Differentiable volumetric rendering
While standard volumetric rendering is used to render 2D projections of 3D data, differentiable volume rendering is used to do the opposite: construct 3D data from 2D images. This is how it works: we represent the shape and texture of the object as a parametric function. This function can be used to generate 2D projections. But, given 2D projections (this is typically multiple views of the 3D scene), we can optimize the parameters of these implicit shape and texture functions so that its projections are the multi-view 2D images. This optimization is possible since the rendering process is completely differentiable, and the implicit functions used are also differentiable.
Reconstructing 3D models from multi-view images
In this section, we are going to show an example of using differentiable volumetric rendering for reconstructing 3D models from multi-view images. Reconstructing 3D models is a frequently sought problem. Usually, the direct ways...