J. N. P. Martel*, D. B. Lindell*, C. Z. Lin, E. R. Chan, M. Monteiro, G. Wetzstein, ACORN: Adaptive Coordinate Networks for Neural Representation, SIGGRAPH 2021

Abstract:

Neural representations have emerged as a new paradigm for applications in rendering, imaging, geometric modeling, and simulation. Compared to traditional representations such as meshes, point clouds, or volumes they can be flexibly incorporated into differentiable learning-based pipelines. While recent improvements to neural representations now make it possible to represent signals with fine details at moderate resolutions (e.g., for images and 3D shapes), adequately representing large-scale or complex scenes has proven a challenge. Current neural representations fail to accurately represent images at resolutions greater than a megapixel or 3D scenes with more than a few hundred thousand polygons. Here, we introduce a new hybrid implicit-explicit network architecture and training strategy that adaptively allocates resources during training and inference based on the local complexity of a signal of interest. Our approach uses a multiscale block-coordinate decomposition, similar to a quadtree or octree, that is optimized during training. The network architecture operates in two stages: using the bulk of the network parameters, a coordinate encoder generates a feature grid in a single forward pass. Then, hundreds or thousands of samples within each block can be efficiently evaluated using a lightweight feature decoder. With this hybrid implicit-explicit network architecture, we demonstrate the first experiments that fit gigapixel images to nearly 40 dB peak signal-to-noise ratio. Notably this represents an increase in scale of over 1000x compared to the resolution of previously demonstrated image-fitting experiments. Moreover, our approach is able to represent 3D shapes significantly faster and better than previous techniques; it reduces training times from days to hours or minutes and memory requirements by over an order of magnitude.

Bibtex:

@article{mllcmw-acorn-21,
author = {Martel, Julien N.P. and Lindell, David B. and Lin, Connor Z. and Chan, Eric R. and Monteiro, Marco and Wetzstein, Gordon},
title = {ACORN: Adaptive Coordinate Networks for Neural Representation},
journal = {ACM Trans. Graph. (SIGGRAPH)},
year={2021}
}