Radiance Meshes for Volumetric Reconstruction

Abstract

We introduce Radiance Meshes for representing radiance fields with constant density tetrahedral cells produced with a Delaunay tetrahedralization.Unlike a Voronoi diagram, a Delaunay tetrahedralization yields simple triangles that are natively supported by existing hardware. As such, our model is able to perform exact and fast volume rendering using both rasterization and ray-tracing. We introduce a new rasterization method that achieve faster rendering speeds than all prior radiance field representations (assuming an equivalent number of primitives and resolution) across a variety of platforms.Optimizing the positions of Delaunay vertices introduces topological discontinuities (edge flips). To solve this, we use a Zip-NeRF-style backbone which allows us to express a smoothly varying field even when the topology changes.Our rendering method exactly evaluates the volume rendering equation and enables high quality, real-time view synthesis on standard consumer hardware. Our tetrahedral meshes also lend themselves to a variety of exciting applications including fisheye lens distortion, physics-based simulation, editing, and mesh extraction.