Vox-Surf: Voxel-Based Implicit Surface Representation

IEEE Trans Vis Comput Graph. 2024 Mar;30(3):1743-1755. doi: 10.1109/TVCG.2022.3225844. Epub 2024 Jan 30.

Abstract

Virtual content creation and interaction play an important role in modern 3D applications. Recovering detailed 3D models from real scenes can significantly expand the scope of its applications and has been studied for decades in the computer vision and computer graphics community. In this work, we propose Vox-Surf, a voxel-based implicit surface representation. Our Vox-Surf divides the space into finite sparse voxels, where each voxel is a basic geometry unit that stores geometry and appearance information on its corner vertices. Due to the sparsity inherited from the voxel representation, Vox-Surf is suitable for almost any scene and can be easily trained end-to-end from multiple view images. We utilize a progressive training process to gradually cull out empty voxels and keep only valid voxels for further optimization, which greatly reduces the number of sample points and improves inference speed. Experiments show that our Vox-Surf representation can learn fine surface details and accurate colors with less memory and faster rendering than previous methods. The resulting fine voxels can also be considered as the bounding volumes for collision detection, which is useful in 3D interactions. We also show the potential application of Vox-Surf in scene editing and augmented reality. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/zju3dv/Vox-Surf.