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A Large-Scale City Dataset for City-Scale Neural Rendering and Beyond (arxiv.org)
2 points by PaulHoule on Oct 7, 2023 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: A game engine flies and drives through two virtual cities, capturing aerial and street views with exact camera positions and controllable light, weather, and traffic. The 28-square-kilometer collection lets researchers test photo-to-3D rendering, which struggles more here than on the small objects studied before.

Abstract · MatrixCity: A Large-scale City Dataset for City-scale Neural Rendering and Beyond

Neural radiance fields (NeRF) and its subsequent variants have led to remarkable progress in neural rendering. While most of recent neural rendering works focus on objects and small-scale scenes, developing neural rendering methods for city-scale scenes is of great potential in many real-world applications. However, this line of research is impeded by the absence of a comprehensive and high-quality dataset, yet collecting such a dataset over real city-scale scenes is costly, sensitive, and technically difficult. To this end, we build a large-scale, comprehensive, and high-quality synthetic dataset for city-scale neural rendering researches. Leveraging the Unreal Engine 5 City Sample project, we develop a pipeline to easily collect aerial and street city views, accompanied by ground-truth camera poses and a range of additional data modalities. Flexible controls over environmental factors like light, weather, human and car crowd are also available in our pipeline, supporting the need of various tasks covering city-scale neural rendering and beyond. The resulting pilot dataset, MatrixCity, contains 67k aerial images and 452k street images from two city maps of total size $28km^2$. On top of MatrixCity, a thorough benchmark is also conducted, which not only reveals unique challenges of the task of city-scale neural rendering, but also highlights potential improvements for future works. The dataset and code will be publicly available at our project page: https://city-super.github.io/matrixcity/.

Yixuan Li, Lihan Jiang, Linning Xu, Yuanbo Xiangli, Zhenzhi Wang, Dahua Lin, Bo Dai
arXiv:2309.16553 · cs.CV · submitted Sep 28, 2023
abstract · pdf · html · Accepted to ICCV 2023. Project page: $\href{https://city-super.github.io/matrixcity/}{this\, https\, URL}$

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