I-DACS: Always Maintaining Consistency Between Poses and the Field for Radiance Field Construction Without Pose Prior

The radiance field, emerging as a novel 3D scene representation, has found widespread application across diverse fields. Standard radiance field construction approaches rely on the ground-truth poses of key-frames, while building the field without pose prior remains a formidable challenge. Recent advancements have made strides in mitigating this challenge, albeit to a limited extent, by jointly optimizing poses and the radiance field. However, in these schemes, the consistency between the radiance field and poses is achieved completely by training. Once the poses of key-frames undergo changes, long-term training is required to readjust the field to fit them. To address such a limitation, we propose a new solution for radiance field construction without pose prior, namely I-DACS (Incremental radiance field construction with Direction-Aware Color Sampling). Diverging from most of the existing global optimization solutions, we choose to incrementally solve the poses and construct a radiance field within a sliding-window framework. The poses are unequivocally retrieved from the radiance field, devoid of any constraints and accompanying noise from other observation models, so as to achieve the consistency of poses to the field. Besides, in the radiance field, the color information is much higher-frequency and more time-consuming to learn compared with the density. To accelerate training, we isolate the color information to a distinct color field, and construct the color field based on an innovative direction-aware color sampling strategy, by which the color field can be derived directly from images without training. The color field obtained in this way is always consistent with the poses, and intricate details of training images can be retained to the utmost extent. Extensive experimental results evidently showcase both the remarkable training speed and the outstanding performance in rendering quality and localization accuracy achieved by I-DACS. To make our results reproducible, the source code has been released at <uri xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">https://cslinzhang.github.io/I-DACS-MainPage/</uri>.