Summary

In this chapter, we started with a high-level description of differentiable volumetric rendering. We then dived deep into several important concepts of differentiable volumetric rendering, including ray sampling, volume sampling, and the ray marcher, but only by explanations and coding examples. We walked through a coding example of using differentiable volumetric rendering for reconstructing 3D models from multi-view images.

Using volumes for 3D deep learning has become an interesting direction in recent years. As many innovative ideas come out following this direction, many breakthroughs are emerging. One of the breakthroughs, called Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF), will be the topic of our next chapter.