Mounted butterflies are among the most striking objects in natural history collections. However, their beauty is notoriously hard to digitize in 3D: they are small and fragile, with microscopic hairs and vein structures. Capturing them in sufficient detail, therefore, requires a macro lens, which has a very limited Depth of Field (DoF). Moreover, a camera body cannot be maneuvered beneath a pinned specimen to photograph its ventral surface (the underside of the wings). We introduce an end-to-end pipeline that resolves these challenges to turn such specimens into photo-realistic 3D models viewable from every direction. It combines three ingredients: handheld focus stacking for all-in-focus macro capture without a tripod, a non-contact first-surface mirror system that exposes the ventral surface without touching the specimen, and a segmentation-free, mirror-aware 3D Gaussian Splatting extension. We validate the reconstructions on four diverse specimens.
Close-up rendering, zooming into a scene well beyond any training camera, is important for virtual production and interactive 3D content, yet remains an open challenge. 3D Gaussian splatting (3DGS) enables high-fidelity, real-time novel view synthesis, but its rendering quality degrades at close range. Recent diffusion-based methods that enhance the rendering by conditioning on reference images from the training set produce significant artifacts in this setting. We analyze this failure and identify its root cause: the scale gap between the close-up and reference views. We show that the features in reference-conditioned enhancement models are not scale-invariant, causing cross-view attention to retrieve incorrect correspondences when the same content appears at different scales, and that this mismatch cannot be corrected in latent space because the VAE encoder is not scale-equivariant. Building on this analysis we introduce MACRO, Multi-plane Attention for Closeup Render Optimization, a training-free method for high-quality close-up novel view synthesis from 3DGS. MACRO resolves the scale gap by leveraging the scene's known 3D structure: it decomposes the close-up into depth planes, crops and resizes references in image space to match the scale of each plane before encoding, and applies a depth-aware attention mask so each token attends only to scale-matched references. The method requires no architectural changes or additional training. We further contribute two new close-up novel view synthesis benchmarks, the first standardized evaluation protocol for this setting, and demonstrate state-of-the-art results on both, outperforming existing 3DGS and diffusion-based methods on both reconstruction and perceptual metrics. Project page: https://nitzanhod.github.io/MACRO
We introduce MicroZoom, a generative framework for gigapixel image synthesis at the microscopic scale. Given a standard photograph and a sparse set of consumer-grade microscope close-ups, MicroZoom synthesizes a seamless, gigapixel-resolution image grounded in the material character of the real references, enabling exploratory visualization of microscopic texture across the full spatial extent of an object. Our goal is plausible synthesis, not exact reconstruction. We focus on full-image, reference-based, extreme-scale super-resolution at magnification levels of up to 350x, a setting that introduces two major challenges: (1) recovering texture-specific detail from highly lossy inputs near ambiguous material boundaries, and (2) preserving correct large-scale pattern structure, such as the repeating geometry of a fabric weave, across millions of local predictions. We address these with a two-stage cascaded design, where the first stage recovers global pattern coherence and the second refines local texture detail, supplemented by a segmentation mask to guide synthesis at ambiguous boundaries. We verify our approach on a collection of self-captured everyday objects and demonstrate globally coherent, materially grounded gigapixel imagery.
Monocular RGB cameras mounted on drones are widely used for wildlife monitoring, yet most analytical pipelines remain confined to two-dimensional image space, leaving geometric information in video underexploited. We present WildLIFT, a computational framework that integrates three-dimensional scene geometry from monocular drone video with open-vocabulary 2D instance segmentation to enable species-agnostic 3D detection and tracking. Oriented 3D bounding box labels with semantic face information enable quantitative assessment of viewpoint coverage and inter-animal occlusion, producing structured metadata for downstream ecological analyses. We validate the framework on 2,581 manually curated frames comprising over 6,700 3D detections across four large mammal species. WildLIFT maintains high identity consistency in multi-animal scenes and substantially reduces manual 3D annotation effort through keyframe-based refinement. By transforming standard drone footage into structured 3D and viewpoint-aware representations, WildLIFT extends the analytical utility of aerial wildlife datasets for behavioural research and population monitoring.