NeRF-Guided Unsupervised Learning of RGB-D Registration

This paper focuses on training a robust RGB-D registration model without ground-truth pose supervision. Existing methods usually adopt a pairwise training strategy based on differentiable rendering, which enforces the photometric and the geometric consistency between the two registered frames as supervision. However, this frame-to-frame framework suffers from poor multi-view consistency due to factors such as lighting changes, geometry occlusion and reflective materials. In this paper, we present NeRF-UR, a novel frame-to-model optimization framework for unsupervised RGB-D registration. Instead of frame-to-frame consistency, we leverage the neural radiance field (NeRF) as a global model of the scene and use the consistency between the input and the NeRF-rerendered frames for pose optimization. This design can significantly improve the robustness in scenarios with poor multi-view consistency and provides better learning signal for the registration model. Furthermore, to bootstrap the NeRF optimization, we create a synthetic dataset, Sim-RGBD, through a photo-realistic simulator to warm up the registration model. By first training the registration model on Sim-RGBD and later unsupervisedly fine-tuning on real data, our framework enables distilling the capability of feature extraction and registration from simulation to reality. Our method outperforms the state-of-the-art counterparts on two popular indoor RGB-D datasets, ScanNet and 3DMatch. Code and models will be released for paper reproduction.

MIPS-Fusion: Multi-Implicit-Submaps for Scalable and Robust Online Neural RGB-D Reconstruction

We introduce MIPS-Fusion, a robust and scalable online RGB-D reconstruction method based on a novel neural implicit representation -- multi-implicit-submap. Different from existing neural RGB-D reconstruction methods lacking either flexibility with a single neural map or scalability due to extra storage of feature grids, we propose a pure neural representation tackling both difficulties with a divide-and-conquer design. In our method, neural submaps are incrementally allocated alongside the scanning trajectory and efficiently learned with local neural bundle adjustments. The submaps can be refined individually in a back-end optimization and optimized jointly to realize submap-level loop closure. Meanwhile, we propose a hybrid tracking approach combining randomized and gradient-based pose optimizations. For the first time, randomized optimization is made possible in neural tracking with several key designs to the learning process, enabling efficient and robust tracking even under fast camera motions. The extensive evaluation demonstrates that our method attains higher reconstruction quality than the state of the arts for large-scale scenes and under fast camera motions.