We present a novel approach to large-scale point cloud surface reconstruction by developing an efficient framework that converts an irregular point cloud into a signed distance field (SDF). Our backbone builds upon recent transformer-based architectures (i.e. PointTransformerV3), that serializes the point cloud into a locality-preserving sequence of tokens. We efficiently predict the SDF value at a point by aggregating nearby tokens, where fast approximate neighbors can be retrieved thanks to the serialization. We serialize the point cloud at different levels/scales, and non-linearly aggregate a feature to predict the SDF value. We show that aggregating across multiple scales is critical to overcome the approximations introduced by the serialization (i.e. false negatives in the neighborhood). Our frameworks sets the new state-of-the-art in terms of accuracy and efficiency (better or similar performance with half the latency of the best prior method, coupled with a simpler implementation), particularly on outdoor datasets where sparse-grid methods have shown limited performance.

Research on differentiable scene representations is consistently moving towards more efficient, real-time models. Recently, this has led to the popularization of splatting methods, which eschew the traditional ray-based rendering of radiance fields in favor of rasterization. This has yielded a significant improvement in rendering speeds due to the efficiency of rasterization algorithms and hardware, but has come at a cost: the approximations that make rasterization efficient also make implementation of light transport phenomena like reflection and refraction much more difficult. We propose a novel scene representation which avoids these approximations, but keeps the efficiency and reconstruction quality of splatting by leveraging a decades-old efficient volumetric mesh ray tracing algorithm which has been largely overlooked in recent computer vision research. The resulting model, which we name Radiant Foam, achieves rendering speed and quality comparable to Gaussian Splatting, without the constraints of rasterization. Unlike ray traced Gaussian models that use hardware ray tracing acceleration, our method requires no special hardware or APIs beyond the standard features of a programmable GPU.

Largely due to their implicit nature, neural fields lack a direct mechanism for filtering, as Fourier analysis from discrete signal processing is not directly applicable to these representations. Effective filtering of neural fields is critical to enable level-of-detail processing in downstream applications, and support operations that involve sampling the field on regular grids (e.g. marching cubes). Existing methods that attempt to decompose neural fields in the frequency domain either resort to heuristics or require extensive modifications to the neural field architecture. We show that via a simple modification, one can obtain neural fields that are low-pass filtered, and in turn show how this can be exploited to obtain a frequency decomposition of the entire signal. We demonstrate the validity of our technique by investigating level-of-detail reconstruction, and showing how coarser representations can be computed effectively. Source code is available at https://theialab.github.io/banf

Dual pixels contain disparity cues arising from the defocus blur. This disparity information is useful for many vision tasks ranging from autonomous driving to 3D creative realism. However, directly estimating disparity from dual pixels is less accurate. This work hypothesizes that distilling high-precision dark stereo knowledge, implicitly or explicitly, to efficient dual-pixel student networks enables faithful reconstructions. This dark knowledge distillation should also alleviate stereo-synchronization setup and calibration costs while dramatically increasing parameter and inference time efficiency. We collect the first and largest 3-view dual-pixel video dataset, dpMV, to validate our explicit dark knowledge distillation hypothesis. We show that these methods outperform purely monocular solutions, especially in challenging foreground-background separation regions using faithful guidance from dual pixels. Finally, we demonstrate an unconventional use case unlocked by dpMV and implicit dark knowledge distillation from an ensemble of teachers for Light Field (LF) video reconstruction. Our LF video reconstruction method is the fastest and most temporally consistent to date. It remains competitive in reconstruction fidelity while offering many other essential properties like high parameter efficiency, implicit disocclusion handling, zero-shot cross-dataset transfer, geometrically consistent inference on higher spatial-angular resolutions, and adaptive baseline control. All source code is available at the repository https://github.com/Aryan-Garg.