S2D: Sparse to Dense Lifting for 3D Reconstruction with Minimal Inputs

We introduce S2C-3D, a novel sparse-view 3D reconstruction framework for high-fidelity and complete scene reconstruction from as few as six to eight images. Our framework features three components: a specialized diffusion model for scene-specific image restoration, a training-free view-consistency conditioned sampling process in the diffusion model for refined Gaussian optimization, and a camera trajectory planning scheme to ensure comprehensive scene coverage. The specialized diffusion model is developed by finetuning a pretrained architecture on the input views and their corresponding degraded counterparts. The adaptation to the scene distribution allows the model to repair Gaussian renderings while effectively eliminating domain gaps. Meanwhile, the trajectory planning scheme optimizes scene coverage by connecting each newly sampled camera to its two nearest neighbors. By iteratively constructing paths and retaining only those that significantly enhance visibility, the scheme establishes a trajectory that covers the entire scene. To address multi-view conflicts, the view-consistency conditioned sampling process quantifies the consistency between neighboring repaired images. This information is injected as a condition into the sampling process of the frozen diffusion model, facilitating the generation of view-consistent images without additional training. Consequently, our approach produces high-fidelity 3D Gaussians that are robust to artifacts. Experimental results demonstrate that S2C-3D outperforms state-of-the-art methods, constructing high-quality scenes that are free from missing regions, blurring, or other artifacts with very sparse inputs. The source code and data are available at https://gapszju.github.io/S2C-3D.

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has recently enabled real-time rendering of unbounded 3D scenes for novel view synthesis. However, this technique requires dense training views to accurately reconstruct 3D geometry. A limited number of input views will significantly degrade reconstruction quality, resulting in artifacts such as "floaters" and "background collapse" at unseen viewpoints. In this work, we introduce SparseGS, an efficient training pipeline designed to address the limitations of 3DGS in scenarios with sparse training views. SparseGS incorporates depth priors, novel depth rendering techniques, and a pruning heuristic to mitigate floater artifacts, alongside an Unseen Viewpoint Regularization module to alleviate background collapses. Our extensive evaluations on the Mip-NeRF360, LLFF, and DTU datasets demonstrate that SparseGS achieves high-quality reconstruction in both unbounded and forward-facing scenarios, with as few as 12 and 3 input images, respectively, while maintaining fast training and real-time rendering capabilities.

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 D$^{3}$GS, a Depth-DINO-Diffusion guided sparse-view Gaussian reconstruction framework that jointly enhances geometry and appearance. D$^{3}$GS 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 D$^{3}$GS achieves consistent and substantial improvements over strong baselines, with ablation studies validating the effectiveness and complementary roles of each component.