The success of the Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) for modeling and free-view rendering static objects has inspired numerous attempts on dynamic scenes. Current techniques that utilize neural rendering for facilitating free-view videos (FVVs) are restricted to either offline rendering or are capable of processing only brief sequences with minimal motion. In this paper, we present a novel technique, Residual Radiance Field or ReRF, as a highly compact neural representation to achieve real-time FVV rendering on long-duration dynamic scenes. ReRF explicitly models the residual information between adjacent timestamps in the spatial-temporal feature space, with a global coordinate-based tiny MLP as the feature decoder. Specifically, ReRF employs a compact motion grid along with a residual feature grid to exploit inter-frame feature similarities. We show such a strategy can handle large motions without sacrificing quality. We further present a sequential training scheme to maintain the smoothness and the sparsity of the motion/residual grids. Based on ReRF, we design a special FVV codec that achieves three orders of magnitudes compression rate and provides a companion ReRF player to support online streaming of long-duration FVVs of dynamic scenes. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of ReRF for compactly representing dynamic radiance fields, enabling an unprecedented free-viewpoint viewing experience in speed and quality.
Pipeline
llustration of our Neural Residual Radiance Field (ReRF). First, we estimate a dense motion field Dt. Next, we generate a compact motion grid Mt through motion pooling. Finally, we warp ft−1 to a base grid ˆft and learn our residual grid rt to increase feature sparsity and promote compression.
Results
The rendered appearance results of our ReRF method on long sequences with large motions. The last row shows that we can enable variable bitrate.