RGB-D Mapping and Tracking in a Plenoxel Radiance Field

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that integrating RGB-D data into the Plenoxel radiance field model enables accurate dense 3D mapping and tracking, outperforming neural network-based methods in speed and accuracy.

Contribution

The authors extend the Plenoxel radiance field model to incorporate RGB-D data for dense mapping and tracking without neural networks, achieving state-of-the-art results.

Findings

Achieves superior mapping accuracy compared to previous methods.

Faster processing than neural network-based approaches.

Provides a neural network-free analytical differential method.

Abstract

The widespread adoption of Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) have ensured significant advances in the domain of novel view synthesis in recent years. These models capture a volumetric radiance field of a scene, creating highly convincing, dense, photorealistic models through the use of simple, differentiable rendering equations. Despite their popularity, these algorithms suffer from severe ambiguities in visual data inherent to the RGB sensor, which means that although images generated with view synthesis can visually appear very believable, the underlying 3D model will often be wrong. This considerably limits the usefulness of these models in practical applications like Robotics and Extended Reality (XR), where an accurate dense 3D reconstruction otherwise would be of significant value. In this paper, we present the vital differences between view synthesis models and 3D reconstruction models. We also comment on why a depth sensor is essential for modeling accurate geometry in general outward-facing scenes using the current paradigm of novel view synthesis methods. Focusing on the structure-from-motion task, we practically demonstrate this need by extending the Plenoxel radiance field model: Presenting an analytical differential approach for dense mapping and tracking with radiance fields based on RGB-D data without a neural network. Our method achieves state-of-the-art results in both mapping and tracking tasks, while also being faster than competing neural network-based approaches. The code is available at: https://github.com/ysus33/RGB-D_Plenoxel_Mapping_Tracking.git