NeRF applied to satellite imagery for surface reconstruction

Abstract: We present Surf-NeRF, a modified implementation of the recently introduced Shadow Neural Radiance Field (S-NeRF) model. This method is able to synthesize novel views from a sparse set of satellite images of a scene, while accounting for the variation in lighting present in the pictures. The trained model can also be used to accurately estimate the surface elevation of the scene, which is often a desirable quantity for satellite observation applications. S-NeRF improves on the standard Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) method by considering the radiance as a function of the albedo and the irradiance. Both these quantities are output by fully connected neural network branches of the model, and the latter is considered as a function of the direct light from the sun and the diffuse color from the sky. The implementations were run on a dataset of satellite images, augmented using a zoom-and-crop technique. A hyperparameter study for NeRF was carried out, leading to intriguing observations on the model's convergence. Finally, both NeRF and S-NeRF were run until 100k epochs in order to fully fit the data and produce their best possible predictions. The code related to this article can be found at https://github.com/fsemerar/surfnerf.