Unmanned Aerial Vehicle-Neural Radiance Field (UAV-NeRF): Learning Multiview Drone Three-Dimensional Reconstruction with Neural Radiance Field

Abstract

In traditional 3D reconstruction using UAV images, only radiance information, which is treated as a geometric constraint, is used in feature matching, allowing for the restoration of the scene’s structure. After introducing radiance supervision, NeRF can adjust the geometry in the fixed-ray direction, resulting in a smaller search space and higher robustness. Considering the lack of NeRF construction methods for aerial scenarios, we propose a new NeRF point sampling method, which is generated using a UAV imaging model, compatible with a global geographic coordinate system, and suitable for a UAV view. We found that NeRF is optimized entirely based on the radiance while ignoring the direct geometry constraint. Therefore, we designed a radiance correction strategy that considers the incidence angle. Our method can complete point sampling in a UAV imaging scene, as well as simultaneously perform digital surface model construction and ground radiance information recovery. When tested on self-acquired datasets, the NeRF variant proposed in this paper achieved better reconstruction accuracy than the original NeRF-based methods. It also reached a level of precision comparable to that of traditional photogrammetry methods, and it is capable of outputting a surface albedo that includes shadow information.