Gaussian Activated Neural Radiance Fields for High Fidelity Reconstruction and Pose Estimation

Shin-Fang Chng, Sameera Ramasinghe, Jamie Sherrah, Simon Lucey

Abstract: Despite Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) showing compelling results in photorealistic novel views synthesis of real-world scenes, most existing approaches require accurate prior camera poses. Although approaches for jointly recovering the radiance field and camera pose exist, they rely on a cumbersome coarse-to-fine auxiliary positional embedding to ensure good performance. We present Gaussian Activated Neural Radiance Fields (GARF), a new positional embedding-free neural radiance field architecture – employing Gaussian activations – that is competitive with the current state-of-the-art in terms of high fidelity reconstruction and pose estimation.