Control-NeRF: Editable Feature Volumes for Scene Rendering and Manipulation

We present Control-NeRF1, a method for performing flexible, 3D-aware image content manipulation while enabling high-quality novel view synthesis, from a set of posed input images. NeRF-based approaches [23] are effective for novel view synthesis, however such models memorize the radiance for every point in a scene within a neural network. Since these models are scene-specific and lack a 3D scene representation, classical editing such as shape manipulation, or combining scenes is not possible. While there are some recent hybrid approaches that combine NeRF with external scene representations such as sparse voxels, planes, hash tables, etc. [16, 5, 24, 9], they focus mostly on efficiency and don't explore the scene editing and manipulation capabilities of hybrid approaches. With the aim of exploring controllable scene representations for novel view synthesis, our model couples learnt scene-specific 3D feature volumes with a general NeRF rendering network. We can generalize to novel scenes by optimizing only the scene-specific 3D feature volume, while keeping the parameters of the rendering network fixed. Since the feature volumes are independent of the rendering model, we can manipulate and combine scenes by editing their corresponding feature volumes. The edited volume can then be plugged into the rendering model to synthesize high-quality novel views. We demonstrate scene manipulations including: scene mixing; applying rigid and non-rigid transformations; inserting, moving and deleting objects in a scene; while producing photo-realistic novel-view synthesis results.