SwiftNDC: Fast Neural Depth Correction for High-Fidelity 3D Reconstruction
Authors: Kang Han, Wei Xiang, Lu Yu, Mathew Wyatt, Gaowen Liu, Ramana Rao Kompella
Organizations: La Trobe University, Melbourne, VIC 3086, Australia · Australian Institute of Marine Science, Perth, WA 6009, Australia · Cisco Research, San Jose, CA, USA
Depth-guided 3D reconstruction has gained popularity as a fast alternative to optimization-heavy approaches, yet existing methods still suffer from scale drift, multi-view inconsistencies, and the need for substantial refinement to achieve high-fidelity geometry. Here, we propose SwiftNDC, a fast and general framework built around a Neural Depth Correction field that produces cross-view consistent depth maps. From these refined depths, we generate a dense point cloud through back-projection and robust reprojection-error filtering, obtaining a clean and uniformly distributed geometric initialization for downstream reconstruction. This reliable dense geometry substantially accelerates 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) for mesh reconstruction, enabling high-quality surfaces with significantly fewer optimization iterations. For novel-view synthesis, SwiftNDC can also improve 3DGS rendering quality, highlighting the benefits of strong geometric initialization. We conduct a comprehensive study across five datasets, including two for mesh reconstruction, as well as three for novel-view synthesis. SwiftNDC consistently reduces running time for accurate mesh reconstruction and boosts rendering fidelity for view synthesis, demonstrating the effectiveness of combining neural depth refinement with robust geometric initialization for high-fidelity and efficient 3D reconstruction.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: Comparison of mesh reconstruction and novel view synthesis. Standard 3DGS based methods (Gaussian Opacity Field (GOF) [ 42 ] ) initialized from a sparse SfM point cloud requires extensive optimization to achieve high-fidelity results. SwiftNDC produces reliable dense geometry that accelerates mesh reconstruction (quality measured in Chamfer Distance (CD) ↓ ) and improves rendering quality for novel view synthesis.
Figure 2: SwiftNDC pipeline. The method starts with both monocular and multi-view depth maps. A neural depth correction field, supervised by sparse SfM points, refines these depths at pixel level. The corrected depths are then transformed into a dense and reliable sampled point cloud, which serves as a strong geometric initialization for downstream mesh reconstruction and 3DGS-based view synthesis.
Figure 3: Depth accuracy drives surface quality. The per-view–corrected monocular and multi-view depth maps look plausible, yet L1 distance comparison against GOF’s [ 42 ] geo-consistent depth renderings reveals ≈ 40 mm residual error. Fusing these depths into point clouds exposes severe cross-view mis-alignment that propagates into rough, hole-ridden meshes with high Chamfer distance error. Our SwiftNDC cuts the depth error to less than 10 mm, producing a point cloud that aligns tightly across views and a final surface that is visually smooth and metrically accurate.
Figure 4: Effect of removing unreliable points using reprojection-error filtering.
Figure 5: Qualitative results for view synthesis and mesh reconstruction. Our dense initialization yields more complete geometry, especially in sparsely observed regions, enabling higher-quality rendering or reduced mesh reconstruction time with similar quality.
Model
Mean CD ↓
Time (m)
Full neural depth correction
0.75
1
Per-view cor. mo. depth
3.15
0.18
Per-view cor. mv. depth
2.50
0.13
Monocular depth head
0.91
1
Monocular depth only
1.00
0.94
Multi-view depth only
0.98
0.89
Table 4: Ablation study on the DTU dataset.
Stage
Time (s)
VGGT depth inference
3.6
Monocular depth inference
6.6
Initial per-view correction
7.0
Global scale refinement
7.0
Per-pixel correction
30.9
3DGS optimization-1k iterations
110
Table 5: Reconstruction time breakdown (seconds) on the DTU scenes with 49 images.
Novel view synthesis from sparse inputs remains challenging for 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) due to ambiguous geometry, cross-view inconsistency, and missing details in under-constrained regions, resulting in degraded reconstruction and unstable rendering. To tackle these issues, we propose D3GS, a Depth-DINO-Diffusion guided sparse-view Gaussian reconstruction framework that jointly enhances geometry and appearance. D3GS first recovers a high-resolution, metric depth map via diffusion-based completion and DPT (Dense Prediction Transformer) refinement, providing robust Gaussian initialization and geometric constraints. Then, a DINO-guided view-consistent learning is introduced to augment Gaussian attributes with structural features, improving multi-view consistency. Finally, a diffusion-based Gaussian refinement module injects generative priors into an iterative optimization strategy, enhancing high-frequency geometric and appearance details within the Gaussian representation. Experiments on DTU, LLFF, and Mip-NeRF 360 show that D3GS achieves consistent and substantial improvements over strong baselines, with ablation studies validating the effectiveness and complementary roles of each component.
Yunqi Gao, Zhanfeng Liao, Hanzhang Tu +7
Central China Normal University · Tsinghua University · Fuzhou University +4
This paper introduces a fast method for high-quality 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) reconstruction without traditional Structure-from-Motion (SfM). The proposed approach leverages 3D Foundation Models (3DFMs) for camera pose and point-cloud initialization, then jointly optimizes both camera poses and Gaussian primitives using a depth-guided loss function. This enables fast convergence even from rough initialization with as few as 50-60 input views. To further improve reconstruction quality in sparse-view scenarios, an MLP-based pose refinement module is introduced alongside depth-guided supervision from the foundation model. Extensive experiments on Mip-NeRF 360, Tanks and Temples, and RobustNeRF demonstrate that the proposed method achieves competitive reconstruction quality (23.61 dB PSNR, 0.19 LPIPS) while reducing training time to approximately three minutes per scene. The proposed method produces ready-to-use 3DGS models at a fraction of the time required by existing pipelines, making it suitable for near real-time applications in robotics, VR, and autonomous navigation.
Anurag Dalal, Daniel Hagen, Kjell G. Robbersmyr +1
Dep. of Eng. Sciences University of Agder Grimstad, Norway · Top Research Centre Mechatronics University of Agder Grimstad, Norway
3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has emerged as a prominent paradigm for 3D reconstruction and novel view synthesis. However, it remains vulnerable to severe artifacts when trained under sparse-view constraints. While recent methods attempt to rectify artifacts in rendered views using image diffusion models, they typically rely on multi-view self-attention to retrieve information from reference images. We observe that this mechanism often fails when the rendered novel views output by 3DGS are heavily corrupted: damaged query features lead to erroneous cross-view retrieval, resulting in inconsistent rendering refinement. To address this, we propose GeoQuery, a geometry-guided diffusion framework that integrates generative priors with explicit geometric cues via a novel Geometry-guided Cross-view Attention (GCA) mechanism. First, by leveraging predicted depth maps and camera poses, we construct a geometry-induced correspondence field to sample reference features, forming a geometry-aligned proxy query that replaces the corrupted rendering features. Furthermore, we design a new cross-view feature aggregation pipeline, in which we restrict the cross-view attention to a local window around each proxy query to effectively retrieve useful features while suppressing spurious matches. GeoQuery can be seamlessly integrated into existing diffusion-based pipelines, enabling robust reconstruction even under extreme view sparsity. Extensive experiments on sparse-view novel view synthesis and rendering artifact removal demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.
Xiao Cao, Yuze Li, Youmin Zhang +4
University of Electronic Science and Technology of China & Rawmantic AI, China · Rawmantic AI, China · Tianjin University, China +1