SS-NeRF: Physically Based Sparse Spectral Rendering With Neural Radiance Field

In this paper, we propose SS-NeRF, the end-to-end Neural Radiance Field (NeRF)-based architectures for high-quality physically based rendering with sparse inputs. We modify the classical spectral rendering into two main steps, 1) the generation of a series of spectrum maps spanning different wavelengths, 2) the combination of these spectrum maps for the RGB output. The proposed architecture follows these two steps through the proposed multi-layer perceptron (MLP)-based architecture (SpectralMLP) and spectrum attention UNet (SAUNet). Given the ray origin and the ray direction, the SpectralMLP constructs the spectral radiance field to obtain spectrum maps of novel views, which are then sent to the SAUNet to produce RGB images of white-light illumination. Applying NeRF to build up the spectral rendering is a more physically-based way from the perspective of ray-tracing. Further, the spectral radiance fields decompose difficult scenes and improve the performance of NeRF-based methods. Previous baseline, such as SpectralNeRF, outperforms recent methods in synthesizing novel views but requires relatively dense viewpoints for accurate scene reconstruction. To tackle this, we propose SS-NeRF to enhance the detail of scene representation with sparse inputs. In SS-NeRF, we first design the depth-aware continuity to optimize the reconstruction based on single-view depth predictions. Then, the geometric-projected consistency is introduced to optimize the multi-view geometry alignment. Additionally, we introduce a superpixel-aligned consistency to ensure that the average color within each superpixel region remains consistent. Comprehensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method is superior to recent state-of-the-art methods when synthesizing new views on both synthetic and real-world datasets.