@inproceedings{
wang2024distillnerf,
title={DistillNe{RF}: Perceiving 3D Scenes from Single-Glance Images by Distilling Neural Fields and Foundation Model Features},
author={Letian Wang and Seung Wook Kim and Jiawei Yang and Cunjun Yu and Boris Ivanovic and Steven L. Waslander and Yue Wang and Sanja Fidler and Marco Pavone and Peter Karkus},
booktitle={The Thirty-eighth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems},
year={2024},
url={https://openreview.net/forum?id=7fScrgJ3An}
}
We propose DistillNeRF, a self-supervised learning framework addressing the challenge of understanding 3D environments from limited 2D observations in outdoor autonomous driving scenes. Our method is a generalizable feedforward model that predicts a rich neural scene representation from sparse, single-frame multi-view camera inputs with limited view overlap, and is trained self-supervised with differentiable rendering to reconstruct RGB, depth, or feature images. Our first insight is to exploit per-scene optimized Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) by generating dense depth and virtual camera targets from them, which helps our model to learn enhanced 3D geometry from sparse non-overlapping image inputs. Second, to learn a semantically rich 3D representation, we propose distilling features from pre-trained 2D foundation models, such as CLIP or DINOv2, thereby enabling various downstream tasks without the need for costly 3D human annotations. To leverage these two insights, we introduce a novel model architecture with a two-stage lift-splat-shoot encoder and a parameterized sparse hierarchical voxel representation. Experimental results on the NuScenes and Waymo NOTR datasets demonstrate that DistillNeRF significantly outperforms existing comparable state-of-the-art self-supervised methods for scene reconstruction, novel view synthesis, and depth estimation; and it allows for competitive zero-shot 3D semantic occupancy prediction, as well as open-world scene understanding through distilled foundation model features. Demos and code will be available at https://distillnerf.github.io/.
DistillNeRF: Perceiving 3D Scenes from Single-Glance Images by Distilling Neural Fields and Foundation Model Features
Letian Wang Seung Wook Kim Jiawei Yang Cunjun Yu Boris Ivanovic Steven L. Waslander Yue Wang Sanja Fidler Marco Pavone Peter Karkus