SpikingNeRF: Making Bio-inspired Neural Networks See through the Real World
This work enables high-quality 3D rendering on neuromorphic hardware, addressing energy efficiency for applications like robotics and AR/VR.
The paper tackles the problem of making neural radiance fields (NeRF) energy-efficient by integrating spiking neural networks (SNNs) with NeRF, resulting in a 70.79% reduction in energy consumption while maintaining comparable synthesis quality to ANN baselines.
In this paper, we propose SpikingNeRF, which aligns the temporal dimension of spiking neural networks (SNNs) with the radiance rays, to seamlessly accommodate SNNs to the reconstruction of neural radiance fields (NeRF). Thus, the computation turns into a spike-based, multiplication-free manner, reducing energy consumption and making high-quality 3D rendering, for the first time, accessible to neuromorphic hardware. In SpikingNeRF, each sampled point on the ray is matched to a particular time step and represented in a hybrid manner where the voxel grids are maintained as well. Based on the voxel grids, sampled points are determined whether to be masked out for faster training and inference. However, this masking operation also incurs irregular temporal length, making it intractable for hardware processors, e.g., GPUs, to conduct parallel training. To address this problem, we develop the temporal padding strategy to tackle the masked samples to maintain regular temporal length, i.e., regular tensors, and further propose the temporal condensing strategy to form a denser data structure for hardware-friendly computation. Experiments on various datasets demonstrate that our method can reduce energy consumption by an average of 70.79\% and obtain comparable synthesis quality with the ANN baseline. Verification on the neuromorphic hardware accelerator also shows that SpikingNeRF can further benefit from neuromorphic computing over the ANN baselines on energy efficiency. Codes and the appendix are in \url{https://github.com/Ikarosy/SpikingNeRF-of-CASIA}.