nerf-pytorch VS colmap

Found relevant code at https://github.com/yenchenlin/nerf-pytorch + all code implementations here

I have been curious about NeRF and have tried out the software. I really like the idea, but I have found generating the NeRF representation to be too slow and does not do seem to do too well if the number of cameras in the rig are a bit sparse. I have seen that there have been some evolution and variations of the NeRF concept and I am looking into some of them currently.

While there are other PyTorch implementations out there (e.g., this one and this one), I personally found them somewhat difficult to follow, so I decided to do a complete rewrite of NeRF myself. I tried to stay as close to the authors' text as possible, and I added comments in the code referring back to the relevant sections/equations in the paper. The final result is a tight 374 lines of heavily commented code (320 sloc—"source lines of code"—on GitHub) all contained in a single file. For comparison, this PyTorch implementation has approximately 970 sloc spread across several files, while this PyTorch implementation has approximately 905 sloc. A Colab notebook for the full model can be found here.

Not saying its easy to use, but there is an application gui and it is free: https://github.com/colmap/colmap

Colmap (Model folders (BIN and TXT), dense workspaces, NVM, PLY)

See colmap for example https://colmap.github.io/

You're looking into a problem called photogrammetry, and a well-studied one at that. I'd recommend looking into "shape from motion" (sfm); specifically techniques that do "dense reconstruction." I'd recommend COLMAP to start with. It does pose estimation from images (e.g. you point it at a bunch of images and it will figure out the relative poses of the cameras that took them), as well as sparse and dense reconstcution.

COLMAP builds dense meshes from a collection of cameras https://colmap.github.io/

I’ve seen references to using COLMAP (https://colmap.github.io/) to estimate camera position/pose, e.g. here

Classical photogrammetry, where I agree with u/tdgros that the way to go is https://colmap.github.io/. There are actually better variants in literature but nothing is more reliable and user-friendly than COLMAP. This will give you a very precise point cloud, that can be meshed if needed.