RayFormer: Modeling Inter- and Intra-Ray Similarity for NeRF-Based Video Snapshot Compressive Imaging

arXiv cs.CV / 5/1/2026

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Key Points

  • The paper targets video snapshot compressive imaging (SCI), aiming to reconstruct dynamic scenes from a single measurement, and notes that NeRF-based approaches often use random ray sampling that overlooks structural similarities.
  • It introduces a patch-level ray sampling strategy to better model scene content structure before applying any learning-based reconstruction.
  • The authors propose RayFormer, an Inter- and Intra-Ray Transformer that captures both inter-ray similarities among neighboring spatial points at the same depth and intra-ray correlations along each viewing ray.
  • By combining patch-level sampling with a total variation prior in the optimization objective, the method improves spatial smoothness and reduces artifacts.
  • Experiments on simulated and real-world scenes show the approach achieves state-of-the-the-art (SOTA) reconstruction quality.

Abstract

Video snapshot compressive imaging (SCI) enables the reconstruction of dynamic scenes from a single snapshot measurement. Recently, NeRF-based methods have shown promising reconstruction performance. However, such methods typically adopt random ray sampling strategies and fail to capture content structural similarities, resulting in limited reconstruction quality. To address these issues, we first propose a patch-level ray sampling strategy to enable the modeling of content structure. Then, we propose an Inter- and Intra-Ray Transformer (RayFormer) to capture the structural similarities, modeling both inter-ray similarities among spatially neighboring points at the same depth and intra-ray correlations between adjacent points along the viewing ray. Finally, benefiting from the patch-level sampling strategy, the total variation prior is incorporated into the objective function to enhance spatial smoothness and suppress artifacts. Experiments in both simulated and real-world scenes demonstrate that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) reconstruction performance.