Real-Time Neural Rasterization for Large Scenes

Jeffrey Yunfan Liu, Yun Chen, Ze Yang, Jingkang Wang, Sivabalan Manivasagam, Raquel Urtasun; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2023, pp. 8416-8427

We propose a new method for realistic real-time novel-view synthesis (NVS) of large scenes. Existing fast neural rendering methods generate realistic results, but primarily work for small scale scenes (<50 square meter) and have difficulty at large scale (>10000 square meter). Traditional graphics-based rasterization rendering is fast for large scenes but lacks realism and requires expensive manually created assets. Our approach combines the best of both worlds by taking a moderate-quality scaffold mesh as input and learning a neural texture field and shader to model view-dependant effects to enhance realism, while still using the standard graphics pipeline for real-time rendering. Our method outperforms existing neural rendering methods, providing at least 30x faster rendering with comparable or better realism for large self-driving and drone scenes. Our work is the first to enable real-time visualization of large real-world scenes.