Abstract Point‐based radiance field rendering has demonstrated impressive results for novel view synthesis, offering a compelling blend of rendering quality and computational efficiency. However, also latest approaches in this domain are not without their shortcomings. 3D Gaussian Splatting [KKLD23] struggles when tasked with rendering highly detailed scenes, due to blurring and cloudy artifacts. On the other hand, ADOP [RFS22] can accommodate crisper images, but the neural reconstruction network decreases performance, it grapples with temporal instability and it is unable to effectively address large gaps in the point cloud. In this paper, we present TRIPS (Trilinear Point Splatting), an approach that combines ideas from both Gaussian Splatting and ADOP. The fundamental concept behind our novel technique involves rasterizing points into a screen‐space image pyramid, with the selection of the pyramid layer determined by the projected point size. This approach allows rendering arbitrarily large points using a single trilinear write. A lightweight neural network is then used to reconstruct a hole‐free image including detail beyond splat resolution. Importantly, our render pipeline is entirely differentiable, allowing for automatic optimization of both point sizes and positions. Our evaluation demonstrate that TRIPS surpasses existing state‐of‐the‐art methods in terms of rendering quality while maintaining a real‐time frame rate of 60 frames per second on readily available hardware. This performance extends to challenging scenarios, such as scenes featuring intricate geometry, expansive landscapes, and auto‐exposed footage. The project page is located at: https://lfranke.github.io/trips

Existing real-time RGB-D reconstruction approaches, like Kinect Fusion, lack real-time photo-realistic visualization. This is due to noisy, oversmoothed or incomplete geometry and blurry textures which are fused from imperfect depth maps and camera poses. Recent neural rendering methods can overcome many of such artifacts but are mostly optimized for offline usage, hindering the integration into a live reconstruction pipeline.

In the last few years, deep neural networks opened the doors for big advances in novel view synthesis. Many of these approaches are based on a (coarse) proxy geometry obtained by structure from motion algorithms. Small deficiencies in this proxy can be fixed by neural rendering, but larger holes or missing parts, as they commonly appear for thin structures or for glossy regions, still lead to distracting artifacts and temporal instability. In this paper, we present a novel neural-rendering-based approach to detect and fix such deficiencies. As a proxy, we use a point cloud, which allows us to easily remove outlier geometry and to fill in missing geometry without complicated topological operations. Keys to our approach are (i) a differentiable, blending point-based renderer that can blend out redundant points, as well as (ii) the concept of Visual Error Tomography (VET), which allows us to lift 2D error maps to identify 3D-regions lacking geometry and to spawn novel points accordingly. Furthermore, (iii) by adding points as nested environment maps, our approach allows us to generate high-quality renderings of the surroundings in the same pipeline. In our results, we show that our approach can improve the quality of a point cloud obtained by structure from motion and thus increase novel view synthesis quality significantly. In contrast to point growing techniques, the approach can also fix large-scale holes and missing thin structures effectively. Rendering quality outperforms state-of-the-art methods and temporal stability is significantly improved, while rendering is possible at real-time frame rates.

In this paper we present ADOP, a novel point-based, differentiable neural rendering pipeline. Like other neural renderers, our system takes as input calibrated camera images and a proxy geometry of the scene, in our case a point cloud. To generate a novel view, the point cloud is rasterized with learned feature vectors as colors and a deep neural network fills the remaining holes and shades each output pixel. The rasterizer renders points as one-pixel splats, which makes it very fast and allows us to compute gradients with respect to all relevant input parameters efficiently. Furthermore, our pipeline contains a fully differentiable physically-based photometric camera model, including exposure, white balance, and a camera response function. Following the idea of inverse rendering, we use our renderer to refine its input in order to reduce inconsistencies and optimize the quality of its output. In particular, we can optimize structural parameters like the camera pose, lens distortions, point positions and features, and a neural environment map, but also photometric parameters like camera response function, vignetting, and per-image exposure and white balance. Because our pipeline includes photometric parameters, e.g. exposure and camera response function, our system can smoothly handle input images with varying exposure and white balance, and generates high-dynamic range output. We show that due to the improved input, we can achieve high render quality, also for difficult input, e.g. with imperfect camera calibrations, inaccurate proxy geometry, or varying exposure. As a result, a simpler and thus faster deep neural network is sufficient for reconstruction. In combination with the fast point rasterization, ADOP achieves real-time rendering rates even for models with well over 100M points. https://github.com/darglein/ADOP

In this paper, we present Neural Adaptive Tomography (NeAT), the first adaptive, hierarchical neural rendering pipeline for tomography. Through a combination of neural features with an adaptive explicit representation, we achieve reconstruction times far superior to existing neural inverse rendering methods. The adaptive explicit representation improves efficiency by facilitating empty space culling and concentrating samples in complex regions, while the neural features act as a neural regularizer for the 3D reconstruction. The NeAT framework is designed specifically for the tomographic setting, which consists only of semi-transparent volumetric scenes instead of opaque objects. In this setting, NeAT outperforms the quality of existing optimization-based tomography solvers while being substantially faster. https://github.com/darglein/NeAT

Abstract We present a linear algebra framework for structured matrices and general optimization problems. The matrices and matrix operations are defined recursively to efficiently capture complex structures and enable advanced compiler optimization. In addition to common dense and sparse matrix types, we define mixed matrices, which allow every element to be of a different type. Using mixed matrices, the low‐ and high‐level structure of complex optimization problems can be encoded in a single type. This type is then analyzed at compile time by a recursive linear solver that picks the optimal algorithm for the given problem. For common computer vision problems, our system yields a speedup of 3–5 compared to other optimization frameworks. The BLAS performance is benchmarked against the MKL library. We achieve a significant speedup in block‐SPMV and block‐SPMM. This work is implemented and released open‐source as a header‐only extension to the C+ + math library Eigen.