# NeRF-NQA: No-Reference Quality Assessment for Scenes Generated by NeRF and Neural View Synthesis Methods

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.08029 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.08029/

## Key facts

- Cited by 10 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 32 of its 64 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Dec 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 32)

- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04079/) (2023)
- [PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00593/) (2016)
- [MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottlenecks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04381/) (2018)
- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [MobileNets: Efficient Convolutional Neural Networks for Mobile Vision Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04861/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Plenoxels: Radiance Fields without Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05131/) (2021)
- [Matterport3D: Learning from RGB-D Data in Indoor Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.06158/) (2017)
- [TensoRF: Tensorial Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09517/) (2022)
- [EfficientNetV2: Smaller Models and Faster Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00298/) (2021)
- [Exploring CLIP for Assessing the Look and Feel of Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12396/) (2022)
- [Direct Voxel Grid Optimization: Super-fast Convergence for Radiance Fields Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.11215/) (2021)
- [Image Quality Assessment: Unifying Structure and Texture Similarity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07728/) (2020)
- [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)
- [NeuMan: Neural Human Radiance Field from a Single Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12575/) (2022)
- [Gradient Magnitude Similarity Deviation: A Highly Efficient Perceptual Image Quality Index](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1308.3052/) (2013)
- [PieAPP: Perceptual Image-Error Assessment through Pairwise Preference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.02067/) (2018)
- [Is Attention All That NeRF Needs?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.13298/) (2022)
- [Light Field Neural Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.09687/) (2021)
- [A Haar Wavelet-Based Perceptual Similarity Index for Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06140/) (2016)
- [Mean Deviation Similarity Index: Efficient and Reliable Full-Reference Image Quality Evaluator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.07433/) (2016)
- [A practical guide and software for analysing pairwise comparison experiments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.03686/) (2017)
- [Active Sampling for Pairwise Comparisons via Approximate Message Passing and Information Gain Maximization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05691/) (2020)
- [Perceptual Quality Assessment of NeRF and Neural View Synthesis Methods for Front-Facing Views](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15206/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [Neural Radiance Fields for the Real World: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.13104/) (2025)
- [Towards End-to-End Neuromorphic Event-based 3D Object Reconstruction Without Physical Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.00741/) (2025)
- [NVS-SQA: Exploring Self-Supervised Quality Representation Learning for Neurally Synthesized Scenes without References](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.06488/) (2025)
- [A Survey of 3D Reconstruction with Event Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.08438/) (2025)
- [Benchmarking Image Similarity Metrics for Novel View Synthesis Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.12563/) (2025)
- [DNRSelect: Active Best View Selection for Deferred Neural Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12150/) (2025)
- [Non-Aligned Reference Image Quality Assessment for Novel View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.08155/) (2025)
- [OrbitNVS: Harnessing Video Diffusion Priors for Novel View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.19613/) (2026)
- [Aes3D: Aesthetic Assessment in 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.05155/) (2026)
- [From Explicit References to Scene Manifolds: Distributional Fidelity and Realism for Radiance Field Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.07346/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Neural View Synthesis (NVS) has demonstrated efficacy in generating high-fidelity dense viewpoint videos using a image set with sparse views. However, existing quality assessment methods like PSNR, SSIM, and LPIPS are not tailored for the scenes with dense viewpoints synthesized by NVS and NeRF variants, thus, they often fall short in capturing the perceptual quality, including spatial and angular aspects of NVS-synthesized scenes. Furthermore, the lack of dense ground truth views makes the full reference quality assessment on NVS-synthesized scenes challenging. For instance, datasets such as LLFF provide only sparse images, insufficient for complete full-reference assessments. To address the issues above, we propose NeRF-NQA, the first no-reference quality assessment method for densely-observed scenes synthesized from the NVS and NeRF variants. NeRF-NQA employs a joint quality assessment strategy, integrating both viewwise and pointwise approaches, to evaluate the quality of NVS-generated scenes. The viewwise approach assesses the spatial quality of each individual synthesized view and the overall inter-views consistency, while the pointwise approach focuses on the angular qualities of scene surface points and their compound inter-point quality. Extensive evaluations are conducted to compare NeRF-NQA with 23 mainstream visual quality assessment methods (from fields of image, video, and light-field assessment). The results demonstrate NeRF-NQA outperforms the existing assessment methods significantly and it shows substantial superiority on assessing NVS-synthesized scenes without references. An implementation of this paper are available at https://github.com/VincentQQu/NeRF-NQA.