# NeX: Real-time View Synthesis with Neural Basis Expansion

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.05606 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.05606/

## Key facts

- Cited by 216 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 25 of its 56 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Mar 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Implicit Neural Representations with Periodic Activation Functions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09661/) (2020)
- [Fourier Features Let Networks Learn High Frequency Functions in Low Dimensional Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10739/) (2020)
- [NeRF in the Wild: Neural Radiance Fields for Unconstrained Photo Collections](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.02268/) (2020)
- [Deep Image Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10925/) (2017)
- [Neural Sparse Voxel Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.11571/) (2020)
- [Scene Representation Networks: Continuous 3D-Structure-Aware Neural Scene Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.01618/) (2019)
- [NeRF++: Analyzing and Improving Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.07492/) (2020)
- [DeepVoxels: Learning Persistent 3D Feature Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01024/) (2018)
- [SynSin: End-to-end View Synthesis from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.08804/) (2019)
- [Single-View View Synthesis with Multiplane Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.11364/) (2020)
- [Deferred Neural Rendering: Image Synthesis using Neural Textures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.12356/) (2019)
- [DeepView: View Synthesis with Learned Gradient Descent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.07316/) (2019)
- [Stereo Magnification: Learning View Synthesis using Multiplane Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.09817/) (2018)
- [Neural Reflectance Fields for Appearance Acquisition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.03824/) (2020)
- [Pushing the Boundaries of View Extrapolation with Multiplane Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.00413/) (2019)
- [DeepStereo: Learning to Predict New Views from the World's Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.06825/) (2015)
- [3D Ken Burns Effect from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.05483/) (2019)
- [Extreme View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04777/) (2018)
- [Layer-structured 3D Scene Inference via View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.10264/) (2018)
- [Neural Light Transport for Relighting and View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.03806/) (2020)
- [Crowdsampling the Plenoptic Function](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.15194/) (2020)
- [Learning to Synthesize a 4D RGBD Light Field from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.03292/) (2017)
- [Peeking Behind Objects: Layered Depth Prediction from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.08776/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 216)

- [Instant Neural Graphics Primitives with a Multiresolution Hash Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05989/) (2022)
- [Plenoxels: Radiance Fields without Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05131/) (2021)
- [Direct Voxel Grid Optimization: Super-fast Convergence for Radiance Fields Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.11215/) (2021)
- [PlenOctrees for Real-time Rendering of Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14024/) (2021)
- [K-Planes: Explicit Radiance Fields in Space, Time, and Appearance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.10241/) (2023)
- [Ref-NeRF: Structured View-Dependent Appearance for Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.03907/) (2021)
- [Neural Fields in Visual Computing and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.11426/) (2021)
- [Extracting Triangular 3D Models, Materials, and Lighting From Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12503/) (2021)
- [Advances in Neural Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.05849/) (2021)
- [Fast Dynamic Radiance Fields with Time-Aware Neural Voxels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.15285/) (2022)
- [MobileNeRF: Exploiting the Polygon Rasterization Pipeline for Efficient Neural Field Rendering on Mobile Architectures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.00277/) (2022)
- [FSGS: Real-Time Few-shot View Synthesis using Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00451/) (2023)
- [SparseNeRF: Distilling Depth Ranking for Few-shot Novel View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16196/) (2023)
- [HeadNeRF: A Real-time NeRF-based Parametric Head Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05637/) (2021)
- [DynIBaR: Neural Dynamic Image-Based Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11082/) (2022)
- [BakedSDF: Meshing Neural SDFs for Real-Time View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.14859/) (2023)
- [MERF: Memory-Efficient Radiance Fields for Real-time View Synthesis in Unbounded Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.12249/) (2023)
- [NeRF-Editing: Geometry Editing of Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.04978/) (2022)
- [Neural Rays for Occlusion-aware Image-based Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.13421/) (2021)
- [InfoNeRF: Ray Entropy Minimization for Few-Shot Neural Volume Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.15399/) (2021)
- [HyperReel: High-Fidelity 6-DoF Video with Ray-Conditioned Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.02238/) (2023)
- [Fourier PlenOctrees for Dynamic Radiance Field Rendering in Real-time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.08614/) (2022)
- [Shape, Light, and Material Decomposition from Images using Monte Carlo Rendering and Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.03380/) (2022)
- [Segment Any 3D Gaussians](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00860/) (2023)
- [3DGStream: On-the-Fly Training of 3D Gaussians for Efficient Streaming of Photo-Realistic Free-Viewpoint Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.01444/) (2024)
- [NeRFPlayer: A Streamable Dynamic Scene Representation with Decomposed Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.15947/) (2022)
- [Efficient Neural Radiance Fields for Interactive Free-viewpoint Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01517/) (2021)
- [SPIn-NeRF: Multiview Segmentation and Perceptual Inpainting with Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12254/) (2022)
- [Photo-SLAM: Real-time Simultaneous Localization and Photorealistic Mapping for Monocular, Stereo, and RGB-D Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16728/) (2023)
- [StylizedNeRF: Consistent 3D Scene Stylization as Stylized NeRF via 2D-3D Mutual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.12183/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present NeX, a new approach to novel view synthesis based on enhancements of multiplane image (MPI) that can reproduce next-level view-dependent effects -- in real time. Unlike traditional MPI that uses a set of simple RGBα planes, our technique models view-dependent effects by instead parameterizing each pixel as a linear combination of basis functions learned from a neural network. Moreover, we propose a hybrid implicit-explicit modeling strategy that improves upon fine detail and produces state-of-the-art results. Our method is evaluated on benchmark forward-facing datasets as well as our newly-introduced dataset designed to test the limit of view-dependent modeling with significantly more challenging effects such as rainbow reflections on a CD. Our method achieves the best overall scores across all major metrics on these datasets with more than 1000× faster rendering time than the state of the art. For real-time demos, visit https://nex-mpi.github.io/
