LANe: Lighting-Aware Neural Fields for Compositional Scene Synthesis

Abstract: Neural fields have recently enjoyed great success in representing and rendering 3D scenes. However, most state-of-the-art implicit representations model static or dynamic scenes as a whole, with minor variations. Existing work on learning disentangled world and object neural fields do not consider the problem of composing objects into different world neural fields in a lighting-aware manner. We present Lighting-Aware Neural Field (LANe) for the compositional synthesis of driving scenes in a physically consistent manner. Specifically, we learn a scene representation that disentangles the static background and transient elements into a world-NeRF and class-specific object-NeRFs to allow compositional synthesis of multiple objects in the scene. Furthermore, we explicitly designed both the world and object models to handle lighting variation, which allows us to compose objects into scenes with spatially varying lighting. This is achieved by constructing a light field of the scene and using it in conjunction with a learned shader to modulate the appearance of the object NeRFs. We demonstrate the performance of our model on a synthetic dataset of diverse lighting conditions rendered with the CARLA simulator, as well as a novel real-world dataset of cars collected at different times of the day. Our approach shows that it outperforms state-of-the-art compositional scene synthesis on the challenging dataset setup, via composing object-NeRFs learned from one scene into an entirely different scene whilst still respecting the lighting variations in the novel scene. For more results, please visit our project website https://lane-composition.github.io/.