ADELE - Adaptive Delaunay Grids for High-Fidelity Mesh-Native Reconstruction
Authors: Johannes Weidenfeller, Shaofei Wang, Philipp Fürnstahl, Siyu Tang
Organizations: ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland · Beijing Institute for General Artificial Intelligence, Beijing, China · University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland · Balgrist University Hospital, Zurich, Switzerland
Meshes remain the most practical representation for geometry reasoning and integration into graphics pipelines, yet existing reconstruction methods struggle to produce high-quality meshes. Most state-of-the-art approaches initially learn an intermediate representation (NeRF/3DGS) and treat mesh extraction as a post-processing step, which often leads to oversmoothed surfaces or poor quality meshes with excessive triangle counts.Existing mesh-native optimization methods alleviate some of these issues but suffer from fixed-resolution discretizations and unstable optimization behavior. In this paper, we introduce an adaptive mesh-based optimization framework and a practical mesh rendering technique to address these challenges. Our representation combines an optimizable Delaunay-triangulated tetrahedral grid with a multi-resolution hash grid. The former is refined through point pruning and insertion, while the latter provides latent features for SDF/appearance value predictions. We use volumetric rendering to bootstrap a coarse geometry while leveraging mesh-based rendering for recovering fine-grained details. Additionally, we propose a differentiable, rasterization-based depth-offset rendering formulation, reducing geometric artifacts and improving reconstruction quality. Our method significantly outperforms existing mesh optimization approaches across a variety of object-centric benchmarks while being competitive with state-of-the-art NeRF/3DGS methods.
Figures & tables
Figure 1. Qualitative comparison of mesh reconstructions from multi-view images. Existing methods based on 3D Gaussian Splatting (PGSR, 2DGS) or mesh-gaussian-hybrid optimization (MiLO) produce meshes with noticeable artifacts or oversmoothed surfaces. Our method directly optimizes a locally refinable tetrahedral grid with a novel depth-offset rendering formulation, yielding high-quality meshes with sharp geometric details and well-distributed triangles.
Figure 2. Overview of our framework. We represent scene geometry using an adaptive tetrahedral grid whose connectivity is maintained via Delaunay triangulation (§ 3.1 ) and whose vertex positions are optimizable (§ 3.2 ). SDF values at grid vertices are queried from a multi-resolution hash grid, and a mesh is extracted using the Marching Tetrahedra algorithm (DMTet). The mesh is rasterized via NVDiffrast to obtain depth and normal maps. For each pixel, we perform depth-offset sampling (§ 3.4 ) to generate multiple 3D sample points xi around the surface. These points, along with the viewing direction d and surface normal n , are fed through an appearance hash grid and a color MLP to produce pixel colors. During early training, a volumetric rendering branch (dashed blue) provides additional supervision to stabilize optimization (§ 3.3 ). The final output is supervised with an L1 photometric loss against ground-truth images along with mask and mesh regularization losses (§ 3.5 ).
Figure 3. Adaptive tetrahedral grid optimization. Starting from a uniform initialization (left), the grid progressively adapts to the scene geometry through Delaunay-site (i.e. , vertex) movement, densification, and pruning. Periodic Delaunay re-triangulation maintains valid grid connectivity throughout optimization.
Figure 4. Depth-offset sampling. Per-pixel alignment between the RGB reconstruction loss gradient w.r.t. mesh position and the viewing direction for different numbers of offset samples N . Red indicates strong alignment with the viewing direction, while blue denotes largely perpendicular gradients. Increasing N leads to progressively stronger alignment with the viewing direction.
