F2-NeRF: Fast Neural Radiance Field Training With Free Camera Trajectories

Peng Wang, Yuan Liu, Zhaoxi Chen, Lingjie Liu, Ziwei Liu, Taku Komura, Christian Theobalt, Wenping Wang; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2023, pp. 4150-4159

This paper presents a novel grid-based NeRF called F^2-NeRF (Fast-Free-NeRF) for novel view synthesis, which enables arbitrary input camera trajectories and only costs a few minutes for training. Existing fast grid-based NeRF training frameworks, like Instant-NGP, Plenoxels, DVGO, or TensoRF, are mainly designed for bounded scenes and rely on space warping to handle unbounded scenes. Existing two widely-used space-warping methods are only designed for the forward-facing trajectory or the 360deg object-centric trajectory but cannot process arbitrary trajectories. In this paper, we delve deep into the mechanism of space warping to handle unbounded scenes. Based on our analysis, we further propose a novel space-warping method called perspective warping, which allows us to handle arbitrary trajectories in the grid-based NeRF framework. Extensive experiments demonstrate that F^2-NeRF is able to use the same perspective warping to render high-quality images on two standard datasets and a new free trajectory dataset collected by us.