[Day 2] NeRF: Representing Scenes as Neural Radiance Fields for View Synthesis

Key Idea

NeRF presents a method to represent 3D scenes using a fully connected neural network. Given a set of 2D images of a scene, it learns to output the color and volume density of any 3D point, enabling high-quality view synthesis.

Why It Matters

3D scene representation and rendering have traditionally required complex data structures and models. NeRF's neural network-based approach provides a compact, continuous, and differentiable representation, pushing the boundaries of view synthesis.

Technical Bite

NeRF uses a neural network to model the volumetric scene function, and ray marching to render novel views. It leverages spatial coordinates as input and outputs RGB color and volume density.

Impact

Sparked interest in using deep learning for 3D scene representation and has influenced various subsequent works in the field of computer graphics and vision.

Paper

Authors - Ben Mildenhall, Pratul P. Srinivasan, Matthew Tancik, Jonathan T. Barron, Ravi Ramamoorthi, Ren Ng

Paper - [Link]