24
37
40
55
63
65
69
83
97
105
106
110
114
118
122
Mean
Time
implicit
NeRF ( Mildenhall et al., 2020 )
1.90
1.60
1.85
0.58
2.28
1.27
1.47
1.67
2.05
1.07
0.88
2.53
1.06
1.15
0.96
1.49
>12h
VolSDF ( Yariv et al., 2021 )
1.14
1.26
0.81
0.49
1.25
0.70
0.72
1.29
1.18
0.70
0.66
1.08
0.42
0.61
0.55
0.86
>12h
NeuS ( Wang et al., 2021 )
1.00
1.37
0.93
0.43
1.10
0.65
0.57
1.48
1.09
0.83
0.52
1.20
0.35
0.49
0.54
0.84
>12h
Neuralangelo ( Li et al., 2023 )
0.37
0.72
0.35
0.35
0.87
0.54
0.53
1.29
0.97
0.73
0.47
0.74
0.32
0.41
0.43
0.61
>12h
Gaussian
3DGS ( Kerbl et al., 2023 )
2.14
1.53
2.08
1.68
3.49
2.21
1.43
2.07
2.22
1.75
1.79
2.55
1.53
1.52
1.50
1.96
11.2 m
SuGaR ( Guédon and Lepetit, 2024b )
1.47
1.33
1.13
0.61
2.25
1.71
1.15
1.63
1.62
1.07
0.79
2.45
0.98
0.88
0.79
1.33
∼ 1h
Table 1. Quantitative comparison of geometric reconstruction on the DTU dataset. We report Chamfer distance (mm, ↓ ) for 15 test scenes, grouped by representation type: implicit (NeRF-based), Gaussian (3DGS-based), and mesh-based methods. Colors indicate 1st , 2nd , and 3rd place per scene. Our method achieves lower mean Chamfer distance among mesh-based approaches while performing on par with state-of-the-art radiance-field methods. Baseline runtimes are from ( Guédon et al., 2025a ) (RTX 4090, 24 GB); ours were measured on an H200 (141 GB)*.
Method
Basketball
Bear
Bread
Camera
Clock
Cow
Dog
Doll
Dragon
Durian
Fountain
Gundam
House
Jade
Man
Monster
Sculpture
Stone
Mean
NeuS
2.96
3.00
2.85
2.61
2.75
2.04
2.75
2.17
2.95
3.14
3.03
1.62
3.23
4.25
2.29
1.92
2.10
2.51
2.68
Surfels
1.59
1.52
1.41
1.75
5.08
3.21
2.97
2.32
2.93
4.01
2.65
0.97
1.76
3.49
2.23
1.36
3.07
2.02
2.46
SuGar
8.00
9.73
7.65
7.77
9.21
8.69
9.27
8.75
9.76
8.04
9.05
7.32
7.28
10.7
9.29
8.20
8.98
9.19
8.71
PGSR
0.92
1.05
0.74
1.51
1.64
1.09
1.35
1.33
1.51
1.63
1.50
0.92
1.18
3.01
1.17
0.97
1.25
1.08
1.35
IMLS-Splatting
2.48
1.86
2.69
3.61
2.96
2.80
2.85
2.32
2.39
3.35
2.83
1.78
3.01
5.10
2.61
1.99
2.04
2.85
2.75
Mesh Splatting
1.26
1.16
0.75
1.75
1.99
1.30
2.08
2.02
1.57
2.36
2.37
0.90
1.94
3.27
1.52
1.30
1.64
1.64
1.71
Table 2. Quantitative comparison of geometric reconstruction on the BlendedMVS dataset. We report Chamfer distance (mm, ↓ ) for 18 test scenes. Colors indicate 1st , 2nd , and 3rd place per scene. Our method achieves the best mean Chamfer distance among mesh-based methods.
Figure 5. Qualitative comparison on the DTU dataset. We compare mesh reconstructions on two challenging scenes. 2DGS and MiLO produce oversmoothed surfaces that lose geometric detail. PGSR captures some details but exhibits surface noise. Our method reconstructs sharp edges and high-frequency details while maintaining clean mesh quality, as visible in the roof tiles and the bird’s textured feathers.
PSNR ↑
Render
Method
Chair
Drums
Ficus
Hotdog
Lego
Mats.
Mic
Ship
Avg
Native
PGSR
31.62
24.69
28.60
35.09
31.67
28.93
33.81
29.14
30.44
MILo
32.69
25.52
34.67
34.82
33.77
29.11
33.51
30.76
31.85
NVDiffrec
31.60
24.10
30.88
33.04
29.14
26.74
30.78
26.12
29.05
Ours
31.68
24.42
29.48
34.00
30.79
26.41
32.25
28.43
29.68
Mesh
PGSR
27.12
16.40
22.13
29.60
27.41
14.86
24.95
24.69
23.40
Table 3. Quantitative comparison on NeRF Synthetic. PSNR ( ↑ ) and SSIM ( ↑ ) under two rendering protocols: Native rendering uses each method’s own renderer (3DGS for PGSR/MiLO, neural-shaded mesh rasterization for ours); Extracted-mesh rendering renders the extracted mesh shaded with a per-vertex diffuse albedo.
