End-to-end View Synthesis via NeRF Attention

In this paper, we present a simple seq2seq formulation for view synthesis where we take a set of ray points as input and output colors corresponding to the rays. Directly applying a standard transformer on this seq2seq formulation has two limitations. First, the standard attention cannot successfully fit the volumetric rendering procedure, and therefore high-frequency components are missing in the synthesized views. Second, applying global attention to all rays and pixels is extremely inefficient. Inspired by the neural radiance field (NeRF), we propose the NeRF attention (NeRFA) to address the above problems. On the one hand, NeRFA considers the volumetric rendering equation as a soft feature modulation procedure. In this way, the feature modulation enhances the transformers with the NeRF-like inductive bias. On the other hand, NeRFA performs multi-stage attention to reduce the computational overhead. Furthermore, the NeRFA model adopts the ray and pixel transformers to learn the interactions between rays and pixels. NeRFA demonstrates superior performance over NeRF and NerFormer on four datasets: DeepVoxels, Blender, LLFF, and CO3D. Besides, NeRFA establishes a new state-of-the-art under two settings: the single-scene view synthesis and the category-centric novel view synthesis. The code will be made publicly available.