EfficientNeRF Efficient Neural Radiance Fields

Tao Hu, Shu Liu, Yilun Chen, Tiancheng Shen, Jiaya Jia; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2022, pp. 12902-12911

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) has been wildly applied to various tasks for its high-quality representation of 3D scenes. It takes long per-scene training time and per-image testing time. In this paper, we present EfficientNeRF as an efficient NeRF-based method to represent 3D scene and synthesize novel-view images. Although several ways exist to accelerate the training or testing process, it is still difficult to much reduce time for both phases simultaneously. We analyze the density and weight distribution of the sampled points then propose valid and pivotal sampling at the coarse and fine stage, respectively, to significantly improve sampling efficiency. In addition, we design a novel data structure to cache the whole scene during testing to accelerate the testing speed. Overall, our method can reduce over 88% of training time, reach testing speed of around 200 to 500 FPS, while still achieving competitive accuracy. Experiments prove that our method promotes the practicality of NeRF in the real world and enables many applications.