SPARSESAT-NERF: DENSE DEPTH SUPERVISED NEURAL RADIANCE FIELDS FOR SPARSE SATELLITE IMAGES

Digital surface model generation using traditional multi-view stereo matching (MVS) performs poorly over non-Lambertian surfaces, with asynchronous acquisitions, or at discontinuities. Neural radiance fields (NeRF) offer a new paradigm for reconstructing surface geometries using continuous volumetri...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:ISPRS Annals of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences
Main Authors: L. Zhang, E. Rupnik
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Copernicus Publications 2023-12-01
Online Access:https://isprs-annals.copernicus.org/articles/X-1-W1-2023/895/2023/isprs-annals-X-1-W1-2023-895-2023.pdf
Description
Summary:Digital surface model generation using traditional multi-view stereo matching (MVS) performs poorly over non-Lambertian surfaces, with asynchronous acquisitions, or at discontinuities. Neural radiance fields (NeRF) offer a new paradigm for reconstructing surface geometries using continuous volumetric representation. NeRF is self-supervised, does not require ground truth geometry for training, and provides an elegant way to include in its representation physical parameters about the scene, thus potentially remedying the challenging scenarios where MVS fails. However, NeRF and its variants require many views to produce convincing scene&rsquo;s geometries which in earth observation satellite imaging is rare. In this paper we present SparseSat-NeRF (SpS-NeRF) &ndash; an extension of Sat-NeRF adapted to sparse satellite views. SpS-NeRF employs dense depth supervision guided by crosscorrelation similarity metric provided by traditional semi-global MVS matching. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on stereo and tri-stereo Pl&eacute;iades 1B/WorldView-3 images, and compare against NeRF and Sat-NeRF. The code is available at <code>https://github.com/LulinZhang/SpS-NeRF</code>
ISSN:2194-9042
2194-9050