SurfelSplat: Learning Efficient and Generalizable Gaussian Surfel Representations for Sparse-View Surface Reconstruction

Few-view surface reconstruction recovers the visible surfaces of a scene from a few posed RGB images, providing the 3D models that robots need to explore and interact online. On mobile platforms, the reconstruction must be fast and geometrically accurate while keeping a small memory footprint to ensure safe and efficient operation. 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) offers a high-fidelity scene representation, but building it from a few views is ill-posed, as many distinct surfaces reproduce the same images, making traditional photometric methods prone to "floater" artifacts. End-to-end methods resolve the ambiguity by regressing splats with large, usually Transformer-based, networks that require heavy compute and memory while generalizing poorly to new scenes. We propose G2SR, which exploits a well-posed core of the task: given cross-view 2D splat correspondences, 3D splats follow analytically from multi-view geometry. G2SR employs a lightweight neural frontend to detect and track 2D Gaussian splats on the image plane and an analytic backend to triangulate each into a metric-scale 3D splat. On ScanNet, Replica, and DTU, G2SR matches or exceeds the geometric accuracy of state-of-the-art end-to-end methods while running at 69-89 reconstructions per second within 203 MB of GPU memory (5-107x less) for 2- and 3-view inputs at 384 x 512 resolution, offering a practical path to online Gaussian-based surface reconstruction.

3D Gaussian Splatting has achieved remarkable success in novel view synthesis. However, extracting high-fidelity surfaces directly from 3DGS remains challenging due to its discrete and unstructured nature. Existing 3DGS-based reconstruction methods typically rely on multi-view geometric consistency or local constraints. Without an explicit structured geometric prior during optimization, these methods often struggle to resolve structural ambiguities, leading to artifacts and floaters, particularly in textureless or occluded regions. To address this limitation, we propose TopoSurfel, a novel framework that closes the loop between Gaussian surfels and continuous meshes. Unlike recent methods that incorporate mesh extraction into the differentiable pipeline by introducing auxiliary neural networks or extra per-Gaussian parameters, we dynamically extract a continuous proxy mesh via a non-trainable differentiable iso-surfacing process. Leveraging this differentiable connection, we introduce a mesh-guided surfel evolution strategy, including normal alignment and geometry-aware density control, to effectively suppress floaters and fill surface holes. Furthermore, to address the initialization challenges in large-scale environments, we propose a spatially aware hybrid re-initialization strategy that ensures robust reconstruction across complex scenes. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TopoSurfel achieves competitive geometric reconstruction accuracy while maintaining high-quality mesh-based novel view synthesis. The code for our method is available at https://github.com/Fan-Treasure/TopoSurfel.

Sparse-view satellite image surface reconstruction remains highly challenging, fundamentally because the reliability of multi-view matching under satellite imaging conditions is strongly spatially heterogeneous. Affected by large photometric differences, weak textures, and repetitive textures, multi-view geometric constraints are often sparse, unevenly distributed, and locally unreliable. Although 2D Gaussian Splatting (2DGS) is more suitable than 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) for the explicit representation of continuous surfaces, research on generalizable feed-forward 2DGS frameworks for sparse-view satellite surface reconstruction is still lacking. To address this issue, we propose SatSurfGS, a generalizable sparse-view surface reconstruction method for satellite imagery based on 2DGS. The proposed method builds a coarse-to-fine Gaussian attribute prediction framework and explicitly models local geometric reliability at three levels: feature learning, Gaussian parameter estimation, and training optimization. Specifically, we propose a confidence-aware monocular multi-view feature fusion module to adaptively integrate monocular priors and multi-view matching features according to local confidence; a cross-stage self-consistency residual guidance module to stabilize stage-wise Gaussian parameter refinement using the residual between the rendered height map from the previous stage and the current-stage MVS height map, together with confidence information; and a confidence bidirectional routing loss to achieve differentiated allocation of geometric and appearance supervision. Experiments on satellite datasets show that the proposed method achieves improved rendering quality, surface reconstruction accuracy, cross-dataset generalization, and inference efficiency compared with representative generalizable baselines and competitive per-scene optimization methods.