Federated Learning for Large-Scale Scene Modeling with Neural Radiance Fields

We envision a system to continuously build and maintain a map based on earth-scale neural radiance fields (NeRF) using data collected from vehicles and drones in a lifelong learning manner. However, existing large-scale modeling by NeRF has problems in terms of scalability and maintainability when modeling earth-scale environments. Therefore, to address these problems, we propose a federated learning pipeline for large-scale modeling with NeRF. We tailor the model aggregation pipeline in federated learning for NeRF, thereby allowing local updates of NeRF. In the aggregation step, the accuracy of the clients' global pose is critical. Thus, we also propose global pose alignment to align the noisy global pose of clients before the aggregation step. In experiments, we show the effectiveness of the proposed pose alignment and the federated learning pipeline on the large-scale scene dataset, Mill19.