendering system called UE4-NeRF that is designed for real-time rendering of large-scale scenes. Our proposed approach partitions large scenes into subNeRFs, and uses polygonal meshes to represent them. In order to represent the partitioned independent scene, we initialize polygonal meshes by constructing multiple regular octahedra within the scene and the vertices of the polygonal faces are continuously optimized during the training process. Drawing inspiration from the Level of Detail (LOD) techniques, we train meshes with varying levels of detail for different observation levels. Our approach combines with the rasterization pipeline in Unreal Engine 4 (UE4), achieving real-time rendering of large-scale scenes at 4K resolution with a frame rate of up to 43 FPS. Our experimental results demonstrate that our method attains rendering quality on par with state-of-the-art approaches, while additionally offering the advantage of real-time performance.

Generating controllable and photorealistic digital human avatars is a long-standing and important problem in Vision and Graphics. Recent methods have shown great progress in terms of either photorealism or inference speed while the combination of the two desired properties still remains unsolved. To this end, we propose a novel method, called DELIFFAS, which parameterizes the appearance of the human as a surface light field that is attached to a controllable and deforming human mesh model. At the core, we represent the light field around the human with a deformable two-surface parameterization, which enables fast and accurate inference of the human appearance. This allows perceptual supervision on the full image compared to previous approaches that could only supervise individual pixels or small patches due to their slow runtime. Our carefully designed human representation and supervision strategy leads to state-of-the-art synthesis results and inference time. The video results and code are available at https://vcai.

State-of-the-art 3D-aware generative models rely on coordinate-based MLPs to parameterize 3D radiance fields. While demonstrating impressive results, querying an MLP for every sample along each ray leads to slow rendering. Therefore, existing approaches often render low-resolution feature maps and process them with an upsampling network to obtain the final image. Albeit efficient, neural rendering often entangles viewpoint and content such that changing the camera pose results in unwanted changes of geometry or appearance. Motivated by recent results in voxel-based novel view synthesis, we investigate the utility of sparse voxel grid representations for fast and 3D-consistent generative modeling in this paper. Our results demonstrate that monolithic MLPs can indeed be replaced by 3D convolutions when combining sparse voxel grids with progressive growing, free space pruning and appropriate regularization. To obtain a compact representation of the scene and allow for scaling to higher voxel resolutions, our model disentangles the foreground object (modeled in 3D) from the background (modeled in 2D). In contrast to existing approaches, our method requires only a single forward pass to generate a full 3D scene. It hence allows for efficient rendering from arbitrary viewpoints while yielding 3D consistent results with high visual fidelity.

Neural volume rendering became increasingly popular recently due to its success in synthesizing novel views of a scene from a sparse set of input images. So far, the geometry learned by neural volume rendering techniques was modeled using a generic density function. Furthermore, the geometry itself was extracted using an arbitrary level set of the density function leading to a noisy, often low fidelity reconstruction. The goal of this paper is to improve geometry representation and reconstruction in neural volume rendering. We achieve that by modeling the volume density as a function of the geometry.

Reconstruction of 3D neural fields from posed images has emerged as a promising method for self-supervised representation learning. The key challenge preventing the deployment of these 3D scene learners on large-scale video data is their dependence on precise camera poses from structure-from-motion, which is prohibitively expensive to run at scale. We propose a method that jointly reconstructs camera poses and 3D neural scene representations online and in a single forward pass. We estimate poses by first lifting frame-to-frame optical flow to 3D scene flow via differentiable rendering, preserving locality and shift-equivariance of the image processing backbone. SE(3) camera pose estimation is then performed via a weighted least-squares fit to the scene flow field. This formulation enables us to jointly supervise pose estimation and a generalizable neural scene representation via re-rendering the input video, and thus, train end-to-end and fully self-supervised on real-world video datasets. We demonstrate that our method performs robustly on diverse, real-world video, notably on sequences traditionally challenging to optimization-based pose estimation techniques.

Existing human rendering methods require every part of the human to be fully visible throughout the input video. However, this assumption does not hold in real-life settings where obstructions are common, resulting in only partial visibility of the human. Considering this, we present OccFusion, an approach that utilizes efficient 3D Gaussian splatting supervised by pretrained 2D diffusion models for efficient and high-fidelity human rendering. We propose a pipeline consisting of three stages. In the Initialization stage, complete human masks are generated from partial visibility masks. In the Optimization stage, 3D human Gaussians are optimized with additional supervisions by Score-Distillation Sampling (SDS) to create a complete geometry of the human. Finally, in the Refinement stage, in-context inpainting is designed to further improve rendering quality on the less observed human body parts. We evaluate OccFusion on ZJU-MoCap and challenging OcMotion sequences and found that it achieves state-of-the-art performance in the rendering of occluded humans.