🙌🏻Generation of 3D scenes from 2D photos with NVIDIA's NeRF
Inverse rendering has long used AI to approximate the behavior of light in the real world, allowing a 3D scene to be reconstructed from multiple 2D images taken from different angles. The NVIDIA research team has developed an approach that solves this problem almost instantly by combining ultra-fast neural network training and fast rendering.
NVIDIA has taken this approach to a popular new technology called Neural Radiation Fields, or NeRF. The result, dubbed Instant NeRF, is the fastest NeRF technology to date, achieving over 1000x speedup in some cases. It only takes a few seconds for the model to learn from a few dozen still photos - plus the camera angles they were taken from - and then it can render the resulting 3D scene in tens of milliseconds.
NeRFs use neural networks to represent and render realistic 3D scenes based on an input collection of 2D images. Collecting data for NeRF transmission is reminiscent of the work of a photographer on the red carpet: the neural network needs several dozen images taken from different points of the scene, as well as the position of the camera of each of them.
Typically, creating a 3D scene using traditional methods takes several hours or more, depending on the complexity and resolution of the rendering. Bringing AI into the picture speeds things up. Early NeRF models rendered crisp, artifact-free scenes in minutes, but took hours to learn. Instant NeRF reduces rendering time by several orders of magnitude. It is based on multi-resolution hash mesh encoding that is optimized to run efficiently on NVIDIA GPUs. This way you can achieve high-quality results using a fast and small neural network.
The model was developed using the NVIDIA CUDA toolkit and the Tiny CUDA neural network library. Due to its lightness, the neural network can be trained and run on a single NVIDIA GPU - it runs fastest on cards with NVIDIA Tensor Cores.
This technology will be useful for training robots and self-driving cars so that they can understand the size and shape of objects in the real world by capturing 2D images or video recordings of them. It can also be used in architecture and entertainment to quickly create digital representations of real environments that creators can modify and use.
https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2022/03/25/instant-nerf-research-3d-ai/