# DIST: Rendering Deep Implicit Signed Distance Function with Differentiable Sphere Tracing

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.13225 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.13225/

## Key facts

- Cited by 180 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 29 Nov 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 180)

- [NeuS: Learning Neural Implicit Surfaces by Volume Rendering for Multi-view Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10689/) (2021)
- [DUSt3R: Geometric 3D Vision Made Easy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14132/) (2023)
- [Efficient Geometry-aware 3D Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.07945/) (2021)
- [Volume Rendering of Neural Implicit Surfaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.12052/) (2021)
- [IBRNet: Learning Multi-View Image-Based Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.13090/) (2021)
- [UNISURF: Unifying Neural Implicit Surfaces and Radiance Fields for Multi-View Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10078/) (2021)
- [NICE-SLAM: Neural Implicit Scalable Encoding for SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.12130/) (2021)
- [Neural Fields in Visual Computing and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.11426/) (2021)
- [MonoSDF: Exploring Monocular Geometric Cues for Neural Implicit Surface Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.00665/) (2022)
- [Neural Geometric Level of Detail: Real-time Rendering with Implicit 3D Shapes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.10994/) (2021)
- [In-Place Scene Labelling and Understanding with Implicit Scene Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15875/) (2021)
- [Advances in Neural Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.05849/) (2021)
- [OmniObject3D: Large-Vocabulary 3D Object Dataset for Realistic Perception, Reconstruction and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.07525/) (2023)
- [NeuS2: Fast Learning of Neural Implicit Surfaces for Multi-view Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.05231/) (2022)
- [3D Neural Field Generation using Triplane Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.16677/) (2022)
- [Learning Object-Compositional Neural Radiance Field for Editable Scene Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01847/) (2021)
- [Editing Conditional Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.06466/) (2021)
- [Neural Rays for Occlusion-aware Image-based Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.13421/) (2021)
- [NerfingMVS: Guided Optimization of Neural Radiance Fields for Indoor Multi-view Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01129/) (2021)
- [Shape As Points: A Differentiable Poisson Solver](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03452/) (2021)
- [SparseNeuS: Fast Generalizable Neural Surface Reconstruction from Sparse Views](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.05737/) (2022)
- [NEAT: Neural Attention Fields for End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.04456/) (2021)
- [NICER-SLAM: Neural Implicit Scene Encoding for RGB SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.03594/) (2023)
- [Neural Human Performer: Learning Generalizable Radiance Fields for Human Performance Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07448/) (2021)
- [BACON: Band-limited Coordinate Networks for Multiscale Scene Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.04645/) (2021)
- [MV-DUSt3R+: Single-Stage Scene Reconstruction from Sparse Views In 2 Seconds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.06974/) (2024)
- [Modulated Periodic Activations for Generalizable Local Functional Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.03960/) (2021)
- [NeuSG: Neural Implicit Surface Reconstruction with 3D Gaussian Splatting Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00846/) (2023)
- [Neural 3D Scene Reconstruction with the Manhattan-world Assumption](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.02836/) (2022)
- [Generalizable Patch-Based Neural Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.10662/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We propose a differentiable sphere tracing algorithm to bridge the gap between inverse graphics methods and the recently proposed deep learning based implicit signed distance function. Due to the nature of the implicit function, the rendering process requires tremendous function queries, which is particularly problematic when the function is represented as a neural network. We optimize both the forward and backward passes of our rendering layer to make it run efficiently with affordable memory consumption on a commodity graphics card. Our rendering method is fully differentiable such that losses can be directly computed on the rendered 2D observations, and the gradients can be propagated backwards to optimize the 3D geometry. We show that our rendering method can effectively reconstruct accurate 3D shapes from various inputs, such as sparse depth and multi-view images, through inverse optimization. With the geometry based reasoning, our 3D shape prediction methods show excellent generalization capability and robustness against various noises.