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DirectL: Efficient Radiance Fields Rendering for 3D Light Field Displays (2407.14053v1)

Published 19 Jul 2024 in cs.GR and cs.CV

Abstract: Autostereoscopic display, despite decades of development, has not achieved extensive application, primarily due to the daunting challenge of 3D content creation for non-specialists. The emergence of Radiance Field as an innovative 3D representation has markedly revolutionized the domains of 3D reconstruction and generation. This technology greatly simplifies 3D content creation for common users, broadening the applicability of Light Field Displays (LFDs). However, the combination of these two fields remains largely unexplored. The standard paradigm to create optimal content for parallax-based light field displays demands rendering at least 45 slightly shifted views preferably at high resolution per frame, a substantial hurdle for real-time rendering. We introduce DirectL, a novel rendering paradigm for Radiance Fields on 3D displays. We thoroughly analyze the interweaved mapping of spatial rays to screen subpixels, precisely determine the light rays entering the human eye, and propose subpixel repurposing to significantly reduce the pixel count required for rendering. Tailored for the two predominant radiance fields--Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) and 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS), we propose corresponding optimized rendering pipelines that directly render the light field images instead of multi-view images. Extensive experiments across various displays and user study demonstrate that DirectL accelerates rendering by up to 40 times compared to the standard paradigm without sacrificing visual quality. Its rendering process-only modification allows seamless integration into subsequent radiance field tasks. Finally, we integrate DirectL into diverse applications, showcasing the stunning visual experiences and the synergy between LFDs and Radiance Fields, which unveils tremendous potential for commercialization applications. \href{direct-l.github.io}{\textbf{Project Homepage}

Citations (1)

Summary

  • The paper introduces DirectL, a novel paradigm that repurposes idle subpixels to reduce the rendering workload by approximately 55%.
  • The paper optimizes NeRF and 3DGS through view-independent ray-order rendering, achieving up to 40× faster speeds without compromising visual quality.
  • The paper's experimental evaluations confirm enhanced visual fidelity across various light field displays, paving the way for real-time 3D applications.

Efficient Radiance Fields Rendering for 3D Light Field Displays: An In-Depth Analysis

The paper "DirectL: Efficient Radiance Fields Rendering for 3D Light Field Displays" proposes a novel rendering paradigm called DirectL aimed at improving the efficiency of radiance fields rendering for autostereoscopic light field displays. This paradigm addresses the existing challenges in creating and rendering high-quality 3D content for light field displays, making significant strides towards simplifying the process for non-specialists and enhancing rendering performance.

Introduction and Motivation

Light Field Displays (LFDs) are capable of reproducing the distribution of light rays from 3D scenes, providing realistic stereoscopic visualization. Despite the increasing availability of high-resolution lenticular lens-based LFDs, challenges in both 3D content creation and rendering efficiency have hindered widespread adoption. Traditional methods require rendering at least 45 high-resolution views per frame, posing a substantial hurdle for real-time applications.

The advent of Radiance Fields, specifically Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) and 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS), has revolutionized 3D scene reconstruction and generation, enabling high-quality content from simpler inputs like captured video. However, the combination of radiance fields and LFDs has been largely unexplored, especially at a fundamental level where optimization could yield significant benefits.

DirectL Paradigm Overview

DirectL introduces an innovative approach by leveraging the principles of both radiance fields and light field displays to achieve efficient rendering. The paradigm is divided into three primary steps:

  1. Offline Calculation of Ray Configurations: Precomputing the necessary parameters and indices for rendering based on the hardware specifications of the LFD.
  2. View-Independent Ray-Order Rendering: Implementing ray-order rendering pipelines for NeRFs and 3DGS, bypassing the need to render multiple views.
  3. Reordering Subpixels: Utilizing the precomputed indices to reorganize the RGB channels to form a correctly encoded image suitable for display.

Subpixel Repurposing

A key innovation in DirectL is the concept of subpixel repurposing. Traditional methods discard approximately 90% of the rendered pixels as each pixel on the encoded image only uses one color channel from the viewpoint images, leaving the others underutilized. DirectL repurposes these idle subpixels by reassigning them to nearby positions within the same viewpoint image. This strategy significantly reduces the total number of pixels that need to be rendered, by approximately 55%, without compromising visual quality.

Optimized Rendering Pipelines

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs)

For NeRFs, the rendering process is adapted to support ray-order processing:

  • The necessary rays are determined based on precomputed parameters.
  • Colors are computed for each ray individually, independent of the viewpoint, greatly optimizing the rendering process.
  • The resulting colors are then reordered to produce the final light field image.

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS)

For 3DGS, DirectL redesigns the original tile-based rasterization to adopt a ray-order approach:

  • A Bounding Volume Hierarchy (BVH) is constructed for efficient ray traversal.
  • Each ray checks for intersections with the Gaussians, sorts the intersecting points by distance, and performs alpha compositing to compute the final color.
  • The ray-order processing not only facilitates efficient rendering but also enhances the sharpness of the resulting images, improving visual clarity on the LFD.

Experimental Results

The experimental evaluation of DirectL was conducted on lenticular LFDs of varying resolutions and sizes, showcasing substantial improvements:

  • DirectL achieved up to 40 times faster rendering speeds compared to the standard paradigm.
  • Visual quality was maintained, as evidenced by user studies and RMSE metrics.
  • Particularly, the user visual perception evaluation demonstrated that the display quality of DirectL was close to or better than the high-resolution standard paradigm, with significant gains in rendering performance.

Implications and Future Research

DirectL's optimized rendering processes for radiance fields transform the feasibility of real-time applications on LFDs. Practically, this opens avenues for enhanced user experiences in areas such as virtual reality, gaming, and interactive 3D displays. Theoretically, it underscores the potential of integrating advanced rendering techniques to overcome hardware limitations and optimize computational resources.

Future research could focus on:

  • Advanced compression and storage solutions for the precomputed ray parameters to reduce memory usage.
  • Improved ray-order algorithms for 3DGS to further boost rendering efficiency.
  • Exploring super-resolution techniques specifically tailored for light field displays to enhance image clarity without increasing computational costs.
  • Developing quantitative metrics for assessing the perceptual quality of 3D displays, moving beyond subjective user studies.

Conclusion

The DirectL paradigm represents a significant step towards real-time, high-quality 3D rendering on light field displays by effectively combining the strengths of radiance fields with optimized rendering techniques. This innovative approach not only addresses existing challenges but also paves the way for widespread adoption and new applications in the field of 3D displays and interactive visual content.

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