# Neural Radiance Fields Approach to Deep Multi-View Photometric Stereo

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.05594 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.05594/

## Key facts

- Cited by 25 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 48 of its 129 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Oct 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 48)

- [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)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [Mip-NeRF: A Multiscale Representation for Anti-Aliasing Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13415/) (2021)
- [pixelNeRF: Neural Radiance Fields from One or Few Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.02190/) (2020)
- [D-NeRF: Neural Radiance Fields for Dynamic Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13961/) (2020)
- [On the Spectral Bias of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.08734/) (2018)
- [NeRF in the Wild: Neural Radiance Fields for Unconstrained Photo Collections](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.02268/) (2020)
- [PlenOctrees for Real-time Rendering of Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14024/) (2021)
- [MVSNet: Depth Inference for Unstructured Multi-view Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02505/) (2018)
- [MVSNeRF: Fast Generalizable Radiance Field Reconstruction from Multi-View Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15595/) (2021)
- [Depth-supervised NeRF: Fewer Views and Faster Training for Free](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.02791/) (2021)
- [FastNeRF: High-Fidelity Neural Rendering at 200FPS](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10380/) (2021)
- [NeRV: Neural Reflectance and Visibility Fields for Relighting and View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.03927/) (2020)
- [Cascade Cost Volume for High-Resolution Multi-View Stereo and Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.06378/) (2019)
- [Recurrent MVSNet for High-resolution Multi-view Stereo Depth Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.10556/) (2019)
- [PatchmatchNet: Learned Multi-View Patchmatch Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.01411/) (2020)
- [AutoInt: Automatic Integration for Fast Neural Volume Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.01714/) (2020)
- [Learning a Multi-View Stereo Machine](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.05375/) (2017)
- [Stereo Matching by Training a Convolutional Neural Network to Compare Image Patches](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.05970/) (2015)
- [Deep Stereo using Adaptive Thin Volume Representation with Uncertainty Awareness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.12012/) (2019)
- [Point-Based Multi-View Stereo Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.04422/) (2019)
- [SurfaceNet: An End-to-end 3D Neural Network for Multiview Stereopsis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.01749/) (2017)
- [DPSNet: End-to-end Deep Plane Sweep Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.00538/) (2019)
- [Fast-MVSNet: Sparse-to-Dense Multi-View Stereo With Learned Propagation and Gauss-Newton Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.13017/) (2020)
- [Multi-Scale Geometric Consistency Guided Multi-View Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08103/) (2019)
- [ShaRF: Shape-conditioned Radiance Fields from a Single View](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.08860/) (2021)
- [Learning Inverse Depth Regression for Multi-View Stereo with Correlation Cost Volume](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.11746/) (2019)
- [Multi-View Photometric Stereo: A Robust Solution and Benchmark Dataset for Spatially Varying Isotropic Materials](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.06659/) (2020)
- [PS-FCN: A Flexible Learning Framework for Photometric Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.08696/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [GeoNeRF: Generalizing NeRF with Geometry Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.13539/) (2021)
- [PS-NeRF: Neural Inverse Rendering for Multi-view Photometric Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.11406/) (2022)
- [Compressing Explicit Voxel Grid Representations: fast NeRFs become also small](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.12782/) (2022)
- [Trimming the Fat: Efficient Compression of 3D Gaussian Splats through Pruning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.18214/) (2024)
- [Uncertainty-Aware Deep Multi-View Photometric Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.13071/) (2022)
- [WildLight: In-the-wild Inverse Rendering with a Flashlight](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14190/) (2023)
- [MVPSNet: Fast Generalizable Multi-view Photometric Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11167/) (2023)
- [Multi-View Photometric Stereo Revisited](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07670/) (2022)
- [RNb-NeuS: Reflectance and Normal-based Multi-View 3D Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.01215/) (2023)
- [nLMVS-Net: Deep Non-Lambertian Multi-View Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.11876/) (2022)
- [Deep Learning Methods for Calibrated Photometric Stereo and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08414/) (2022)
- [Normal-guided Detail-Preserving Neural Implicit Function for High-Fidelity 3D Surface Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.04861/) (2024)
- [Robustifying the Multi-Scale Representation of Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.04233/) (2022)
- [Learning Robust Multi-Scale Representation for Neural Radiance Fields from Unposed Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.04521/) (2023)
- [NPLMV-PS: Neural Point-Light Multi-View Photometric Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.12057/) (2024)
- [PRM: Photometric Stereo based Large Reconstruction Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.07371/) (2024)
- [Domain-Adaptive Full-Face Gaze Estimation via Novel-View-Synthesis and Feature Disentanglement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16140/) (2023)
- [A Neural Height-Map Approach for the Binocular Photometric Stereo Problem](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.05958/) (2023)
- [Fast Satellite Tensorial Radiance Field for Multi-date Satellite Imagery of Large Size](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.11767/) (2023)
- [rpcPRF: Generalizable MPI Neural Radiance Field for Satellite Camera](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.07179/) (2023)
- [LUCES-MV: A Multi-View Dataset for Near-Field Point Light Source Photometric Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.16737/) (2024)
- [Mobile Robotic Multi-View Photometric Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.10842/) (2025)
- [PS-GS: Gaussian Splatting for Multi-View Photometric Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.18231/) (2025)
- [Neural Multi-View Self-Calibrated Photometric Stereo without Photometric Stereo Cues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.23162/) (2025)
- [3D Gaussian Splatting for Efficient Retrospective Dynamic Scene Novel View Synthesis with a Standardized Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.12437/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present a modern solution to the multi-view photometric stereo problem (MVPS). Our work suitably exploits the image formation model in a MVPS experimental setup to recover the dense 3D reconstruction of an object from images. We procure the surface orientation using a photometric stereo (PS) image formation model and blend it with a multi-view neural radiance field representation to recover the object's surface geometry. Contrary to the previous multi-staged framework to MVPS, where the position, iso-depth contours, or orientation measurements are estimated independently and then fused later, our method is simple to implement and realize. Our method performs neural rendering of multi-view images while utilizing surface normals estimated by a deep photometric stereo network. We render the MVPS images by considering the object's surface normals for each 3D sample point along the viewing direction rather than explicitly using the density gradient in the volume space via 3D occupancy information. We optimize the proposed neural radiance field representation for the MVPS setup efficiently using a fully connected deep network to recover the 3D geometry of an object. Extensive evaluation on the DiLiGenT-MV benchmark dataset shows that our method performs better than the approaches that perform only PS or only multi-view stereo (MVS) and provides comparable results against the state-of-the-art multi-stage fusion methods.