3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has emerged as a powerful technique for generating photorealistic renderings of a scene in real-time. However, the volumetric nature of 3DGS limits its ability to accurately capture surface geometry. To address this, 2D Gaussian Splatting (2DGS) was proposed to enable view-consistent and geometrically accurate surface reconstruction from multi-view images. However, 2DGS can be sensitive to the initialization of the Gaussian primitives. Reliance on Structure-from-Motion (SfM) initializations, which can produce poor estimates on challenging image sets, may lead to subpar results. In this work, we enhance 2DGS by incorporating monocular depth and normal priors to improve both geometric accuracy and robustness. We propose a depth-guided initialization strategy for Gaussians and introduce a clustering-based technique for pruning degenerate Gaussians. We evaluate our method on the DTU dataset, where it achieves state-of-the-art results in mesh reconstruction while preserving high-quality novel view synthesis.
3D reconstruction from sparse views is a challenging task in 3D computer vision. Recent studies on 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) have achieved remarkable results with sparse views in novel view synthesis, yet reconstructing high-quality geometric surfaces from sparse views remains a challenge, due to the limited geometry clues and the discreteness of Gaussians. In this paper, we propose a novel 3DGS-based method for high-fidelity surface reconstruction from sparse views. Our key insight is to introduce a normal-guided depth propagation approach, which can extend depth information from high-confidence regions to constrain the depth in low-confidence areas. Additionally, we propose an abnormal depth edge-aware regularization to address depth discontinuities caused by the discreteness of Gaussians. Extensive experiments on DTU and Tanks-and-Temples datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in sparse view surface reconstruction. Project page: https://hanl2010.github.io/DP-GS.
3D Gaussian splatting (3DGS) has emerged as a widely-used tool for novel view synthesis, offering real-time rendering in a sparse representation. However, the method's reliance on structure-from-motion initialization and photometric optimization can lead to suboptimal geometric reconstruction, particularly for objects with high specularity. In this work, we investigate the integration of geometric priors, in the form of predicted normal and depth maps, into the 3DGS framework to improve the reconstruction quality. We analyze the effect of incorporating these priors into GS-based methods and our evaluation reveals that multi-view predictions, as they are done by the recent visual geometry grounded transformer (VGGT), outperform single-view alternatives. A major factor is the existence of a confidence map for the estimations, which comes as a by-product of multi-view models and which can significantly improve the effectiveness of priors by weighting each prediction appropriately. Extensive experiments on standard benchmarks show consistent improvement in reconstruction quality and significant gains in complex scenes including specular objects.
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.