Scalable Neural Indoor Scene Rendering

We propose a scalable neural scene reconstruction and rendering method to support distributed training and interactive rendering of large indoor scenes. Our representation is based on tiles. Tile appearances are trained in parallel through a background sampling strategy that augments each tile with distant scene information via a proxy global mesh. Each tile has two low-capacity MLPs: one for view-independent appearance (diffuse color and shading) and one for view-dependent appearance (specular highlights, reflections). We leverage the phenomena that complex view-dependent scene reflections can be attributed to virtual lights underneath surfaces at the total ray distance to the source. This lets us handle sparse samplings of the input scene where reflection highlights do not always appear consistently in input images. We show interactive free-viewpoint rendering results from five scenes, one of which covers an area of more than 100 m(2). Experimental results show that our method produces higher-quality renderings than a single large-capacity MLP and five recent neural proxy-geometry and voxel-based baseline methods.