Toward Semantic Communication for Real-time Mobile 3D Reconstruction
Authors: Fangzhou Zhao, Yao Sun, Xuesong Liu, Runze Cheng, Shang Kai, Yi Sun
Abstract
Real-time mobile 3D reconstruction is fundamental to many emerging applications such as autonomous navigation and digital twin construction, where a moving platform continuously captures an image stream and transmit to a computing server for scene understanding. Unlike offline reconstruction, camera poses and scene geometry are estimated on-the-fly during acquisition, making multi-view consistency a real-time requirement and rendering geometric estimation highly sensitive to communication-induced distortions. Semantic communication (SemCom) transmits compact semantic information, offering a promising way to preserve task-critical data over unreliable links. However, existing designs are optimized at the image or single-view level and without providing explicit reliability information for geometric estimation, limiting their applicability to real-time mobile 3D reconstruction. In this context, we propose a SemCom framework for real-time mobile 3D reconstruction. The framework includes a semantic transceiver that outputs a reconstructed image alongside a pixel-wise confidence map, quantifying the reliability of each region. We further introduce a confidence-guided geometric estimation method, incorporating confidence into RANSAC-based pose initialization and bundle adjustment to reduce the influence of unreliable regions and enhance robustness under noisy channels. Simulations show that, compared to existing SemCom and traditional seperate source and channel coding, our framework maintains high image quality while significantly improving pose estimation accuracy and 3D structural consistency.
Live free-viewpoint visualization of real humans is critical for immersive communication and interactive digital experiences. Existing methods either rely on computationally expensive optimization or require calibrated cameras and low-resolution inputs, making real-time high-resolution deployment impractical. In this work, we present Tele360, the first real-time feed-forward system for dynamic human reconstruction and live free-viewpoint visualization from sparse, unposed RGB streams. Our system jointly estimates camera poses and reconstructs a dynamic 3D Gaussian representation for each time instance in a single forward pass. To achieve this, we start by designing a lightweight sparsity-aware multi-view transformer backbone that tokenizes foreground human regions while preserving global context through a shared scene token. We then employ a fully transformer-based Gaussian decoder to mitigate convolution-induced over-smoothing while keeping decoding sparse and efficient. In addition, we introduce a hybrid feature pyramid that injects multi-scale appearance cues into geometry prediction. We further introduce a lightweight differentiable Levenberg-Marquardt camera refinement layer to enhance multi-view consistency and geometric alignment. Moreover, to stabilize learning under sparse, unposed inputs, we transfer multi-view geometry priors from a large visual-geometry foundation model via teacher-student distillation. Finally, the predicted Gaussian maps are streamed with video codecs to remote devices for interactive free-viewpoint rendering. Extensive experiments show that Tele360 achieves state-of-the-art visual quality on studio benchmarks while supporting real-time 2K input-to-rendering at over 25 FPS on a single consumer GPU. Additional captured sequences illustrate its performance across varied subjects, clothing, and motions under our multi-camera setup.
Recent feed-forward geometry foundation models have demonstrated impressive generalization by recovering depth and poses in a single forward pass. However, these models are typically constrained by a global coordinate frame assumption. This dependency becomes a significant bottleneck for long-context and streaming reconstruction, as it forces the network to maintain an arbitrary temporal origin and handle translation magnitudes that grow unbounded over time. Our solution, which we call R3, employs relative regression. We employ a lightweight MLP to predict confidence-weighted relative constraints. These confidences serve as a unified anchor: weighting losses during training and guiding pose aggregation during inference. R3 supports both full-context offline reconstruction and causal, bounded-memory streaming. Our evaluation in both offline and streaming settings validates the effectiveness of our relative mechanism. Project page: https://kevinxu02.github.io/r3-site
Streaming 3D reconstruction aims to recover 3D information, such as camera poses and point clouds, from a video stream, which necessitates geometric accuracy, temporal consistency, and computational efficiency. Motivated by the principles of Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM), we introduce LingBot-Map, a feed-forward 3D foundation model for reconstructing scenes from streaming data, built upon a geometric context transformer (GCT) architecture. A defining aspect of LingBot-Map lies in its carefully designed attention mechanism, which integrates an anchor context, a pose-reference window, and a trajectory memory to address coordinate grounding, dense geometric cues, and long-range drift correction, respectively. This design keeps the streaming state compact while retaining rich geometric context, enabling stable efficient inference at around 20 FPS on 518 x 378 resolution inputs over long sequences exceeding 10,000 frames. Extensive evaluations across a variety of benchmarks demonstrate that our approach achieves superior performance compared to both existing streaming and iterative optimization-based approaches.