Neural Ray-Tracing: Learning Surfaces and Reflectance for Relighting and View Synthesis

Understand

Recent neural rendering methods have demonstrated accurate view interpolation by predicting volumetric density and color with a neural network.

• Although such volumetric representations can be supervised on static and dynamic scenes, existing methods implicitly bake the complete scene light transport into a single neural network for a given scene, including surface modeling, bidirectional scattering distribution functions, and indirect lighting effects.
• In contrast to traditional rendering pipelines, this prohibits changing surface reflectance, illumination, or composing other objects in the scene.
• In this work, we explicitly model the light transport between scene surfaces and we rely on traditional integration schemes and the rendering equation to reconstruct a scene.