VRP-UDF: Towards Unbiased Learning of Unsigned Distance Functions from Multi-view Images with Volume Rendering Priors

Unsigned distance functions (UDFs) have been a vital representation for open surfaces. With different differentiable renderers, current methods are able to train neural networks to infer a UDF by minimizing the rendering errors with the UDF to the multi-view ground truth. However, these differentiable renderers are mainly handcrafted, which makes them either biased on ray-surface intersections, or sensitive to unsigned distance outliers, or not scalable to large scenes. To resolve these issues, we present a novel differentiable renderer to infer UDFs more accurately. Instead of using handcrafted equations, our differentiable renderer is a neural network which is pre-trained in a data-driven manner. It learns how to render unsigned distances into depth images, leading to a prior knowledge, dubbed volume rendering priors. To infer a UDF for an unseen scene from multiple RGB images, we generalize the learned volume rendering priors to map inferred unsigned distances in alpha blending for RGB image rendering. To reduce the bias of sampling in UDF inference, we utilize an auxiliary point sampling prior as an indicator of ray-surface intersection, and propose novel schemes towards more accurate and uniform sampling near the zero-level sets. We also propose a new strategy that leverages our pretrained volume rendering prior to serve as a general surface refiner, which can be integrated with various Gaussian reconstruction methods to optimize the Gaussian distributions and refine geometric details. Our results show that the learned volume rendering prior is unbiased, robust, scalable, 3D aware, and more importantly, easy to learn. Further experiments show that the volume rendering prior is also a general strategy to enhance other neural implicit representations such as signed distance function and occupancy.