# Urban Radiance Fields

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.14643 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14643/

## Key facts

- Cited by 263 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 41 of its 72 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Nov 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 41)

- [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)
- [nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11027/) (2019)
- [Encoder-Decoder with Atrous Separable Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.02611/) (2018)
- [ScanNet: Richly-annotated 3D Reconstructions of Indoor Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.04405/) (2017)
- [DeepSDF: Learning Continuous Signed Distance Functions for Shape Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.05103/) (2019)
- [Scalability in Perception for Autonomous Driving: Waymo Open Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04838/) (2019)
- [Mip-NeRF: A Multiscale Representation for Anti-Aliasing Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13415/) (2021)
- [NeuS: Learning Neural Implicit Surfaces by Volume Rendering for Multi-view Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10689/) (2021)
- [pixelNeRF: Neural Radiance Fields from One or Few Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.02190/) (2020)
- [NeRF in the Wild: Neural Radiance Fields for Unconstrained Photo Collections](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.02268/) (2020)
- [Volume Rendering of Neural Implicit Surfaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.12052/) (2021)
- [Neural Sparse Voxel Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.11571/) (2020)
- [The Replica Dataset: A Digital Replica of Indoor Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.05797/) (2019)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Argoverse: 3D Tracking and Forecasting with Rich Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02620/) (2019)
- [Local Light Field Fusion: Practical View Synthesis with Prescriptive Sampling Guidelines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.00889/) (2019)
- [Common Objects in 3D: Large-Scale Learning and Evaluation of Real-life 3D Category Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.00512/) (2021)
- [UNISURF: Unifying Neural Implicit Surfaces and Radiance Fields for Multi-View Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10078/) (2021)
- [BARF: Bundle-Adjusting Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.06405/) (2021)
- [In-Datacenter Performance Analysis of a Tensor Processing Unit](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04760/) (2017)
- [KITTI-360: A Novel Dataset and Benchmarks for Urban Scene Understanding in 2D and 3D](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.13410/) (2021)
- [iMAP: Implicit Mapping and Positioning in Real-Time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.12352/) (2021)
- [Dynamic View Synthesis from Dynamic Monocular Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.06468/) (2021)
- [In-Place Scene Labelling and Understanding with Implicit Scene Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15875/) (2021)
- [Neural RGB-D Surface Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.04532/) (2021)
- [Neural Scene Graphs for Dynamic Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10379/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 263)

- [Mega-NeRF: Scalable Construction of Large-Scale NeRFs for Virtual Fly-Throughs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10703/) (2021)
- [DrivingGaussian: Composite Gaussian Splatting for Surrounding Dynamic Autonomous Driving Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.07920/) (2023)
- [UniSim: A Neural Closed-Loop Sensor Simulator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.01898/) (2023)
- [BungeeNeRF: Progressive Neural Radiance Field for Extreme Multi-scale Scene Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05504/) (2021)
- [A Survey on 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.03890/) (2024)
- [Street Gaussians: Modeling Dynamic Urban Scenes with Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01339/) (2024)
- [EmerNeRF: Emergent Spatial-Temporal Scene Decomposition via Self-Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.02077/) (2023)
- [Language Embedded 3D Gaussians for Open-Vocabulary Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18482/) (2023)
- [CityGaussian: Real-time High-quality Large-Scale Scene Rendering with Gaussians](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01133/) (2024)
- [MatrixCity: A Large-scale City Dataset for City-scale Neural Rendering and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16553/) (2023)
- [MARS: An Instance-aware, Modular and Realistic Simulator for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15058/) (2023)
- [OmniRe: Omni Urban Scene Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.16760/) (2024)
- [Point-SLAM: Dense Neural Point Cloud-based SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.04278/) (2023)
- [NeRF: Neural Radiance Field in 3D Vision: A Comprehensive Review (Updated Post-Gaussian Splatting)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.00379/) (2022)
- [WildGaussians: 3D Gaussian Splatting in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.08447/) (2024)
- [SUDS: Scalable Urban Dynamic Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14536/) (2023)
- [Efficient Neural Radiance Fields for Interactive Free-viewpoint Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01517/) (2021)
- [NeuRAD: Neural Rendering for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15260/) (2023)
- [Vox-Fusion: Dense Tracking and Mapping with Voxel-based Neural Implicit Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.15858/) (2022)
- [Periodic Vibration Gaussian: Dynamic Urban Scene Reconstruction and Real-time Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18561/) (2023)
- [D2NeRF: Self-Supervised Decoupling of Dynamic and Static Objects from a Monocular Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.15838/) (2022)
- [SelfOcc: Self-Supervised Vision-Based 3D Occupancy Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12754/) (2023)
- [DriveDreamer4D: World Models Are Effective Data Machines for 4D Driving Scene Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13571/) (2024)
- [NeRFReN: Neural Radiance Fields with Reflections](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.15234/) (2021)
- [StreetSurf: Extending Multi-view Implicit Surface Reconstruction to Street Views](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.04988/) (2023)
- [S-NeRF: Neural Radiance Fields for Street Views](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.00749/) (2023)
- [Copilot4D: Learning Unsupervised World Models for Autonomous Driving via Discrete Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.01017/) (2023)
- [textitS3Gaussian: Self-Supervised Street Gaussians for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.20323/) (2024)
- [DeVRF: Fast Deformable Voxel Radiance Fields for Dynamic Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.15723/) (2022)
- [Progressively Optimized Local Radiance Fields for Robust View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13791/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The goal of this work is to perform 3D reconstruction and novel view synthesis from data captured by scanning platforms commonly deployed for world mapping in urban outdoor environments (e.g., Street View). Given a sequence of posed RGB images and lidar sweeps acquired by cameras and scanners moving through an outdoor scene, we produce a model from which 3D surfaces can be extracted and novel RGB images can be synthesized. Our approach extends Neural Radiance Fields, which has been demonstrated to synthesize realistic novel images for small scenes in controlled settings, with new methods for leveraging asynchronously captured lidar data, for addressing exposure variation between captured images, and for leveraging predicted image segmentations to supervise densities on rays pointing at the sky. Each of these three extensions provides significant performance improvements in experiments on Street View data. Our system produces state-of-the-art 3D surface reconstructions and synthesizes higher quality novel views in comparison to both traditional methods (e.g.~COLMAP) and recent neural representations (e.g.~Mip-NeRF).