Even though the name suggests it, no this doesn't have anything to do with NeRF streaming. It does however do something pretty amazing. NeRF-based approaches struggle to recover high-quality details from source images in real-world scenarios. The imperfect calibration information and scene representation inaccuracy often lead to rendering artifacts, such as noise and blur. Addressing these challenges, researchers have proposed NeRFLiX, a general NeRF-agnostic restorer paradigm that significantly improves the synthesis quality of NeRF-based approaches.
The NeRFLiX system uses a degradation-driven inter-viewpoint mixer to effectively remove NeRF-native rendering artifacts for existing deep neural networks. This breakthrough technology pushes the performance of cutting-edge NeRF models to entirely new levels, producing highly photorealistic synthetic views.
The NeRFLiX framework consists of two main components: a NeRF-style degradation simulator (NDS) and an inter-viewpoint mixer (IVM). The NDS is designed to create large-scale paired training data that closely resemble NeRF-rendered images, while the IVM enhances a rendered view by fusing useful information from the most relevant reference views.
Constructing Massive Paired Data with NeRF-style Degradation Simulator
The NeRF-style degradation simulator (NDS) addresses the challenge of constructing large-scale paired data for training. By simulating various NeRF-style degradations, researchers have been able to create a sizable dataset that covers a wide range of scenes and degradation types. This data aids in training deep neural networks to improve the quality of NeRF-rendered images, making NeRFLiX a natural enhancer for NeRF models.
Inter-Viewpoint Mixer: Maximizing Efficiency and Performance
NeRFLiX's inter-viewpoint mixer (IVM) progressively aligns image contents at the pixel and patch levels to maximize efficiency and improve performance. It also employs a fast view selection technique to choose only the most relevant reference training views for aggregation, rather than using the entire NeRF input views. This approach not only enhances the quality of NeRF-rendered images but also accelerates training time.
50% Reduction in Training Time with NeRFLiX
One of the most impressive achievements of NeRFLiX is its ability to significantly reduce training time. By employing the proposed IVM and NDS, NeRFLiX has demonstrated a 50% reduction in training time while still producing even better results.
NeRFLiX represents another encouraging step forwards in the march towards photorealism from datasets in the wild. As methods become stronger, I believe the barrier to entry will naturally be more accessible for the average person, to allow them to utilize NeRF for their own memories. The code for NeRFLiX has not been released yet, but the authors have marked that it will be released.