Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) show impressive performances in photo-realistic free-view rendering of scenes. Recent improvements such as TensoRF and ZipNeRF employ explicit models for faster optimization and rendering. However, all these radiance fields require a dense sampling of images in the given scene for effective training. Their performances degrade significantly when only a sparse set of views is available. Existing depth priors used to supervise the radiance fields are either sparse or suffer from generalization issues. We seek to learn scene-specific dense depth priors to regularize the radiance fields. Further, we desire a framework of regularizations that can work across different radiance field models. We observe that certain features of the radiance fields, such as positional encoding, number of decomposed tensor components or size of the hash table, cause overfitting in the sparse-input scenario. We design augmented models by reducing the capacity of these features and train them along with the main radiance field. These augmented models learn simpler solutions, which estimate better depth in certain regions. By supervising the main radiance field with such depths, we significantly improve the performance of the radiance fields on popular forward-facing and 360ˆ datasets by employing the above regularization.

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has shown impressive results in real-time novel view synthesis. However, it often struggles under sparse-view settings, producing undesirable artifacts such as floaters, inaccurate geometry, and overfitting due to limited observations. We find that a key contributing factor is uncontrolled densification, where adding Gaussian primitives rapidly without guidance can harm geometry and cause artifacts. We propose AD-GS, a novel alternating densification framework that interleaves high and low densification phases. During high densification, the model densifies aggressively, followed by photometric loss based training to capture fine-grained scene details. Low densification then primarily involves aggressive opacity pruning of Gaussians followed by regularizing their geometry through pseudo-view consistency and edge-aware depth smoothness. This alternating approach helps reduce overfitting by carefully controlling model capacity growth while progressively refining the scene representation. Extensive experiments on challenging datasets demonstrate that AD-GS significantly improves rendering quality and geometric consistency compared to existing methods. The source code for our model can be found on our project page: https://gurutvapatle.github.io/publications/2025/ADGS.html.

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) show impressive performance for the photo-realistic free-view rendering of scenes. However, NeRFs require dense sampling of images in the given scene, and their performance degrades significantly when only a sparse set of views are available. Researchers have found that supervising the depth estimated by the NeRF helps train it effectively with fewer views. The depth supervision is obtained either using classical approaches or neural networks pre-trained on a large dataset. While the former may provide only sparse supervision, the latter may suffer from generalization issues. As opposed to the earlier approaches, we seek to learn the depth supervision by designing augmented models and training them along with the NeRF. We design augmented models that encourage simpler solutions by exploring the role of positional encoding and view-dependent radiance in training the few-shot NeRF. The depth estimated by these simpler models is used to supervise the NeRF depth estimates. Since the augmented models can be inaccurate in certain regions, we design a mechanism to choose only reliable depth estimates for supervision. Finally, we add a consistency loss between the coarse and fine multi-layer perceptrons of the NeRF to ensure better utilization of hierarchical sampling. We achieve state-of-the-art view-synthesis performance on two popular datasets by employing the above regularizations. The source code for our model can be found on our project page: https://nagabhushansn95.github.io/publications/2023/SimpleNeRF.html

The challenge of graphically rendering high frame-rate videos on low compute devices can be addressed through periodic prediction of future frames to enhance the user experience in virtual reality applications. This is studied through the problem of temporal view synthesis (TVS), where the goal is to predict the next frames of a video given the previous frames and the head poses of the previous and the next frames. In this work, we consider the TVS of dynamic scenes in which both the user and objects are moving. We design a framework that decouples the motion into user and object motion to effectively use the available user motion while predicting the next frames. We predict the motion of objects by isolating and estimating the 3D object motion in the past frames and then extrapolating it. We employ multi-plane images (MPI) as a 3D representation of the scenes and model the object motion as the 3D displacement between the corresponding points in the MPI representation. In order to handle the sparsity in MPIs while estimating the motion, we incorporate partial convolutions and masked correlation layers to estimate corresponding points. The predicted object motion is then integrated with the given user or camera motion to generate the next frame. Using a disocclusion infilling module, we synthesize the regions uncovered due to the camera and object motion. We develop a new synthetic dataset for TVS of dynamic scenes consisting of 800 videos at full HD resolution. We show through experiments on our dataset and the MPI Sintel dataset that our model outperforms all the competing methods in the literature.

We consider the problem of temporal view synthesis, where the goal is to predict a future video frame from the past frames using knowledge of the depth and relative camera motion. In contrast to revealing the disoccluded regions through intensity based infilling, we study the idea of an infilling vector to infill by pointing to a non-disoccluded region in the synthesized view. To exploit the structure of disocclusions created by camera motion during their infilling, we rely on two important cues, temporal correlation of infilling directions and depth. We design a learning framework to predict the infilling vector by computing a temporal prior that reflects past infilling directions and a normalized depth map as input to the network. We conduct extensive experiments on a large scale dataset we build for evaluating temporal view synthesis in addition to the SceneNet RGB-D dataset. Our experiments demonstrate that our infilling vector prediction approach achieves superior quantitative and qualitative infilling performance compared to other approaches in literature.