Comparative Assessment of Neural Radiance Fields and Photogrammetry in Digital Heritage: Impact of Varying Image Conditions on 3D Reconstruction

This paper conducts a comparative evaluation between Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) and photogrammetry for 3D reconstruction in the cultural heritage domain. Focusing on three case studies, of which the Terpsichore statue serves as a pilot case, the research assesses the quality, consistency, and efficiency of both methods. The results indicate that, under conditions of reduced input data or lower resolution, NeRF outperforms photogrammetry in preserving completeness and material description for the same set of input images (with known camera poses). The study recommends NeRF for scenarios requiring extensive area mapping with limited images, particularly in emergency situations. Despite NeRF’s developmental stage compared to photogrammetry, the findings demonstrate higher potential for describing material characteristics and rendering homogeneous textures with enhanced visual fidelity and accuracy; however, NeRF seems more prone to noise effects. The paper advocates for the future integration of NeRF with photogrammetry to address respective limitations, offering more comprehensive representation for cultural heritage preservation tasks. Future developments include extending applications to planar surfaces and exploring NeRF in virtual and augmented reality, as well as studying NeRF evolution in line with emerging trends in semantic segmentation and in-the-wild scene reconstruction.