# UC-NeRF: Uncertainty-aware Conditional Neural Radiance Fields from Endoscopic Sparse Views

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.02917 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.02917/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 31 of its 51 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Sep 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 31)

- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [Vision Transformers for Dense Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13413/) (2021)
- [pixelNeRF: Neural Radiance Fields from One or Few Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.02190/) (2020)
- [Towards Robust Monocular Depth Estimation: Mixing Datasets for Zero-shot Cross-dataset Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.01341/) (2019)
- [NeRF in the Wild: Neural Radiance Fields for Unconstrained Photo Collections](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.02268/) (2020)
- [MVSNet: Depth Inference for Unstructured Multi-view Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02505/) (2018)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Depth and Ego-Motion from Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.07813/) (2017)
- [MVSNeRF: Fast Generalizable Radiance Field Reconstruction from Multi-View Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15595/) (2021)
- [Depth-supervised NeRF: Fewer Views and Faster Training for Free](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.02791/) (2021)
- [IBRNet: Learning Multi-View Image-Based Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.13090/) (2021)
- [Local Light Field Fusion: Practical View Synthesis with Prescriptive Sampling Guidelines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.00889/) (2019)
- [RegNeRF: Regularizing Neural Radiance Fields for View Synthesis from Sparse Inputs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.00724/) (2021)
- [MonoSDF: Exploring Monocular Geometric Cues for Neural Implicit Surface Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.00665/) (2022)
- [Cascade Cost Volume for High-Resolution Multi-View Stereo and Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.06378/) (2019)
- [Dense Depth Priors for Neural Radiance Fields from Sparse Input Views](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.03288/) (2021)
- [SparseNeRF: Distilling Depth Ranking for Few-shot Novel View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16196/) (2023)
- [GeoNeRF: Generalizing NeRF with Geometry Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.13539/) (2021)
- [NerfingMVS: Guided Optimization of Neural Radiance Fields for Indoor Multi-view Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01129/) (2021)
- [Pushing the Boundaries of View Extrapolation with Multiplane Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.00413/) (2019)
- [ActiveNeRF: Learning where to See with Uncertainty Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.08546/) (2022)
- [Neural Rendering for Stereo 3D Reconstruction of Deformable Tissues in Robotic Surgery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.15255/) (2022)
- [Stereo Correspondence and Reconstruction of Endoscopic Data Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.01133/) (2021)
- [Extreme View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04777/) (2018)
- [Stochastic Neural Radiance Fields: Quantifying Uncertainty in Implicit 3D Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.02123/) (2021)
- [Endo-Depth-and-Motion: Reconstruction and Tracking in Endoscopic Videos using Depth Networks and Photometric Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16525/) (2021)
- [Conditional-Flow NeRF: Accurate 3D Modelling with Reliable Uncertainty Quantification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10192/) (2022)
- [EndoSurf: Neural Surface Reconstruction of Deformable Tissues with Stereo Endoscope Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.11307/) (2023)
- [Learning to Synthesize a 4D RGBD Light Field from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.03292/) (2017)
- [Deep Surface Light Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.06514/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Endo3R: Unified Online Reconstruction from Dynamic Monocular Endoscopic Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.03198/) (2025)
- [SaLon3R: Structure-aware Long-term Generalizable 3D Reconstruction from Unposed Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.15072/) (2025)
- [EndoWave: 4D Gaussian Splatting with Rational Wavelet for Endoscopic Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.23087/) (2025)
- [Moving Light Adaptive Colonoscopy Reconstruction via Illumination-Attenuation-Aware 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.18739/) (2025)
- [4D Monocular Surgical Reconstruction under Arbitrary Camera Motions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.17473/) (2026)
- [HAD: Hallucination-Aware Diffusion Priors for 3D Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.16873/) (2026)
- [PCM-NeRF: Probabilistic Camera Modeling for Neural Radiance Fields under Pose Uncertainty](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.17831/) (2026)
- [ExtraGS: Enhancing Endoscopic View Extrapolation via Diffusion-Guided 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.12785/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Visualizing surgical scenes is crucial for revealing internal anatomical structures during minimally invasive procedures. Novel View Synthesis is a vital technique that offers geometry and appearance reconstruction, enhancing understanding, planning, and decision-making in surgical scenes. Despite the impressive achievements of Neural Radiance Field (NeRF), its direct application to surgical scenes produces unsatisfying results due to two challenges: endoscopic sparse views and significant photometric inconsistencies. In this paper, we propose uncertainty-aware conditional NeRF for novel view synthesis to tackle the severe shape-radiance ambiguity from sparse surgical views. The core of UC-NeRF is to incorporate the multi-view uncertainty estimation to condition the neural radiance field for modeling the severe photometric inconsistencies adaptively. Specifically, our UC-NeRF first builds a consistency learner in the form of multi-view stereo network, to establish the geometric correspondence from sparse views and generate uncertainty estimation and feature priors. In neural rendering, we design a base-adaptive NeRF network to exploit the uncertainty estimation for explicitly handling the photometric inconsistencies. Furthermore, an uncertainty-guided geometry distillation is employed to enhance geometry learning. Experiments on the SCARED and Hamlyn datasets demonstrate our superior performance in rendering appearance and geometry, consistently outperforming the current state-of-the-art approaches. Our code will be released at https://github.com/wrld/UC-NeRF.