PC-NeRF: Parent-Child Neural Radiance Fields Using Sparse LiDAR Frames in Autonomous Driving Environments
This addresses a critical problem for autonomous vehicles by enabling accurate 3D reconstruction from sparse data, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing NeRF methods.
The paper tackles large-scale 3D scene reconstruction and novel view synthesis using sparse LiDAR frames for autonomous driving, proposing PC-NeRF, which achieves high-precision results with efficient deployment in limited training epochs.
Large-scale 3D scene reconstruction and novel view synthesis are vital for autonomous vehicles, especially utilizing temporally sparse LiDAR frames. However, conventional explicit representations remain a significant bottleneck towards representing the reconstructed and synthetic scenes at unlimited resolution. Although the recently developed neural radiance fields (NeRF) have shown compelling results in implicit representations, the problem of large-scale 3D scene reconstruction and novel view synthesis using sparse LiDAR frames remains unexplored. To bridge this gap, we propose a 3D scene reconstruction and novel view synthesis framework called parent-child neural radiance field (PC-NeRF). Based on its two modules, parent NeRF and child NeRF, the framework implements hierarchical spatial partitioning and multi-level scene representation, including scene, segment, and point levels. The multi-level scene representation enhances the efficient utilization of sparse LiDAR point cloud data and enables the rapid acquisition of an approximate volumetric scene representation. With extensive experiments, PC-NeRF is proven to achieve high-precision novel LiDAR view synthesis and 3D reconstruction in large-scale scenes. Moreover, PC-NeRF can effectively handle situations with sparse LiDAR frames and demonstrate high deployment efficiency with limited training epochs. Our approach implementation and the pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/biter0088/pc-nerf.