EDoF-NeRF: extended depth-of-field neural radiance fields using a coded aperture camera

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) achieve high-quality novel-view synthesis, but their long training times and reliance on dense input views limit accessibility. We present a comparative study of three accelerated NeRF variants - DS-NeRF, TensoRF, and HashNeRF and explore extensions targeted at the low-compute, low-data regime. First, we add a depth-supervision loss derived from COLMAP keypoints to TensoRF (TensoRF-DS) and evaluate it on the LLFF dataset under reduced view counts. Second, we ablate the feature-decoding MLP of TensoRF and study the effect of input downsampling on PSNR and runtime on the synthetic Lego scene. Third, we propose four architectural variants of the HashNeRF color and density networks, including residual and convolutional designs, and report PSNR/training-time tradeoffs under matched iteration budgets. Under iso-time evaluation, none of our extensions conclusively outperform the published baselines, but the experiments characterize which extensions transfer to constrained settings and surface design questions for future work.

Recent advances in neural scene representations enable photorealistic novel-view synthesis, yet most methods remain tightly coupled to a single rendering paradigm, limiting their versatility and integration with conventional graphics workflows. We introduce Floating Radiance Networks (FlaRe), a neural scene representation combining explicit ray-traceable geometry with continuous neural radiance functions. A scene is represented by floating planar generalized Gaussian primitives, each carrying a compact latent descriptor of a local radiance field. A lightweight decoder shared across the scene maps this descriptor, local surface coordinates, and viewing direction to color and opacity. This formulation preserves the expressiveness of neural fields while providing an explicitly addressable structure that can be efficiently queried and manipulated. Hardware-accelerated primitive intersections enable interactive rendering and recursive ray-tracing, including reflections, refractions, transparency, and shadows. The same representation further supports primitive-level deformation, mesh extraction, and appearance stylization directly in its learned descriptor space. Experiments across standard reconstruction benchmarks demonstrate competitive rendering quality while using a compact set of primitives. Together, these results establish FlaRe as a versatile representation that brings high-fidelity neural rendering, ray-tracing, geometric manipulation, and appearance editing into a unified scene model. Source code is available online. Source code can be found at: https://github.com/KByrski/FlaRe

Neural surface reconstruction methods typically treat camera poses as fixed values, assuming perfect accuracy from Structure-from-Motion (SfM) systems. This assumption breaks down with imperfect pose estimates, leading to distorted or incomplete reconstructions. We present PCM-NeRF, a probabilistic framework that augments neural surface reconstruction with per-camera learnable uncertainty, built on top of SG-NeRF. Rather than treating all cameras equally throughout optimization, we represent each pose as a distribution with a learnable mean and variance, initialized from SfM correspondence quality. An uncertainty regularization loss couples the learned variance to view confidence, and the resulting uncertainty directly modulates the effective pose learning rate: uncertain cameras receive damped gradient updates, preventing poorly initialized views from corrupting the reconstruction. This lightweight mechanism requires no changes to the rendering pipeline and adds negligible overhead. Experiments on challenging scenes with severe pose outliers demonstrate that PCM-NeRF consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both Chamfer Distance and F-Score, particularly for geometrically complex structures, without requiring foreground masks.