# D-NPC: Dynamic Neural Point Clouds for Non-Rigid View Synthesis from Monocular Video

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.10078 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10078/

## Key facts

- Cited by 11 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 56 of its 71 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Jun 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 56)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04079/) (2023)
- [Instant Neural Graphics Primitives with a Multiresolution Hash Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05989/) (2022)
- [RAFT: Recurrent All-Pairs Field Transforms for Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12039/) (2020)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Depth Anything: Unleashing the Power of Large-Scale Unlabeled Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10891/) (2024)
- [TensoRF: Tensorial Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09517/) (2022)
- [Nerfies: Deformable Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.12948/) (2020)
- [4D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Dynamic Scene Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08528/) (2023)
- [Direct Voxel Grid Optimization: Super-fast Convergence for Radiance Fields Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.11215/) (2021)
- [Neural Scene Flow Fields for Space-Time View Synthesis of Dynamic Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13084/) (2020)
- [K-Planes: Explicit Radiance Fields in Space, Time, and Appearance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.10241/) (2023)
- [Dynamic 3D Gaussians: Tracking by Persistent Dynamic View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09713/) (2023)
- [Zip-NeRF: Anti-Aliased Grid-Based Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06706/) (2023)
- [Mip-Splatting: Alias-free 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16493/) (2023)
- [HexPlane: A Fast Representation for Dynamic Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.09632/) (2023)
- [Non-Rigid Neural Radiance Fields: Reconstruction and Novel View Synthesis of a Dynamic Scene From Monocular Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12247/) (2020)
- [Dynamic View Synthesis from Dynamic Monocular Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.06468/) (2021)
- [Compact 3D Gaussian Representation for Radiance Field](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.13681/) (2023)
- [Advances in Neural Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.05849/) (2021)
- [Fast Dynamic Radiance Fields with Time-Aware Neural Voxels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.15285/) (2022)
- [Neural Point-Based Graphics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08240/) (2019)
- [Visual Geometry Grounded Deep Structure From Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04563/) (2023)
- [DynIBaR: Neural Dynamic Image-Based Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11082/) (2022)
- [Consistent Video Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.15021/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [Feed-Forward Bullet-Time Reconstruction of Dynamic Scenes from Monocular Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03526/) (2024)
- [SplineGS: Robust Motion-Adaptive Spline for Real-Time Dynamic 3D Gaussians from Monocular Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.09982/) (2024)
- [VR-Splatting: Foveated Radiance Field Rendering via 3D Gaussian Splatting and Neural Points](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.17932/) (2024)
- [Orientation-anchored Hyper-Gaussian for 4D Reconstruction from Casual Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.23492/) (2025)
- [C4D: 4D Made from 3D through Dual Correspondences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.14960/) (2025)
- [Uncertainty Matters in Dynamic Gaussian Splatting for Monocular 4D Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.12768/) (2025)
- [ViDAR: Video Diffusion-Aware 4D Reconstruction From Monocular Inputs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.18792/) (2025)
- [WorldTree: Towards 4D Dynamic Worlds from Monocular Video using Tree-Chains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.11845/) (2026)
- [WebSpline: Structure-Informed Splines for Real-Time 3D Gaussians from Monocular Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.02096/) (2026)
- [SMG: Semantic Motion Graph for Monocular Dynamic Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.31023/) (2026)
- [PASTEL: Panoramic Alignment for Monocular 4D Scene Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.06099/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Dynamic reconstruction and spatiotemporal novel-view synthesis of non-rigidly deforming scenes recently gained increased attention. While existing work achieves impressive quality and performance on multi-view or teleporting camera setups, most methods fail to efficiently and faithfully recover motion and appearance from casual monocular captures. This paper contributes to the field by introducing a new method for dynamic novel view synthesis from monocular video, such as casual smartphone captures. Our approach represents the scene as a textitdynamic neural point cloud, an implicit time-conditioned point distribution that encodes local geometry and appearance in separate hash-encoded neural feature grids for static and dynamic regions. By sampling a discrete point cloud from our model, we can efficiently render high-quality novel views using a fast differentiable rasterizer and neural rendering network. Similar to recent work, we leverage advances in neural scene analysis by incorporating data-driven priors like monocular depth estimation and object segmentation to resolve motion and depth ambiguities originating from the monocular captures. In addition to guiding the optimization process, we show that these priors can be exploited to explicitly initialize our scene representation to drastically improve optimization speed and final image quality. As evidenced by our experimental evaluation, our dynamic point cloud model not only enables fast optimization and real-time frame rates for interactive applications, but also achieves competitive image quality on monocular benchmark sequences. Our code and data are available online: https://moritzkappel.github.io/projects/dnpc/.