Neural Visibility Field for Uncertainty-Driven Active Mapping

Shangjie Xue, Jesse Dill, Pranay Mathur, Frank Dellaert, Panagiotis Tsiotra, Danfei Xu; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2024, pp. 18122-18132

This paper presents Neural Visibility Field (NVF) a novel uncertainty quantification method for Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) applied to active mapping. Our key insight is that regions not visible in the training views lead to inherently unreliable color predictions by NeRF at this region resulting in increased uncertainty in the synthesized views. To address this we propose to use Bayesian Networks to composite position-based field uncertainty into ray-based uncertainty in camera observations. Consequently NVF naturally assigns higher uncertainty to unobserved regions aiding robots to select the most informative next viewpoints. Extensive evaluations show that NVF excels not only in uncertainty quantification but also in scene reconstruction for active mapping outperforming existing methods. More details can be found at https://sites.google.com/view/nvf-cvpr24/.