SiLVR: Scalable Lidar-Visual Reconstruction with Neural Radiance Fields for Robotic Inspection
This work addresses robotic inspection in large-scale environments, offering a scalable solution with metric scale, but it is incremental as it adapts existing NeRF methods by incorporating lidar data.
The paper tackles the problem of large-scale 3D reconstruction by fusing lidar and vision data using neural radiance fields, resulting in high-quality reconstructions that are geometrically accurate and photo-realistic, demonstrated over trajectories up to 600 metres.
We present a neural-field-based large-scale reconstruction system that fuses lidar and vision data to generate high-quality reconstructions that are geometrically accurate and capture photo-realistic textures. This system adapts the state-of-the-art neural radiance field (NeRF) representation to also incorporate lidar data which adds strong geometric constraints on the depth and surface normals. We exploit the trajectory from a real-time lidar SLAM system to bootstrap a Structure-from-Motion (SfM) procedure to both significantly reduce the computation time and to provide metric scale which is crucial for lidar depth loss. We use submapping to scale the system to large-scale environments captured over long trajectories. We demonstrate the reconstruction system with data from a multi-camera, lidar sensor suite onboard a legged robot, hand-held while scanning building scenes for 600 metres, and onboard an aerial robot surveying a multi-storey mock disaster site-building. Website: https://ori-drs.github.io/projects/silvr/