# Aerial-NeRF: Adaptive Spatial Partitioning and Sampling for Large-Scale Aerial Rendering

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.06214 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.06214/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 27 of its 48 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 May 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 27 of 27)

- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Instant Neural Graphics Primitives with a Multiresolution Hash Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05989/) (2022)
- [Mip-NeRF: A Multiscale Representation for Anti-Aliasing Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13415/) (2021)
- [TensoRF: Tensorial Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09517/) (2022)
- [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)
- [NeRF++: Analyzing and Improving Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.07492/) (2020)
- [Block-NeRF: Scalable Large Scene Neural View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.05263/) (2022)
- [Local Light Field Fusion: Practical View Synthesis with Prescriptive Sampling Guidelines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.00889/) (2019)
- [Soft Rasterizer: A Differentiable Renderer for Image-based 3D Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01786/) (2019)
- [DeepVoxels: Learning Persistent 3D Feature Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01024/) (2018)
- [Mega-NeRF: Scalable Construction of Large-Scale NeRFs for Virtual Fly-Throughs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10703/) (2021)
- [Neural Scene Graphs for Dynamic Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10379/) (2020)
- [BungeeNeRF: Progressive Neural Radiance Field for Extreme Multi-scale Scene Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05504/) (2021)
- [The Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Benchmark: Object Detection and Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.00518/) (2018)
- [NeRS: Neural Reflectance Surfaces for Sparse-view 3D Reconstruction in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07604/) (2021)
- [Text2NeRF: Text-Driven 3D Scene Generation with Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11588/) (2023)
- [FoV-NeRF: Foveated Neural Radiance Fields for Virtual Reality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16365/) (2021)
- [SurfelGAN: Synthesizing Realistic Sensor Data for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.03844/) (2020)
- [AU-AIR: A Multi-modal Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Dataset for Low Altitude Traffic Surveillance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.11737/) (2020)
- [AADS: Augmented Autonomous Driving Simulation using Data-driven Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.07849/) (2019)
- [Bi-directional Domain Adaptation for Sim2Real Transfer of Embodied Navigation Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.12421/) (2020)
- [Recursive-NeRF: An Efficient and Dynamically Growing NeRF](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.09103/) (2021)
- [S3IM: Stochastic Structural SIMilarity and Its Unreasonable Effectiveness for Neural Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.07032/) (2023)
- [4K-NeRF: High Fidelity Neural Radiance Fields at Ultra High Resolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04701/) (2022)
- [Embodied Visual Navigation with Automatic Curriculum Learning in Real Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.05429/) (2020)
- [VQ-NeRF: Neural Reflectance Decomposition and Editing with Vector Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11864/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [TraGraph-GS: Trajectory Graph-based Gaussian Splatting for Arbitrary Large-Scale Scene Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.08704/) (2025)
- [Urban Neural Surface Reconstruction from Constrained Sparse Aerial Imagery with 3D SAR Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.22045/) (2026)
- [CLEAR-NeRF: Collinearity and Local-region Enhanced Accurate 3D Reconstruction in Unbounded Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.28125/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent progress in large-scale scene rendering has yielded Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF)-based models with an impressive ability to synthesize scenes across small objects and indoor scenes. Nevertheless, extending this idea to large-scale aerial rendering poses two critical problems. Firstly, a single NeRF cannot render the entire scene with high-precision for complex large-scale aerial datasets since the sampling range along each view ray is insufficient to cover buildings adequately. Secondly, traditional NeRFs are infeasible to train on one GPU to enable interactive fly-throughs for modeling massive images. Instead, existing methods typically separate the whole scene into multiple regions and train a NeRF on each region, which are unaccustomed to different flight trajectories and difficult to achieve fast rendering. To that end, we propose Aerial-NeRF with three innovative modifications for jointly adapting NeRF in large-scale aerial rendering: (1) Designing an adaptive spatial partitioning and selection method based on drones' poses to adapt different flight trajectories; (2) Using similarity of poses instead of (expert) network for rendering speedup to determine which region a new viewpoint belongs to; (3) Developing an adaptive sampling approach for rendering performance improvement to cover the entire buildings at different heights. Extensive experiments have conducted to verify the effectiveness and efficiency of Aerial-NeRF, and new state-of-the-art results have been achieved on two public large-scale aerial datasets and presented SCUTic dataset. Note that our model allows us to perform rendering over 4 times as fast as compared to multiple competitors. Our dataset, code, and model are publicly available at https://drliuqi.github.io/.