TriVol: Point Cloud Rendering via Triple Volumes

Existing learning-based methods for point cloud rendering adopt various 3D representations and feature querying mechanisms to alleviate the sparsity problem of point clouds. However, artifacts still appear in the rendered images, due to the challenges in extracting continuous and discriminative 3D features from point clouds. In this paper, we present a dense while lightweight 3D representation, named TriVol, that can be combined with NeRF to render photo-realistic images from point clouds. Our TriVol consists of triple slim volumes, each of which is encoded from the input point cloud. Our representation has two advantages. First, it fuses the respective fields at different scales and thus extracts local and non-local features for discriminative representation. Second, since the volume size is greatly reduced, our 3D decoder can be efficiently inferred, allowing us to increase the resolution of the 3D space to render more point details. Extensive experiments on different benchmarks with varying kinds of scenes/objects demonstrate our framework’s effectiveness compared with current approaches. Moreover, our framework has excellent generalization ability to render a category of scenes or objects without fine-tuning.