FreeNeRF: Improving Few-Shot Neural Rendering with Free Frequency Regularization

Novel view synthesis with sparse inputs is a challenging problem for neural radiance fields (NeRF). Recent efforts alleviate this challenge by introducing external supervision, such as pre-trained models and extra depth signals, or by using non-trivial patch-based rendering. In this paper, we present Frequency regularized NeRF (FreeNeRF), a surprisingly simple baseline that outperforms previous methods with minimal modifications to plain NeRF. We analyze the key challenges in few-shot neural rendering and find that frequency plays an important role in NeRF's training. Based on this analysis, we propose two regularization terms: one to regularize the frequency range of NeRF's inputs, and the other to penalize the near-camera density fields. Both techniques are “free lunches” that come at no additional computational cost. We demonstrate that even with just one line of code change, the original NeRF can achieve similar performance to other complicated methods in the few-shot setting. FreeNeRF achieves state-of-the-art performance across diverse datasets, including Blender, DTU, and LLFF. We hope that this simple baseline will motivate a rethinking of the fundamental role of frequency in NeRF's training, under both the low-data regime and beyond. This project is released at FreeNeRF.