# TD-NeRF: Novel Truncated Depth Prior for Joint Camera Pose and Neural Radiance Field Optimization

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.07027 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.07027/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 20 of its 38 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 May 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [Instant Neural Graphics Primitives with a Multiresolution Hash Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05989/) (2022)
- [Mip-NeRF 360: Unbounded Anti-Aliased Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12077/) (2021)
- [Vision Transformers for Dense Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13413/) (2021)
- [ORB-SLAM: a Versatile and Accurate Monocular SLAM System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.00956/) (2015)
- [Depth-supervised NeRF: Fewer Views and Faster Training for Free](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.02791/) (2021)
- [Local Light Field Fusion: Practical View Synthesis with Prescriptive Sampling Guidelines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.00889/) (2019)
- [BARF: Bundle-Adjusting Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.06405/) (2021)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks: An Overview](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.07035/) (2017)
- [NICE-SLAM: Neural Implicit Scalable Encoding for SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.12130/) (2021)
- [iMAP: Implicit Mapping and Positioning in Real-Time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.12352/) (2021)
- [INeRF: Inverting Neural Radiance Fields for Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.05877/) (2020)
- [Dense Depth Priors for Neural Radiance Fields from Sparse Input Views](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.03288/) (2021)
- [Single-View View Synthesis with Multiplane Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.11364/) (2020)
- [NoPe-NeRF: Optimising Neural Radiance Field with No Pose Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.07388/) (2022)
- [Free View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.05511/) (2020)
- [Self-Calibrating Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.13826/) (2021)
- [A Survey of Structure from Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.08493/) (2017)
- [GNeRF: GAN-based Neural Radiance Field without Posed Camera](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15606/) (2021)
- [LU-NeRF: Scene and Pose Estimation by Synchronizing Local Unposed NeRFs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05410/) (2023)
- [Photometric Bundle Adjustment for Vision-Based SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.02026/) (2016)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [TVG-SLAM: Robust Gaussian Splatting SLAM with Tri-view Geometric Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.23207/) (2025)
- [RA-NeRF: Robust Neural Radiance Field Reconstruction with Accurate Camera Pose Estimation under Complex Trajectories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.15242/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The reliance on accurate camera poses is a significant barrier to the widespread deployment of Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) models for 3D reconstruction and SLAM tasks. The existing method introduces monocular depth priors to jointly optimize the camera poses and NeRF, which fails to fully exploit the depth priors and neglects the impact of their inherent noise. In this paper, we propose Truncated Depth NeRF (TD-NeRF), a novel approach that enables training NeRF from unknown camera poses - by jointly optimizing learnable parameters of the radiance field and camera poses. Our approach explicitly utilizes monocular depth priors through three key advancements: 1) we propose a novel depth-based ray sampling strategy based on the truncated normal distribution, which improves the convergence speed and accuracy of pose estimation; 2) to circumvent local minima and refine depth geometry, we introduce a coarse-to-fine training strategy that progressively improves the depth precision; 3) we propose a more robust inter-frame point constraint that enhances robustness against depth noise during training. The experimental results on three datasets demonstrate that TD-NeRF achieves superior performance in the joint optimization of camera pose and NeRF, surpassing prior works, and generates more accurate depth geometry. The implementation of our method has been released at https://github.com/nubot-nudt/TD-NeRF.