Neural scene representations, both continuous and discrete, have recently emerged as a powerful new paradigm for 3D scene understanding. Recent efforts have tackled unsupervised discovery of object-centric neural scene representations. However, the high cost of ray-marching, exacerbated by the fact that each object representation has to be ray-marched separately, leads to insufficiently sampled radiance fields and thus, noisy renderings, poor framerates, and high memory and time complexity during training and rendering. Here, we propose to represent objects in an object-centric, compositional scene representation as light fields. We propose a novel light field compositor module that enables reconstructing the global light field from a set of object-centric light fields. Dubbed Compositional Object Light Fields (COLF), our method enables unsupervised learning of object-centric neural scene representations, state-of-the-art reconstruction and novel view synthesis performance on standard datasets, and rendering and training speeds at orders of magnitude faster than existing 3D approaches.

We study the problem of inferring an object-centric scene representation from a single image, aiming to derive a representation that explains the image formation process, captures the scene's 3D nature, and is learned without supervision. Most existing methods on scene decomposition lack one or more of these characteristics, due to the fundamental challenge in integrating the complex 3D-to-2D image formation process into powerful inference schemes like deep networks. In this paper, we propose unsupervised discovery of Object Radiance Fields (uORF), integrating recent progresses in neural 3D scene representations and rendering with deep inference networks for unsupervised 3D scene decomposition. Trained on multi-view RGB images without annotations, uORF learns to decompose complex scenes with diverse, textured background from a single image. We show that uORF performs well on unsupervised 3D scene segmentation, novel view synthesis, and scene editing on three datasets.