L0-Sampler: An L0 Model Guided Volume Sampling for NeRF

Liangchen Li, Juyong Zhang; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2024, pp. 21390-21400

Since its proposal Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) has achieved great success in related tasks mainly adopting the hierarchical volume sampling (HVS) strategy for volume rendering. However the HVS of NeRF approximates distributions using piecewise constant functions which provides a relatively rough estimation. Based on the observation that a well-trained weight function w(t) and the L_0 distance between points and the surface have very high similarity we propose L_0-Sampler by incorporating the L_0 model into w(t) to guide the sampling process. Specifically we propose using piecewise exponential functions rather than piecewise constant functions for interpolation which can not only approximate quasi-L_0 weight distributions along rays quite well but can be easily implemented with a few lines of code change without additional computational burden. Stable performance improvements can be achieved by applying L_0-Sampler to NeRF and related tasks like 3D reconstruction. Code is available at https://ustc3dv.github.io/L0-Sampler/.