Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) represent scenes as neural networks that map 5D input (3D position and 2D viewing direction) to a 4D output (RGB color and opacity). NeRF uses an MLP that is trained to predict volumetric density and color for a scene from many camera views. Key aspects of NeRF include using positional encodings as inputs to help model view-dependent effects, and training to optimize for integrated color and density values along camera rays. NeRF has enabled novel applications beyond novel view synthesis, including pose estimation, dense descriptors, and self-supervised segmentation.
Related topics: