# NeRF-DS: Neural Radiance Fields for Dynamic Specular Objects

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.14435 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14435/

## Key facts

- Cited by 111 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 32 of its 64 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Mar 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 32)

- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [DeepSDF: Learning Continuous Signed Distance Functions for Shape Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.05103/) (2019)
- [Occupancy Networks: Learning 3D Reconstruction in Function Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03828/) (2018)
- [Mip-NeRF 360: Unbounded Anti-Aliased Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12077/) (2021)
- [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)
- [A Point Set Generation Network for 3D Object Reconstruction from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00603/) (2016)
- [Scene Representation Networks: Continuous 3D-Structure-Aware Neural Scene Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.01618/) (2019)
- [Neural Scene Flow Fields for Space-Time View Synthesis of Dynamic Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13084/) (2020)
- [Block-NeRF: Scalable Large Scene Neural View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.05263/) (2022)
- [Differentiable Volumetric Rendering: Learning Implicit 3D Representations without 3D Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.07372/) (2019)
- [KiloNeRF: Speeding up Neural Radiance Fields with Thousands of Tiny MLPs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13744/) (2021)
- [UNISURF: Unifying Neural Implicit Surfaces and Radiance Fields for Multi-View Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10078/) (2021)
- [Ref-NeRF: Structured View-Dependent Appearance for Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.03907/) (2021)
- [NeRV: Neural Reflectance and Visibility Fields for Relighting and View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.03927/) (2020)
- [Non-Rigid Neural Radiance Fields: Reconstruction and Novel View Synthesis of a Dynamic Scene From Monocular Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12247/) (2020)
- [NeRD: Neural Reflectance Decomposition from Image Collections](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.03918/) (2020)
- [Local Implicit Grid Representations for 3D Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.08981/) (2020)
- [HyperNeRF: A Higher-Dimensional Representation for Topologically Varying Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13228/) (2021)
- [Neural-PIL: Neural Pre-Integrated Lighting for Reflectance Decomposition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14373/) (2021)
- [Monocular Dynamic View Synthesis: A Reality Check](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.13445/) (2022)
- [Neural Reflectance Fields for Appearance Acquisition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.03824/) (2020)
- [Octree Generating Networks: Efficient Convolutional Architectures for High-resolution 3D Outputs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.09438/) (2017)
- [Learning a Predictable and Generative Vector Representation for Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08637/) (2016)
- [Neural Volumes: Learning Dynamic Renderable Volumes from Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.07751/) (2019)
- [Fourier PlenOctrees for Dynamic Radiance Field Rendering in Real-time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.08614/) (2022)
- [NeRS: Neural Reflectance Surfaces for Sparse-view 3D Reconstruction in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07604/) (2021)
- [NeRFactor: Neural Factorization of Shape and Reflectance Under an Unknown Illumination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01970/) (2021)
- [Modular Interactive Video Object Segmentation: Interaction-to-Mask, Propagation and Difference-Aware Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.07941/) (2021)
- [NeRFReN: Neural Radiance Fields with Reflections](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.15234/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 111)

- [Deformable 3D Gaussians for High-Fidelity Monocular Dynamic Scene Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.13101/) (2023)
- [SC-GS: Sparse-Controlled Gaussian Splatting for Editable Dynamic Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14937/) (2023)
- [A Survey on 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.03890/) (2024)
- [4D-Rotor Gaussian Splatting: Towards Efficient Novel View Synthesis for Dynamic Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03307/) (2024)
- [GaussianFlow: Splatting Gaussian Dynamics for 4D Content Creation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12365/) (2024)
- [GauFRe: Gaussian Deformation Fields for Real-time Dynamic Novel View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.11458/) (2023)
- [MotionGS: Exploring Explicit Motion Guidance for Deformable 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.07707/) (2024)
- [SplatFields: Neural Gaussian Splats for Sparse 3D and 4D Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.11211/) (2024)
- [Grid4D: 4D Decomposed Hash Encoding for High-Fidelity Dynamic Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.20815/) (2024)
- [Superpoint Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time High-Fidelity Dynamic Scene Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.03697/) (2024)
- [FastGS: Training 3D Gaussian Splatting in 100 Seconds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.04283/) (2025)
- [Gaussian Splatting: 3D Reconstruction and Novel View Synthesis, a Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.03417/) (2024)
- [SpecNeRF: Gaussian Directional Encoding for Specular Reflections](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.13102/) (2023)
- [Recent Trends in 3D Reconstruction of General Non-Rigid Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15064/) (2024)
- [DN-4DGS: Denoised Deformable Network with Temporal-Spatial Aggregation for Dynamic Scene Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13607/) (2024)
- [MANUS: Markerless Grasp Capture using Articulated 3D Gaussians](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02137/) (2023)
- [SpectroMotion: Dynamic 3D Reconstruction of Specular Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.17249/) (2024)
- [Total-Recon: Deformable Scene Reconstruction for Embodied View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.12317/) (2023)
- [Deblur4DGS: 4D Gaussian Splatting from Blurry Monocular Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.06424/) (2024)
- [PRTGS: Precomputed Radiance Transfer of Gaussian Splats for Real-Time High-Quality Relighting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03538/) (2024)
- [7DGS: Unified Spatial-Temporal-Angular Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.07946/) (2025)
- [DiVa-360: The Dynamic Visual Dataset for Immersive Neural Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.16897/) (2023)
- [NeRRF: 3D Reconstruction and View Synthesis for Transparent and Specular Objects with Neural Refractive-Reflective Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.13039/) (2023)
- [NeRFs in Robotics: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.01333/) (2024)
- [DaReNeRF: Direction-aware Representation for Dynamic Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.02265/) (2024)
- [SpectralNeRF: Physically Based Spectral Rendering with Neural Radiance Field](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.08692/) (2023)
- [Reinforcement Learning with Generalizable Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.07950/) (2024)
- [LocalDyGS: Multi-view Global Dynamic Scene Modeling via Adaptive Local Implicit Feature Decoupling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.02363/) (2025)
- [Neural Radiance Field-based Visual Rendering: A Comprehensive Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.00714/) (2024)
- [Efficient Gaussian Splatting for Monocular Dynamic Scene Rendering via Sparse Time-Variant Attribute Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.20378/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Dynamic Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) is a powerful algorithm capable of rendering photo-realistic novel view images from a monocular RGB video of a dynamic scene. Although it warps moving points across frames from the observation spaces to a common canonical space for rendering, dynamic NeRF does not model the change of the reflected color during the warping. As a result, this approach often fails drastically on challenging specular objects in motion. We address this limitation by reformulating the neural radiance field function to be conditioned on surface position and orientation in the observation space. This allows the specular surface at different poses to keep the different reflected colors when mapped to the common canonical space. Additionally, we add the mask of moving objects to guide the deformation field. As the specular surface changes color during motion, the mask mitigates the problem of failure to find temporal correspondences with only RGB supervision. We evaluate our model based on the novel view synthesis quality with a self-collected dataset of different moving specular objects in realistic environments. The experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly improves the reconstruction quality of moving specular objects from monocular RGB videos compared to the existing NeRF models. Our code and data are available at the project website https://github.com/JokerYan/NeRF-DS.