# Urban Radiance Field Representation with Deformable Neural Mesh Primitives

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.10776 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10776/

## Key facts

- Cited by 55 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 47 of its 67 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Jul 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 47)

- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00593/) (2016)
- [Instant Neural Graphics Primitives with a Multiresolution Hash Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05989/) (2022)
- [Scalability in Perception for Autonomous Driving: Waymo Open Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04838/) (2019)
- [Mip-NeRF 360: Unbounded Anti-Aliased Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12077/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Plenoxels: Radiance Fields without Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05131/) (2021)
- [D-NeRF: Neural Radiance Fields for Dynamic Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13961/) (2020)
- [NeRF in the Wild: Neural Radiance Fields for Unconstrained Photo Collections](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.02268/) (2020)
- [Direct Voxel Grid Optimization: Super-fast Convergence for Radiance Fields Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.11215/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Convolutional Occupancy Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.04618/) (2020)
- [Depth-supervised NeRF: Fewer Views and Faster Training for Free](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.02791/) (2021)
- [Block-NeRF: Scalable Large Scene Neural View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.05263/) (2022)
- [KiloNeRF: Speeding up Neural Radiance Fields with Thousands of Tiny MLPs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13744/) (2021)
- [Pixel2Mesh: Generating 3D Mesh Models from Single RGB Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.01654/) (2018)
- [KITTI-360: A Novel Dataset and Benchmarks for Urban Scene Understanding in 2D and 3D](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.13410/) (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)
- [MonoSDF: Exploring Monocular Geometric Cues for Neural Implicit Surface Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.00665/) (2022)
- [Baking Neural Radiance Fields for Real-Time View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14645/) (2021)
- [Deep Marching Tetrahedra: a Hybrid Representation for High-Resolution 3D Shape Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.04276/) (2021)
- [Mega-NeRF: Scalable Construction of Large-Scale NeRFs for Virtual Fly-Throughs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10703/) (2021)
- [Extracting Triangular 3D Models, Materials, and Lighting From Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12503/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 55)

- [DrivingGaussian: Composite Gaussian Splatting for Surrounding Dynamic Autonomous Driving Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.07920/) (2023)
- [Street Gaussians: Modeling Dynamic Urban Scenes with Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01339/) (2024)
- [HUGS: Holistic Urban 3D Scene Understanding via Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12722/) (2024)
- [DriveDreamer4D: World Models Are Effective Data Machines for 4D Driving Scene Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13571/) (2024)
- [textitS3Gaussian: Self-Supervised Street Gaussians for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.20323/) (2024)
- [4K4D: Real-Time 4D View Synthesis at 4K Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11448/) (2023)
- [HUGSIM: A Real-Time, Photo-Realistic and Closed-Loop Simulator for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.01718/) (2024)
- [ReconDreamer: Crafting World Models for Driving Scene Reconstruction via Online Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.19548/) (2024)
- [Representing Long Volumetric Video with Temporal Gaussian Hierarchy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.09608/) (2024)
- [FreeVS: Generative View Synthesis on Free Driving Trajectory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18079/) (2024)
- [StreetCrafter: Street View Synthesis with Controllable Video Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.13188/) (2024)
- [SGD: Street View Synthesis with Gaussian Splatting and Diffusion Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.20079/) (2024)
- [ReconDreamer++: Harmonizing Generative and Reconstructive Models for Driving Scene Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.18438/) (2025)
- [Dynamic 3D Gaussian Fields for Urban Areas](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.03175/) (2024)
- [DreamForge: Motion-Aware Autoregressive Video Generation for Multi-View Driving Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.04003/) (2024)
- [Spectrally Pruned Gaussian Fields with Neural Compensation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.00676/) (2024)
- [DrivingRecon: Large 4D Gaussian Reconstruction Model For Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.09043/) (2024)
- [DRAWER: Digital Reconstruction and Articulation With Environment Realism](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.15278/) (2025)
- [S-NeRF++: Autonomous Driving Simulation via Neural Reconstruction and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02112/) (2024)
- [Multi-Level Neural Scene Graphs for Dynamic Urban Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.00168/) (2024)
- [Video2Game: Real-time, Interactive, Realistic and Browser-Compatible Environment from a Single Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09833/) (2024)
- [CoDa-4DGS: Dynamic Gaussian Splatting with Context and Deformation Awareness for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06744/) (2025)
- [SplatFlow: Self-Supervised Dynamic Gaussian Splatting in Neural Motion Flow Field for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15482/) (2024)
- [Neural Radiance Field in Autonomous Driving: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.13816/) (2024)
- [StreetSurfGS: Scalable Urban Street Surface Reconstruction with Planar-based Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.04354/) (2024)
- [MeshGS: Adaptive Mesh-Aligned Gaussian Splatting for High-Quality Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.08941/) (2024)
- [AlignMiF: Geometry-Aligned Multimodal Implicit Field for LiDAR-Camera Joint Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17483/) (2024)
- [Urban Architect: Steerable 3D Urban Scene Generation with Layout Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.06780/) (2024)
- [HO-Gaussian: Hybrid Optimization of 3D Gaussian Splatting for Urban Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.20032/) (2024)
- [NeRFs in Robotics: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.01333/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) have achieved great success in the past few years. However, most current methods still require intensive resources due to ray marching-based rendering. To construct urban-level radiance fields efficiently, we design Deformable Neural Mesh Primitive~(DNMP), and propose to parameterize the entire scene with such primitives. The DNMP is a flexible and compact neural variant of classic mesh representation, which enjoys both the efficiency of rasterization-based rendering and the powerful neural representation capability for photo-realistic image synthesis. Specifically, a DNMP consists of a set of connected deformable mesh vertices with paired vertex features to parameterize the geometry and radiance information of a local area. To constrain the degree of freedom for optimization and lower the storage budgets, we enforce the shape of each primitive to be decoded from a relatively low-dimensional latent space. The rendering colors are decoded from the vertex features (interpolated with rasterization) by a view-dependent MLP. The DNMP provides a new paradigm for urban-level scene representation with appealing properties: (1) High-quality rendering. Our method achieves leading performance for novel view synthesis in urban scenarios. (2) Low computational costs. Our representation enables fast rendering (2.07ms/1k pixels) and low peak memory usage (110MB/1k pixels). We also present a lightweight version that can run 33× faster than vanilla NeRFs, and comparable to the highly-optimized Instant-NGP (0.61 vs 0.71ms/1k pixels). Project page: hrefhttps://dnmp.github.io/https://dnmp.github.io/.