Investigation on Relative Pose Regression for Multi-Camera Setups with Neural Radiance Fields

Abstract. Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) are a novel approach that is being intensively investigated in 3D scene reconstruction and similar fields to overcome challenges of conventional methods. In this paper, we address the problem of estimating missing camera poses in a six degrees of freedom setting, pushing the capabilities of NeRFs to address scenarios where only the primary camera’s pose is known. Specifically, we focus on dual-camera setups with this constraint. Our core contribution is a novel pose correction model that operates alongside an unmodified NeRF model, for which we have chosen Nerfacto in the Nerfstudio framework. The pose correction model learns the necessary relative translation and rotation adjustments for the secondary camera solely through the NeRF loss. This allows us to integrate our correction model directly into the Nerfacto training pipeline without altering the core functionality. Through extensive experiments on different camera configurations in a synthetic scene, we rigorously evaluate our model’s performance across diverse scenarios, pushing it to its limits. Our findings reveal that our model can effectively learn pose correction parameters within a constrained range, with increased sensitivity to larger translations and particular challenges in rotation corrections. This research highlights the potential of NeRFs for machine learning-driven 3D reconstruction on dual- and multi-camera platforms, expanding the applicability of NeRFs to more complex, real-world setups despite the inherent challenges.