Radiance Meshes for Volumetric Reconstruction
This work addresses the need for efficient and high-quality radiance field representations in computer vision and graphics, with potential applications in view synthesis, simulation, and editing.
The paper tackles the problem of representing radiance fields for volumetric reconstruction by introducing radiance meshes based on Delaunay tetrahedralization, achieving faster rendering speeds than prior methods and enabling high-quality, real-time view synthesis on consumer hardware.
We introduce radiance meshes, a technique for representing radiance fields with constant density tetrahedral cells produced with a Delaunay tetrahedralization. Unlike a Voronoi diagram, a Delaunay tetrahedralization yields simple triangles that are natively supported by existing hardware. As such, our model is able to perform exact and fast volume rendering using both rasterization and ray-tracing. We introduce a new rasterization method that achieves faster rendering speeds than all prior radiance field representations (assuming an equivalent number of primitives and resolution) across a variety of platforms. Optimizing the positions of Delaunay vertices introduces topological discontinuities (edge flips). To solve this, we use a Zip-NeRF-style backbone which allows us to express a smoothly varying field even when the topology changes. Our rendering method exactly evaluates the volume rendering equation and enables high quality, real-time view synthesis on standard consumer hardware. Our tetrahedral meshes also lend themselves to a variety of exciting applications including fisheye lens distortion, physics-based simulation, editing, and mesh extraction.