$R^2$-Mesh: Reinforcement Learning Powered Mesh Reconstruction via Geometry and Appearance Refinement

Abstract: Mesh reconstruction based on Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) is popular in a variety of applications such as computer graphics, virtual reality, and medical imaging due to its efficiency in handling complex geometric structures and facilitating real-time rendering. However, existing works often fail to capture fine geometric details accurately and struggle with optimizing rendering quality. To address these challenges, we propose a novel algorithm that progressively generates and optimizes meshes from multi-view images. Our approach initiates with the training of a NeRF model to establish an initial Signed Distance Field (SDF) and a view-dependent appearance field. Subsequently, we iteratively refine the SDF through a differentiable mesh extraction method, continuously updating both the vertex positions and their connectivity based on the loss from mesh differentiable rasterization, while also optimizing the appearance representation. To further leverage high-fidelity and detail-rich representations from NeRF, we propose an online-learning strategy based on Upper Confidence Bound (UCB) to enhance viewpoints by adaptively incorporating images rendered by the initial NeRF model into the training dataset. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that our method delivers highly competitive and robust performance in both mesh rendering quality and geometric quality.