Exploring Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF)

In the previous chapter, you learned about Differentiable Volume Rendering where you reconstructed the 3D volume from several multi-view images. With this technique, you modeled a volume consisting of N x N x N voxels. The space requirement for storing this volume scale would therefore be O(N3). This is undesirable, especially if we want to transmit this information over the network. Other methods can overcome such large disk space requirements, but they are prone to smoothing geometry and texture. Therefore, we cannot use them to model very complex or textured scenes reliably.

In this chapter, we are going to discuss a breakthrough new approach to representing 3D scenes, called Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF). This is one of the first techniques to model a 3D scene that requires less constant disk space and at the same time, captures the fine geometry and texture of complex scenes.

In this chapter, you will learn about the following topics...