Zip-NeRF: Anti-Aliased Grid-Based Neural Radiance Fields

Jonathan T. Barron, Ben Mildenhall, Dor Verbin, Pratul P. Srinivasan, Peter Hedman; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2023, pp. 19697-19705

Neural Radiance Field training can be accelerated through the use of grid-based representations in NeRF's learned mapping from spatial coordinates to colors and volumetric density. However, these grid-based approaches lack an explicit understanding of scale and therefore often introduce aliasing, usually in the form of jaggies or missing scene content. Anti-aliasing has previously been addressed by mip-NeRF 360, which reasons about sub-volumes along a cone rather than points along a ray, but this approach is not natively compatible with current grid-based techniques. We show how ideas from rendering and signal processing can be used to construct a technique that combines mip-NeRF 360 and grid-based models such as Instant NGP to yield error rates that are 8%-77% lower than either prior technique, and that trains 24x faster than mip-NeRF 360.