Neural Pruning for 3D Scene Reconstruction: Efficient NeRF Acceleration

Abstract: Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) have become a popular 3D reconstruction approach in recent years. While they produce high-quality results, they also demand lengthy training times, often spanning days. This paper studies neural pruning as a strategy to address these concerns. We compare pruning approaches, including uniform sampling, importance-based methods, and coreset-based techniques, to reduce the model size and speed up training. Our findings show that coreset-driven pruning can achieve a 50% reduction in model size and a 35% speedup in training, with only a slight decrease in accuracy. These results suggest that pruning can be an effective method for improving the efficiency of NeRF models in resource-limited settings.