Reconstruction, Representation, and Rendering of Three-Dimensional Environments

Point clouds or meshes are the most common three-dimensional primitives used for the memory representation of environments and objects. These approaches had the advantage or disadvantage of distinctly separating the reconstruction phase from the rendering phase.

Recently, both the Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) (MST$^+$20) and, more notably, the 3D Gaussian Splatting methods have provided a significant boost in this field, harmonizing the reconstruction and rendering processes.