An Efficient Hardware Volume Renderer for Convolutional Neural Radiance Fields

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) has attracted growing attention in the fields of 3D reconstruction and rendering. However, straightforward NeRF algorithms encounter challenges in accurately capturing complex surface details with rich high-frequency information. A recent development known as Convolutional Neural Radiance Field (ConvNeRF) has demonstrated state-of-the-art results for these tasks. But it comes with substantial irregular computational requirements, particularly in the convolutional volume rendering phase. In this paper, we introduce a hardware accelerator designed to enhance the efficiency of convolutional volume rendering in ConvNeRF. Our approach includes the creation of specialized computation modules and corresponding on-chip memory system optimized for seamless support of gated convolutions and skip connections in ConvNeRF. To validate our design, we implement it in VerilogHDL and build a prototype using Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). We also map our design to 40nm CMOS technology. The evaluation results underscore the superiority of our accelerator in terms of energy efficiency when compared to an implementation on an NVIDIA 2080Ti GPU, offering approximately 84.6x more frames per watt.