UC San Diego

Recent advances in the field of neural implicit surface representation has led to the use of signed distance functions as a continuous representation of complex surfaces. Though signed distance functions allow for a very simple and concise mapping of the environment, rendering these surfaces from signed distance functions are non-trivial and require iterative methods such as ray marching, leading to high render times. The inclusion of direction in these functions have been proposed and applied to various object-level applications, but have yet to be proposed for scene-level applications. This thesis explores the idea of scene-level directional distance functions and some of the problems that it faces. It then proposes three different methods through which the directional distance function can be implemented and potential solutions to some of the drawbacks of the directional distance function.