FastSR-NeRF: Improving NeRF Efficiency on Consumer Devices with A Simple Super-Resolution Pipeline

Super-resolution (SR) techniques have recently been proposed to upscale the outputs of neural radiance fields (NeRF) and generate high-quality images with enhanced inference speeds. However, existing NeRF+SR methods increase training overhead by using extra input features, loss functions, and/or expensive training procedures such as knowledge distillation. In this paper, we aim to leverage SR for efficiency gains without costly training or architectural changes. Specifically, we build a simple NeRF+SR pipeline that directly combines existing modules, and we propose a lightweight augmentation technique, random patch sampling, for training. Compared to existing NeRF+SR methods, our pipeline mitigates the SR computing overhead and can be trained up to 23× faster, making it feasible to run on consumer devices such as the Apple MacBook. Experiments show our pipeline can upscale NeRF outputs by 2-4× while maintaining high quality, increasing inference speeds by up to 18× on an NVIDIA V100 GPU and 12.8× on an M1 Pro chip. We conclude that SR can be a simple but effective technique for improving the efficiency of NeRF models for consumer devices.