Area-NeRF: Area-based Neural Radiance Fields

Abstract

Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) has received widespread attention for its photo-realistic novel view synthesis quality. Current methods mainly represent the scene based on point sampling of ray casting, ignoring the influence of the observed area changing with distance. In addition, The current sampling strategies are all focused on the distribution of sampling points on the ray, without paying attention to the sampling of the ray. We found that the current ray sampling strategy for scenes with the camera moving forward severely reduces the convergence speed. In this work, we extend the point representation to area representation by using relative positional encoding, and propose a ray sampling strategy that is suitable for camera trajectory moving forward. We validated the effectiveness of our method on multiple public datasets.