BioNeRF: Biologically Plausible Neural Radiance Fields for View Synthesis

This paper presents BioNeRF, a biologically plausible architecture that models scenes in a 3D representation and synthesizes new views through radiance fields. Since NeRF relies on the network weights to store the scene's 3-dimensional representation, BioNeRF implements a cognitive-inspired mechanism that fuses inputs from multiple sources into a memory-like structure, improving the storing capacity and extracting more intrinsic and correlated information. BioNeRF also mimics a behavior observed in pyramidal cells concerning contextual information, in which the memory is provided as the context and combined with the inputs of two subsequent neural models, one responsible for producing the volumetric densities and the other the colors used to render the scene. Experimental results show that BioNeRF outperforms state-of-the-art results concerning a quality measure that encodes human perception in two datasets: real-world images and synthetic data.

LibOPT: An Open-Source Platform for Fast Prototyping Soft Optimization Techniques

Optimization techniques play an important role in several scientific and real-world applications, thus becoming of great interest for the community. As a consequence, a number of open-source libraries are available in the literature, which ends up fostering the research and development of new techniques and applications. In this work, we present a new library for the implementation and fast prototyping of nature-inspired techniques called LibOPT. Currently, the library implements 15 techniques and 112 benchmarking functions, as well as it also supports 11 hypercomplex-based optimization approaches, which makes it one of the first of its kind. We showed how one can easily use and also implement new techniques in LibOPT under the C paradigm. Examples are provided with samples of source-code using benchmarking functions.