Comparative Assessment of Neural Radiance Fields and 3D Gaussian Splatting for Point Cloud Generation from UAV Imagery

Abstract

Point clouds continue to be the main data source in 3D modeling studies with unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) images. Structure-from-Motion (SfM) and MultiView Stereo (MVS) have high time costs for point cloud generation, especially in large data sets. For this reason, state-of-the-art methods such as Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) and 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) have emerged as powerful alternatives for point cloud generation. This paper explores the performance of NeRF and 3DGS methods in generating point clouds from UAV images. For this purpose, the Nerfacto, Instant-NGP, and Splatfacto methods developed in the Nerfstudio framework were used. The obtained point clouds were evaluated by taking the point cloud produced with the photogrammetric method as reference. In this study, the effects of image size and iteration number on the performance of the algorithms were investigated in two different study areas. According to the results, Splatfacto demonstrates promising capabilities in addressing challenges related to scene complexity, rendering efficiency, and accuracy in UAV imagery.