# NeuSample: Neural Sample Field for Efficient View Synthesis

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.15552 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.15552/

## Key facts

- Cited by 21 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 35 of its 46 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Nov 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 35)

- [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)
- [Occupancy Networks: Learning 3D Reconstruction in Function Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03828/) (2018)
- [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)
- [D-NeRF: Neural Radiance Fields for Dynamic Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13961/) (2020)
- [Nerfies: Deformable Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.12948/) (2020)
- [Neural Sparse Voxel Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.11571/) (2020)
- [PlenOctrees for Real-time Rendering of Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14024/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Convolutional Occupancy Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.04618/) (2020)
- [IBRNet: Learning Multi-View Image-Based Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.13090/) (2021)
- [GRAF: Generative Radiance Fields for 3D-Aware Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.02442/) (2020)
- [KiloNeRF: Speeding up Neural Radiance Fields with Thousands of Tiny MLPs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13744/) (2021)
- [Local Light Field Fusion: Practical View Synthesis with Prescriptive Sampling Guidelines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.00889/) (2019)
- [UNISURF: Unifying Neural Implicit Surfaces and Radiance Fields for Multi-View Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10078/) (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)
- [Baking Neural Radiance Fields for Real-Time View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14645/) (2021)
- [Putting NeRF on a Diet: Semantically Consistent Few-Shot View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00677/) (2021)
- [Light Field Networks: Neural Scene Representations with Single-Evaluation Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.02634/) (2021)
- [Learning Shape Templates with Structured Implicit Functions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.06447/) (2019)
- [Learned Initializations for Optimizing Coordinate-Based Neural Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.02189/) (2020)
- [DONeRF: Towards Real-Time Rendering of Compact Neural Radiance Fields using Depth Oracle Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03231/) (2021)
- [NeX: Real-time View Synthesis with Neural Basis Expansion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.05606/) (2021)
- [Texture Fields: Learning Texture Representations in Function Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.07259/) (2019)
- [AutoInt: Automatic Integration for Fast Neural Volume Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.01714/) (2020)
- [GRF: Learning a General Radiance Field for 3D Representation and Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04595/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [Fast Dynamic Radiance Fields with Time-Aware Neural Voxels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.15285/) (2022)
- [Gaussian-Flow: 4D Reconstruction with Dynamic 3D Gaussian Particle](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03431/) (2023)
- [HyperReel: High-Fidelity 6-DoF Video with Ray-Conditioned Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.02238/) (2023)
- [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)
- [AdaNeRF: Adaptive Sampling for Real-time Rendering of Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.10312/) (2022)
- [Fast High Dynamic Range Radiance Fields for Dynamic Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.06052/) (2024)
- [FastSR-NeRF: Improving NeRF Efficiency on Consumer Devices with A Simple Super-Resolution Pipeline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.11537/) (2023)
- [Neural Pruning for 3D Scene Reconstruction: Efficient NeRF Acceleration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.00950/) (2025)
- [Progressively-connected Light Field Network for Efficient View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.04465/) (2022)
- [Neural Radiance Fields: Past, Present, and Future](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.10050/) (2023)
- [BAA-NGP: Bundle-Adjusting Accelerated Neural Graphics Primitives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.04166/) (2023)
- [MIMO-NeRF: Fast Neural Rendering with Multi-input Multi-output Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.01821/) (2023)
- [Reconstructive Latent-Space Neural Radiance Fields for Efficient 3D Scene Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.17880/) (2023)
- [L0-Sampler: An L0 Model Guided Volume Sampling for NeRF](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.07044/) (2023)
- [Differentiable Rendering with Reparameterized Volume Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.10970/) (2023)
- [MixRT: Mixed Neural Representations For Real-Time NeRF Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.11841/) (2023)
- [Oblique-MERF: Revisiting and Improving MERF for Oblique Photography](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09531/) (2024)
- [Efficient View Synthesis with Neural Radiance Distribution Field](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11130/) (2023)
- [Evolutive Rendering Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.17531/) (2024)
- [TPG-INR: Target Prior-Guided Implicit 3D CT Reconstruction for Enhanced Sparse-view Imaging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.18806/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Neural radiance fields (NeRF) have shown great potentials in representing 3D scenes and synthesizing novel views, but the computational overhead of NeRF at the inference stage is still heavy. To alleviate the burden, we delve into the coarse-to-fine, hierarchical sampling procedure of NeRF and point out that the coarse stage can be replaced by a lightweight module which we name a neural sample field. The proposed sample field maps rays into sample distributions, which can be transformed into point coordinates and fed into radiance fields for volume rendering. The overall framework is named as NeuSample. We perform experiments on Realistic Synthetic 360circ and Real Forward-Facing, two popular 3D scene sets, and show that NeuSample achieves better rendering quality than NeRF while enjoying a faster inference speed. NeuSample is further compressed with a proposed sample field extraction method towards a better trade-off between quality and speed.
