Oblique-MERF: Revisiting and Improving MERF for Oblique Photography

Abstract

Neural radiance fields (NeRF) have established a new paradigm for 3D scene reconstruction, with subsequent work achieving high-quality real-time rendering. However, reconstructing large-scale scenes from oblique aerial photography presents unique challenges, such as varying spatial scale distributions and a constrained range of tilt angles, often resulting in high memory consumption and reduced rendering quality at extrapolated viewpoints. To address these issues, we propose a novel approach named Oblique-MERF to accommodate the distinctive characteristics of oblique photography datasets and support real-time rendering on various common devices. Firstly, an innovative adaptive occupancy plane is proposed to constrain the sampling space. Additionally, we propose a smoothness regularization loss for view-dependent color to enhance the MLP's ability to generalize to untrained viewpoints. Experimental results demonstrate that Oblique-MERF reduces VRAM usage by approximately 40% while maintaining competitive rendering quality compared to baseline methods, and achieves higher frame rates with more realistic rendering even at untrained extrapolated viewpoints.