ARC-NeRF: Area Ray Casting for Broader Unseen View Coverage in Few-shot Object Rendering

Recent advancements in the Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) have enhanced its capabilities for novel view synthesis, yet its reliance on dense multi-view training images poses a practical challenge, often leading to artifacts and a lack of fine object details. Addressing this, we propose ARC-NeRF, an effective regularization-based approach with a novel Area Ray Casting strategy. While the previous ray augmentation methods are limited to covering only a single unseen view per extra ray, our proposed Area Ray covers a broader range of unseen views with just a single ray and enables an adaptive high-frequency regularization based on target pixel photo-consistency. Moreover, we propose luminance consistency regularization, which enhances the consistency of relative luminance between the original and Area Ray, leading to more accurate object textures. The relative luminance, as a free lunch extra data easily derived from RGB images, can be effectively utilized in few-shot scenarios where available training data is limited. Our ARC-NeRF outperforms its baseline and achieves competitive results on multiple benchmarks with sharply rendered fine details.