GenNBV: Generalizable Next-Best-View Policy for Active 3D Reconstruction

Xiao Chen, Quanyi Li, Tai Wang, Tianfan Xue, Jiangmiao Pang; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2024, pp. 16436-16445

While recent advances in neural radiance field enable realistic digitization for large-scale scenes the image-capturing process is still time-consuming and labor-intensive. Previous works attempt to automate this process using the Next-Best-View (NBV) policy for active 3D reconstruction. However the existing NBV policies heavily rely on hand-crafted criteria limited action space or per-scene optimized representations. These constraints limit their cross-dataset generalizability. To overcome them we propose GenNBV an end-to-end generalizable NBV policy. Our policy adopts a reinforcement learning (RL)-based framework and extends typical limited action space to 5D free space. It empowers our agent drone to scan from any viewpoint and even interact with unseen geometries during training. To boost the cross-dataset generalizability we also propose a novel multi-source state embedding including geometric semantic and action representations. We establish a benchmark using the Isaac Gym simulator with the Houses3K and OmniObject3D datasets to evaluate this NBV policy. Experiments demonstrate that our policy achieves a 98.26% and 97.12% coverage ratio on unseen building-scale objects from these datasets respectively outperforming prior solutions.