Robust e-NeRF

     

This repository contains the source code for the ICCV 2023 paper — Robust e-NeRF: NeRF from Sparse & Noisy Events under Non-Uniform Motion, which is mainly built on the PyTorch Lightning framework. Robust e-NeRF is a novel method to directly and robustly reconstruct NeRFs from moving event cameras under various real-world conditions, especially from sparse and noisy events generated under non-uniform motion.

If you find Robust e-NeRF useful for your work, please consider citing:

@inproceedings{low2023_robust-e-nerf,
  title = {Robust e-NeRF: NeRF from Sparse & Noisy Events under Non-Uniform Motion},
  author = {Low, Weng Fei and Lee, Gim Hee},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)},
  year = {2023}
}

Installation

We recommend using Conda to set up an environment with the appropriate dependencies for running Robust e-NeRF, as follows:

git clone https://github.com/wengflow/robust-e-nerf.git
cd robust-e-nerf
conda env create -f environment.yml

If a manual installation is preferred, the list of dependencies can be found in environment.yml.

Dataset Setup

Robust e-NeRF Synthetic Dataset

Our synthetic experiments are performed on a set of sequences simulated using an improved ESIM event camera simulator with different camera configurations on NeRF Realistic Synthetic $360\degree$ scenes. In our Robust e-NeRF Synthetic Event Dataset, we provide the simulated sequences used to study the collective effect of camera speed profile, contrast threshold variation and refractory period. Minor modifications to the ESIM configuration files provided in the dataset enables the simulation of other sequences used in our synthetic experiments.

To run Robust e-NeRF on our synthetic dataset:

1. Setup the dataset according to the official instructions
2. Preprocess each sequence in the raw dataset with:

   python scripts/preprocess_esim.py <sequence_path>/esim.conf <sequence_path>/esim.bag <sequence_path>

TUM-VIE

Our qualitative real experiments are performed on the mocap-1d-trans, mocap-desk2 and office_maze sequences of the TUM-VIE dataset, which are setup as follows:

1. Download the following raw data for each sequence and calibration files into a common folder:
   • <sequence_name>-events_left.h5
   • <sequence_name>-vi_gt_data.tar.gz
   • camera-calibration{A, B}.json
   • mocap-imu-calibration{A, B}.json
2. Uncompress all <sequence_name>-vi_gt_data.tar.gz and then remove them
3. Preprocess each sequence in the raw dataset with:

   python scripts/tum_vie_to_esim.py <sequence_name> <raw_dataset_path> <preprocessed_dataset_path>

   Note that we trim the end of the offize-maze sequence with the additional argument of --end_timestamp 20778222508

Usage

Train, validate or test Robust e-NeRF with:

python scripts/run.py {train, val, test} <config_file_path>

Configuration

In the configs/ folder, we provide two sets of configuration files:

1. {train, test}/synthetic.yaml
2. {train, test}/{mocap-1d-trans, mocap-desk2, office_maze}.yaml

used to train or test Robust e-NeRF for the synthetic and real experiments, respectively.

The specific experimental setting described in the configuration files are given as follows:

Configuration File	Experiment	Sequence	Opt. $C_p$	Opt. $\tau$	$\ell_{grad}$
synthetic.yaml	Synthetic	ficus under the easy/default setting	✗	✗	✗
<sequence_name>.yaml	Real	<sequence_name>	✓	✓	✓

You should modify the following parameters in the given configuration files to reflect the correct or preferred paths:

1. data.dataset_directory: Path to the preprocessed sequence
2. model.checkpoint_filepath: Path to the pretrained model
3. logger.save_dir: Preferred path to the logs

To reproduce our synthetic experiment results under any specific setting, as reported in the paper, you should modify {train, test}/synthetic.yaml as follows:

Experimental Setting	Parameter(s) To Be Modified
Sequence	data.dataset_directory
Opt. $C_p$	model.contrast_threshold.freeze
Opt. $\tau$	model.refractory_period.freeze
w/ or w/o $\ell_{grad}$	loss.weight.log_intensity_grad

You should also modify model.checkpoint_filepath and logger.name accordingly.

Note that in our synthetic experiments, when the contrast threshold $C_p$ and/or refractory period $\tau$ are jointly optimized, we poorly initialize them, by manually overriding the calibrated values, to assess the robustness of the joint optimization.

Please refer to the Robust e-NeRF paper for more details.