# Point2Pix: Photo-Realistic Point Cloud Rendering via Neural Radiance Fields

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.16482 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16482/

## Key facts

- Cited by 12 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 41 of its 59 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Mar 2023.

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

- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Layer Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06450/) (2016)
- [PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00593/) (2016)
- [PointNet++: Deep Hierarchical Feature Learning on Point Sets in a Metric Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02413/) (2017)
- [Instant Neural Graphics Primitives with a Multiresolution Hash Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05989/) (2022)
- [ScanNet: Richly-annotated 3D Reconstructions of Indoor Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.04405/) (2017)
- [Plenoxels: Radiance Fields without Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05131/) (2021)
- [Semantic Image Synthesis with Spatially-Adaptive Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.07291/) (2019)
- [4D Spatio-Temporal ConvNets: Minkowski Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08755/) (2019)
- [Real-Time Single Image and Video Super-Resolution Using an Efficient Sub-Pixel Convolutional Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.05158/) (2016)
- [Nerfies: Deformable Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.12948/) (2020)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis and Semantic Manipulation with Conditional GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.11585/) (2017)
- [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)
- [GIRAFFE: Representing Scenes as Compositional Generative Neural Feature Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.12100/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Open3D: A Modern Library for 3D Data Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.09847/) (2018)
- [IBRNet: Learning Multi-View Image-Based Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.13090/) (2021)
- [Neural Body: Implicit Neural Representations with Structured Latent Codes for Novel View Synthesis of Dynamic Humans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15838/) (2020)
- [Point-NeRF: Point-based Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.08845/) (2022)
- [StyleNeRF: A Style-based 3D-Aware Generator for High-resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08985/) (2021)
- [ARKitScenes: A Diverse Real-World Dataset For 3D Indoor Scene Understanding Using Mobile RGB-D Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.08897/) (2021)
- [Neural RGB-D Surface Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.04532/) (2021)
- [DONeRF: Towards Real-Time Rendering of Compact Neural Radiance Fields using Depth Oracle Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03231/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [LidaRF: Delving into Lidar for Neural Radiance Field on Street Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.00900/) (2024)
- [RoGSplat: Learning Robust Generalizable Human Gaussian Splatting from Sparse Multi-View Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.14198/) (2025)
- [X-Ray: A Sequential 3D Representation For Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14329/) (2024)
- [Learning Robust Generalizable Radiance Field with Visibility and Feature Augmented Point Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.14354/) (2024)
- [HashPoint: Accelerated Point Searching and Sampling for Neural Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14044/) (2024)
- [Real-time Neural Rendering of LiDAR Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.11618/) (2025)
- [Sparse Point Cloud Patches Rendering via Splitting 2D Gaussians](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09413/) (2025)
- [Methods and strategies for improving the novel view synthesis quality of neural radiation field](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.12451/) (2024)
- [GPN: Generative Point-based NeRF](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.08312/) (2024)
- [NARVis: Neural Accelerated Rendering for Real-Time Scientific Point Cloud Visualization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.19097/) (2024)
- [CRISTAL: Real-time Camera Registration in Static LiDAR Scans using Neural Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.16349/) (2025)
- [Bridging the Dimensionality Gap: A Taxonomy and Survey of 2D Vision Model Adaptation for 3D Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.03334/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Synthesizing photo-realistic images from a point cloud is challenging because of the sparsity of point cloud representation. Recent Neural Radiance Fields and extensions are proposed to synthesize realistic images from 2D input. In this paper, we present Point2Pix as a novel point renderer to link the 3D sparse point clouds with 2D dense image pixels. Taking advantage of the point cloud 3D prior and NeRF rendering pipeline, our method can synthesize high-quality images from colored point clouds, generally for novel indoor scenes. To improve the efficiency of ray sampling, we propose point-guided sampling, which focuses on valid samples. Also, we present Point Encoding to build Multi-scale Radiance Fields that provide discriminative 3D point features. Finally, we propose Fusion Encoding to efficiently synthesize high-quality images. Extensive experiments on the ScanNet and ArkitScenes datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and generalization.
