Neural Deformable Voxel Grid for Fast Optimization of Dynamic View Synthesis

Abstract: Recently, Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) is revolutionizing the task of novel view synthesis (NVS) for its superior performance. In this paper, we propose to synthesize dynamic scenes. Extending the methods for static scenes to dynamic scenes is not straightforward as both the scene geometry and appearance change over time, especially under monocular setup. Also, the existing dynamic NeRF methods generally require a lengthy per-scene training procedure, where multi-layer perceptrons (MLP) are fitted to model both motions and radiance. In this paper, built on top of the recent advances in voxel-grid optimization, we propose a fast deformable radiance field method to handle dynamic scenes. Our method consists of two modules. The first module adopts a deformation grid to store 3D dynamic features, and a light-weight MLP for decoding the deformation that maps a 3D point in the observation space to the canonical space using the interpolated features. The second module contains a density and a color grid to model the geometry and density of the scene. The occlusion is explicitly modeled to further improve the rendering quality. Experimental results show that our method achieves comparable performance to D-NeRF using only 20 minutes for training, which is more than 70x faster than D-NeRF, clearly demonstrating the efficiency of our proposed method.