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arXiv:2003.08934cs.CV

NeRF: Representing Scenes as Neural Radiance Fields for View Synthesis

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

Abstract

We present a method that achieves state-of-the-art results for synthesizing novel views of complex scenes by optimizing an underlying continuous volumetric scene function using a sparse set of input views. Our algorithm represents a scene using a fully-connected (non-convolutional) deep network, whose input is a single continuous 5D coordinate (spatial location $(x,y,z)$ and viewing direction $(θ, φ)$) and whose output is the volume density and view-dependent emitted radiance at that spatial location. We synthesize views by querying 5D coordinates along camera rays and use classic volume rendering techniques to project the output colors and densities into an image. Because volume rendering is naturally differentiable, the only input required to optimize our representation is a set of images with known camera poses. We describe how to effectively optimize neural radiance fields to render photorealistic novel views of scenes with complicated geometry and appearance, and demonstrate results that outperform prior work on neural rendering and view synthesis. View synthesis results are best viewed as videos, so we urge readers to view our supplementary video for convincing comparisons.

arXiv comments
ECCV 2020 (oral). Project page with videos and code: http://tancik.com/nerf
Journal reference
DOI
Subjects
cs.CVComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition cs.GRGraphics

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Linked by 8 identifiable commenters in 8 comments across 8 threads, from Jul 2021 to May 2026.

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Discussed in comments8 threads

    • Curious about the actual architecture. From the outside it looks like Gaussian splatting anchored to roughly one viewpoint, since the moment you wander outside the original frame or behind an object, it becomes messy. But Ben Mildenhall is one of the co-founders and a NeRF…

      nomadarView on HNParent context

    • This apparently doesn't apply here, but in fact, pixels can be generated independently of each other. There are architectures where you can generate an arbitrary pixel or element of the image without generating the others; they are just implicit. See NeRFs or 'single-pixel GANs'…

      gwernView on HNParent context

    • NeRF was already standardized in the literature by people who are not these authors [0] and HDR is also already standardized by people who are not these authors [1]. Go with the flow unless you have a very good reason not to. HDR is probably HDR and not some other clever name…

      gamegoblinView on HNParent context

    • At least in the original paper [1], the key idea is that instead of training a neural network to treat "images" as an array of pixels, you train a network to map a camera location and direction (in 3D space) to a distance and a color. For example, if you tell a NeRF that you…

      yalueView on HNParent context

    • ... that one has 52K citations, and the 2D to 3D paper "NeRF: Representing Scenes as Neural Radiance Fields for View Synthesis" with 1488 citations. https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.08934

      visargaView on HNParent context

    • For some additional context, when the original NeRF paper (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2003.08934.pdf) was published 2 years ago, it reportedly took at least 12 hours (depending on hardware used of course) to train on the scene with the bulldozer. This has now been reduced to about 5…

      ath92View on HNParent context

    • > If you're asking me for an example of it being publicly used in production, well I think you're asking a lot considering the technique is only a few months old That is what I explicitly asked for. You’re failure to provide an example is not because it’s new it’s because it’s…

      wokwokwokView on HNParent context

    • I'm no data scientist but many statistical methods rely on prior knowledge and even computed inputs. Two examples I can think of are doing linear regression on the square of your input. For deep learning, people have improved visual representation by taking samples of the colors…

      srcreighView on HNParent context

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