AI Engineering/Phase 04/Lesson 13

3D Vision — Point Clouds & NeRFs

3D vision comes in two flavours. Point clouds are the sensor's raw output. NeRFs are the learned volumetric field. Both answer "what is where in space."

Learn + Build 45 min Python

Prerequisites: Phase 4 Lesson 03 (CNNs), Phase 1 Lesson 12 (Tensor Operations)

#Learning Objectives

Distinguish explicit (point cloud, mesh, voxel) and implicit (signed distance field, NeRF) 3D representations and when each is used
Understand PointNet's symmetric-function trick that makes a neural network permutation-invariant over an unordered set of points
Trace a NeRF forward pass: ray casting, volumetric rendering, positional encoding, MLP density+colour head
Use nerfstudio or instant-ngp for pretrained 3D reconstruction from a small set of posed images

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The text and code of this lesson are based on AI Engineering from Scratch by Rohit Ghumare, MIT licensed.