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.

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.

In this paper, we presentDIB-R, a differentiable rendering framework which allows gradients to be analytically computed for allpixels inanimage.

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has recently emerged as a state-of-the-art 3D reconstruction and rendering technique due to its high-quality results and fast training and rendering time. However, pixels covered by the same Gaussian are always shaded in the same color up to a Gaussian falloff scaling factor. Furthermore, the finest geometric detail any individual Gaussian can represent is a simple ellipsoid. These properties of 3DGS greatly limit the expressivity of individual Gaussian primitives. To address these issues, we draw inspiration from texture and alpha mapping in traditional graphics and integrate it with 3DGS. Specifically, we propose a new generalized Gaussian appearance representation that augments each Gaussian with alpha~(A), RGB, or RGBA texture maps to model spatially varying color and opacity across the extent of each Gaussian. As such, each Gaussian can represent a richer set of texture patterns and geometric structures, instead of just a single color and ellipsoid as in naive Gaussian Splatting. Surprisingly, we found that the expressivity of Gaussians can be greatly improved by using alpha-only texture maps, and further augmenting Gaussians with RGB texture maps achieves the highest expressivity. We validate our method on a wide variety of standard benchmark datasets and our own custom captures at both the object and scene levels. We demonstrate image quality improvements over existing methods while using a similar or lower number of Gaussians.

Enabling ML models to understand image formation might be key for generalization.

And we will provide the necessary maintenance for extended development.