AI Navigate

Fast and Generalizable NeRF Architecture Selection for Satellite Scene Reconstruction

arXiv cs.CV / 3/20/2026

📰 NewsSignals & Early TrendsIdeas & Deep AnalysisModels & Research

Key Points

  • The paper argues that multi-view consistency, not architecture alone, largely determines NeRF quality for satellite scene reconstruction, based on SHAP analysis.
  • It introduces PreSCAN, a predictive framework that estimates NeRF performance before training using lightweight geometric and photometric descriptors.
  • PreSCAN can select suitable NeRF architectures in under 30 seconds with less than 1 dB prediction error, delivering up to 1000x speedups versus neural architecture search.
  • The authors demonstrate edge deployment on Jetson Orin, where combining PreSCAN with offline cost profiling reduces inference power by 26% and latency by 43% with minimal quality loss.
  • Experiments on the DFC2019 dataset show PreSCAN generalizes across diverse satellite scenes without retraining.

Abstract

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) have emerged as a powerful approach for photorealistic 3D reconstruction from multi-view images. However, deploying NeRF for satellite imagery remains challenging. Each scene requires individual training, and optimizing architectures via Neural Architecture Search (NAS) demands hours to days of GPU time. While existing approaches focus on architectural improvements, our SHAP analysis reveals that multi-view consistency, rather than model architecture, determines reconstruction quality. Based on this insight, we develop PreSCAN, a predictive framework that estimates NeRF quality prior to training using lightweight geometric and photometric descriptors. PreSCAN selects suitable architectures in < 30 seconds with < 1 dB prediction error, achieving 1000\times speedup over NAS. We further demonstrate PreSCAN's deployment utility on edge platforms (Jetson Orin), where combining its predictions with offline cost profiling reduces inference power by 26% and latency by 43% with minimal quality loss. Experiments on DFC2019 datasets confirm that PreSCAN generalizes across diverse satellite scenes without retraining.