# View Synthesis with Sculpted Neural Points

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.05869 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.05869/

## Key facts

- Cited by 20 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 38 of its 56 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 May 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 38)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [Plenoxels: Radiance Fields without Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05131/) (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)
- [NeRF++: Analyzing and Improving Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.07492/) (2020)
- [MVSNet: Depth Inference for Unstructured Multi-view Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02505/) (2018)
- [Accelerating 3D Deep Learning with PyTorch3D](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08501/) (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)
- [UNISURF: Unifying Neural Implicit Surfaces and Radiance Fields for Multi-View Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10078/) (2021)
- [RegNeRF: Regularizing Neural Radiance Fields for View Synthesis from Sparse Inputs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.00724/) (2021)
- [FastNeRF: High-Fidelity Neural Rendering at 200FPS](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10380/) (2021)
- [Point-NeRF: Point-based Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.08845/) (2022)
- [BlendedMVS: A Large-scale Dataset for Generalized Multi-view Stereo Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.10127/) (2019)
- [Soft Rasterizer: A Differentiable Renderer for Image-based 3D Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01786/) (2019)
- [SynSin: End-to-end View Synthesis from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.08804/) (2019)
- [PhySG: Inverse Rendering with Spherical Gaussians for Physics-based Material Editing and Relighting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00674/) (2021)
- [Neural Point-Based Graphics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08240/) (2019)
- [Deferred Neural Rendering: Image Synthesis using Neural Textures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.12356/) (2019)
- [Differentiable Surface Splatting for Point-based Geometry Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.04173/) (2019)
- [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)
- [NeRF-Editing: Geometry Editing of Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.04978/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [HexPlane: A Fast Representation for Dynamic Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.09632/) (2023)
- [SEA-RAFT: Simple, Efficient, Accurate RAFT for Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14793/) (2024)
- [ClimateNeRF: Extreme Weather Synthesis in Neural Radiance Field](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.13226/) (2022)
- [WAFT: Warping-Alone Field Transforms for Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.21526/) (2025)
- [VR-Splatting: Foveated Radiance Field Rendering via 3D Gaussian Splatting and Neural Points](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.17932/) (2024)
- [Video2Game: Real-time, Interactive, Realistic and Browser-Compatible Environment from a Single Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09833/) (2024)
- [S-VolSDF: Sparse Multi-View Stereo Regularization of Neural Implicit Surfaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17712/) (2023)
- [PAPR: Proximity Attention Point Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.11086/) (2023)
- [VET: Visual Error Tomography for Point Cloud Completion and High-Quality Neural Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.04634/) (2023)
- [INPC: Implicit Neural Point Clouds for Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.16862/) (2024)
- [Differentiable Point-based Inverse Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02480/) (2023)
- [XScale-NVS: Cross-Scale Novel View Synthesis with Hash Featurized Manifold](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19517/) (2024)
- [PAPR in Motion: Seamless Point-level 3D Scene Interpolation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.05533/) (2024)
- [HashPoint: Accelerated Point Searching and Sampling for Neural Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14044/) (2024)
- [PriOr-Flow: Enhancing Primitive Panoramic Optical Flow with Orthogonal View](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.23897/) (2025)
- [PG-NeuS: Robust and Efficient Point Guidance for Multi-View Neural Surface Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.07997/) (2023)
- [Spiking GS: Towards High-Accuracy and Low-Cost Surface Reconstruction via Spiking Neuron-based Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.07266/) (2024)
- [SurfFill: Completion of LiDAR Point Clouds via Gaussian Surfel Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.03010/) (2025)
- [K-Buffers: A Plug-in Method for Enhancing Neural Fields with Multiple Buffers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19564/) (2025)
- [P-CORE: Self-Supervised Surface Consistency for Point-Based Neural Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.03349/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We address the task of view synthesis, generating novel views of a scene given a set of images as input. In many recent works such as NeRF (Mildenhall et al., 2020), the scene geometry is parameterized using neural implicit representations (i.e., MLPs). Implicit neural representations have achieved impressive visual quality but have drawbacks in computational efficiency. In this work, we propose a new approach that performs view synthesis using point clouds. It is the first point-based method that achieves better visual quality than NeRF while being 100x faster in rendering speed. Our approach builds on existing works on differentiable point-based rendering but introduces a novel technique we call "Sculpted Neural Points (SNP)", which significantly improves the robustness to errors and holes in the reconstructed point cloud. We further propose to use view-dependent point features based on spherical harmonics to capture non-Lambertian surfaces, and new designs in the point-based rendering pipeline that further boost the performance. Finally, we show that our system supports fine-grained scene editing. Code is available at https://github.com/princeton-vl/SNP.