Coverage Optimization for Camera View Selection

We develop a framework for task-specific active next-best-view selection in 3D reconstruction from point clouds, by casting the problem in the language of Bayesian decision theory. Our framework works by (a) placing a prior distribution over the space of implicit surfaces, (b) using recently-developed stochastic surface reconstruction methods to calculate the resulting posterior distribution, then (c) using the posterior distribution to carefully reason about which view to scan next. This enables us to perform camera selection in a manner that is directly optimized for the intended use of the reconstructed data - meaning, we reduce uncertainty only in those regions that make a difference in the task at hand, as opposed to prior approaches that reduce it uniformly across space. We evaluate our method across three distinct downstream tasks: semantic classification, segmentation, and PDE-guided physics simulation. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework achieves superior task performance with fewer views compared to commonly used baselines and prior general uncertainty-reduction techniques.

Active 3D reconstruction relies on active view selection to maximize reconstruction fidelity under limited capture budgets. However, most existing methods rely on surrogate signals such as parameter uncertainty or geometric heuristics, but these signals are often misaligned with the ultimate goal: the fidelity of rendered predictions. We propose GO-PRE, a goal-oriented next-best-view selection framework that explicitly targets information gain in the prediction space. Specifically, we formulate the objective as maximizing the reduction of the average marginal predictive entropy over a user-specified target view manifold. GO-PRE supports interactive goal specification and yields an efficient acquisition rule that enables real-time computation of information gain. Extensive experiments across benchmarks demonstrate that GO-PRE consistently improves active reconstruction performance and provides more reliable uncertainty quantification compared to state-of-the-art methods.

How can a 3D reconstruction system acquire and retain useful information to understand the geometry of a scene from partial views under a limited computation budget? Existing active view acquisition methods typically estimate uncertainty over observed or instantiated geometry, limiting their ability to reason about unseen structure, while long-horizon reconstruction methods often retain redundant observations. We introduce Matisse, a training-free framework that unifies active reconstruction and keyframe selection by leveraging evidence provided by a pretrained generative 3D model. Matisse estimates Evidential Uncertainty from cross-attention evidence associated with 3D latent tokens and derives an Evidential Information Gain to guide both view acquisition and keyframe selection based on the expected reduction in posterior entropy. Matisse supports multi-object scenes through occlusion-aware, object-balanced aggregation and propagates uncertainty through intermediate latents to avoid full reconstruction during planning. Matisse reduces Chamfer distance by 12.7%, 3.8%, and 9.2% on GSO30, YCB-V, and Replica, respectively, relative to the best baseline on each dataset, and achieves a $1.50\times$ end-to-end speedup over the best active reconstruction baseline on GSO30 with the same reconstruction backend. In the GSO30 keyframe selection experiment for long-horizon reconstruction, Matisse achieves comparable Chamfer distance using 14% of the input views compared with Stream3D.