Learning a Room with the Occ-SDF Hybrid: Signed Distance Function Mingled with Occupancy Aids Scene Representation

Xiaoyang Lyu, Peng Dai, Zizhang Li, Dongyu Yan, Yi Lin, Yifan Peng, Xiaojuan Qi; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2023, pp. 8940-8950

Implicit neural rendering, using signed distance function (SDF) representation with geometric priors like depth or surface normal, has made impressive strides in the surface reconstruction of large-scale scenes. However, applying this method to reconstruct a room-level scene from images may miss structures in low-intensity areas and/or small, thin objects. We have conducted experiments on three datasets to identify limitations of the original color rendering loss and priors-embedded SDF scene representation.Our findings show that the color rendering loss creates an optimization bias against low-intensity areas, resulting in gradient vanishing and leaving these areas unoptimized. To address this issue, we propose a feature-based color rendering loss that utilizes non-zero feature values to bring back optimization signals. Additionally, the SDF representation can be influenced by objects along a ray path, disrupting the monotonic change of SDF values when a single object is present. Accordingly, we explore using the occupancy representation, which encodes each point separately and is unaffected by objects along a querying ray. Our experimental results demonstrate that the joint forces of the feature-based rendering loss and Occ-SDF hybrid representation scheme can provide high-quality reconstruction results, especially in challenging room-level scenarios. The code is available at https://github.com/shawLyu/Occ-SDF_Hybrid.