BARF: Bundle-Adjusting Neural Radiance Fields

Chen-Hsuan Lin, Wei-Chiu Ma, Antonio Torralba, Simon Lucey; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021, pp. 5741-5751

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) have recently gained a surge of interest within the computer vision community for its power to synthesize photorealistic novel views of real-world scenes. One limitation of NeRF, however, is its requirement of known camera poses to learn the scene representations. In this paper, we propose Bundle-Adjusting Neural Radiance Fields (BARF) for training NeRF from imperfect camera poses -- the joint problem of learning neural 3D representations and registering camera frames. We establish a theoretical connection to classical planar image registration and show that coarse-to-fine registration is also applicable to NeRF. Furthermore, we demonstrate mathematically that positional encoding has a direct impact on the basin of attraction for registration with a synthesis-based objective. Experiments on synthetic and real-world data show that BARF can effectively optimize the neural scene representations and resolve large camera pose misalignment at the same time. This enables applications of view synthesis and localization of video sequences from unknown camera poses, opening up new avenues for visual localization systems (e.g. SLAM) towards sequential registration with NeRF.