360Roam: Real-Time Indoor Roaming Using Geometry-Aware 360$^\circ$ Radiance Fields

TL;DR

This paper introduces 360Roam, a real-time indoor roaming system using geometry-aware radiance fields that improve view synthesis and scene exploration by leveraging explicit geometry and adaptive local radiance fields.

Contribution

We propose a novel geometry-aware radiance field approach with adaptive local radiance fields for seamless, real-time indoor scene roaming, addressing large-scale scene challenges.

Findings

Superior rendering quality and speed compared to baselines

Effective scene geometry reconstruction from sparse images

Enhanced immersive roaming experience

Abstract

Virtual tour among sparse 360$^\circ$ images is widely used while hindering smooth and immersive roaming experiences. The emergence of Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) has showcased significant progress in synthesizing novel views, unlocking the potential for immersive scene exploration. Nevertheless, previous NeRF works primarily focused on object-centric scenarios, resulting in noticeable performance degradation when applied to outward-facing and large-scale scenes due to limitations in scene parameterization. To achieve seamless and real-time indoor roaming, we propose a novel approach using geometry-aware radiance fields with adaptively assigned local radiance fields. Initially, we employ multiple 360$^\circ$ images of an indoor scene to progressively reconstruct explicit geometry in the form of a probabilistic occupancy map, derived from a global omnidirectional radiance field. Subsequently, we assign local radiance fields through an adaptive divide-and-conquer strategy based on the recovered geometry. By incorporating geometry-aware sampling and decomposition of the global radiance field, our system effectively utilizes positional encoding and compact neural networks to enhance rendering quality and speed. Additionally, the extracted floorplan of the scene aids in providing visual guidance, contributing to a realistic roaming experience. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our system, we curated a diverse dataset of 360$^\circ$ images encompassing various real-life scenes, on which we conducted extensive experiments. Quantitative and qualitative comparisons against baseline approaches illustrated the superior performance of our system in large-scale indoor scene roaming.