Sat-NeRF
 Learning Multi-View Satellite Photogrammetry
With Transient Objects and Shadow Modeling Using RPC Cameras


Roger Marí
Gabriele Facciolo
Thibaud Ehret
[Paper]
[GitHub]
[Data]
[Bibtex]

🔥 🔥 UPDATE JUNE 2023 !!! Have a look at EO-NeRF, our latest method for multi-view satellite photogrammetry using neural radiance fields. 🔥 🔥


Project developed at the ENS Paris-Saclay, Centre Borelli and accepted at the CVPR EarthVision Workshop 2022.

Abstract

We introduce the Satellite Neural Radiance Field (Sat-NeRF), a new end-to-end model for learning multi-view satellite photogrammetry in the wild. Sat-NeRF combines some of the latest trends in neural rendering with native satellite camera models, represented by rational polynomial coefficient (RPC) functions. The proposed method renders new views and infers surface models of similar quality to those obtained with traditional state-of-the-art stereo pipelines. Multi-date images exhibit significant changes in appearance, mainly due to varying shadows and transient objects (cars, vegetation). Robustness to these challenges is achieved by a shadow-aware irradiance model and uncertainty weighting to deal with transient phenomena that cannot be explained by the position of the sun. We evaluate Sat-NeRF using WorldView-3 images from different locations and stress the advantages of applying a bundle adjustment to the satellite camera models prior to training. This boosts the network performance and can optionally be used to extract additional cues for depth supervision.


Method Diagram

Sat-NeRF network architecture. The geometry (volume density) and appearance (albedo color) of permanent structures are simultaneously learned using a main backbone of fully-connected layers. Shadows (shading scalar), hue biases (ambient color) and transient objects (uncertainty coefficient) are learned by secondary heads.

 [GitHub]


Paper

R. Marí, G. Facciolo, T. Ehret.
Sat-NeRF: Learning Multi-View Satellite Photogrammetry With Transient Objects and Shadow Modeling Using RPC Cameras.
In CVPR Workshops, 2022.
(hosted on ArXiv)
(camera ready)


[Bibtex]


Acknowledgements

This template was originally made by Phillip Isola and Richard Zhang for a colorful ECCV project; the code can be found here.