Learning a Room with the Occ-SDF Hybrid: Signed Distance Function Mingled with Occupancy Aids Scene Representation

Abstract

Implicit neural rendering, using signed distance function (SDF) representation with geometric priors like depth or surface normal, has made impressive strides in the surface reconstruction of large-scale scenes. However, applying this method to reconstruct a room-level scene from images may miss structures in low-intensity areas and/or small, thin objects. We have conducted experiments on three datasets to identify limitations of the original color rendering loss and priors-embedded SDF scene representation.Our findings show that the color rendering loss creates an optimization bias against low-intensity areas, resulting in gradient vanishing and leaving these areas unoptimized. To address this issue, we propose a feature-based color rendering loss that utilizes non-zero feature values to bring back optimization signals. Additionally, the SDF representation can be influenced by objects along a ray path, disrupting the monotonic change of SDF values when a single object is present. Accordingly, we explore using the occupancy representation, which encodes each point separately and is unaffected by objects along a querying ray. Our experimental results demonstrate that the joint forces of the feature-based rendering loss and Occ-SDF hybrid representation scheme can provide high-quality reconstruction results, especially in challenging room-level scenarios. The code is available at https://github.com/shawLyu/Occ-SDF_Hybrid.