Configuration
DTU ↓
BMVS ↓
Full Model (ours)
0.53
1.47
w/o Mesh-Based Rendering
0.79
3.17
w/o Hybrid Training
0.72
1.98
w/o Densification
0.59
5.37
w/o Offset Sampling
0.55
1.56
Table 4. Ablation studies on the DTU and BMVS datasets. We report the Chamfer Distance (↓) for different variants of our method on both datasets.
Figure 6. Examples of mesh reconstructions obtained with our method on the TnT dataset.
Figure 7. Qualitative comparison on the BlendedMVS dataset. For each scene, we show the ground truth image, our rendered image, our predicted mesh normals, and mesh reconstructions from our method, PGSR, and MiLO. Our method produces detailed meshes that faithfully capture object silhouettes and detailed surface normals. PGSR produces overly smooth surfaces, while MILo suffers from high frequency artefacts. Best viewed zoomed in.
Figure 8. Ablational results on scenes of the DTU and BlendedMVS datasets. The top row shows results produced by our full method, while the bottom row presents results from different ablation variants.
Figure 9. Qualitative comparison on the NeRF Synthetic dataset. We compare mesh reconstructions from NVDiffrec, MILO, PGSR, and our method. NVDiffrec produces noisy surfaces with limited geometric detail. MILO reconstructs more detailed meshes but exhibit artifacts around the object silhouette. PGSR is lacking fine-grained details and additionally suffers from missing geometry due to its post processing steps. Our method recovers fine-grained geometry, such as individual leaves and the microphone grille, while maintaining clean surface quality.
Appendix figures & tables11 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
Figure 10. Depth-offset sampling. (Left) We sample multiple points along each camera ray by performing inverse sampling with respect to the opacity function Ψ(t) . The sigmoid shape of Ψ concentrates samples near the mesh surface, where the SDF transitions through zero. (Right) early stage reconstruction rendered using sampled depth offsets.
Figure 11. Initialization Examples. Visualizations of the coarse initial meshes derived from VGGT depth priors, which serve as the base geometry for our residual learning framework.
Figure 12. Incorporating a triangle regularization term that penalizes deviations from regular triangles in the output mesh leads to a more evenly tesselated reconstructed surface (right) than our base method (left).
Figure 13. Reconstructed meshes and corresponding error maps for a scene from the DTU dataset. Discarded points are colored in blue, while evaluated points are shown in grey for low error and red for high error. Our method produces closed meshes, whereas PGSR reconstructs only a front-facing surface. Notably, points reconstructed by our method near the mesh boundaries exhibit significant error contributions. This problem is largely resolved by our filtering proecdure.
Method
Avg. Peak VRAM (GB)
Max. Peak VRAM (GB)
Avg. Runtime (min)
Chamfer Distance ↓
PGSR
3.9
5.5
41.4
0.53
MiLO
5.2
8.9
69.6
0.68
ADELE (full)
31.9
33.1
30.3
0.53
ADELE (smaller batch)
21.4
22.5
14
0.56
Appendix
Table 5. Comparison of memory usage, runtime, and reconstruction quality on DTU. Peak VRAM is measured during training; runtime is the average wall-clock training time per scene; Chamfer distance is the mean over all evaluated scenes (lower is better).
Figure 14. Qualitative comparison on the Stanford ORB dataset. For each scene, we show the ground truth image, our rendered image, our predicted mesh normals, and mesh reconstructions from our method, PGSR, and MiLO. Our method produces detailed meshes that faithfully capture object silhouettes and surface+details. PGSR struggles with reflective surfaces, while MiLO tends to produce simplified geometry that misses fine-grained features such as the gnome’s beard and the cactus spines.
Chamfer Distance ×2e3↓
Scene
Gnome
Cactus
Ball
Teapot
Pitcher
Avg
PGSR
0.21
0.08
0.07
0.16
2.10
0.52
MiLO
0.21
0.12
0.11
0.21
0.90
0.31
Ours
0.42
0.05
0.05
0.14
0.99
0.33
Triangle Count ↓
Scene
Gnome
Cactus
Ball
Teapot
Pitcher
Avg
Appendix
Table 6. Quantitative comparison on Stanford ORB. We report Chamfer distance ( ↓ ) scaled by 2e3 as proposed in the official evaluation guidelines, and triangle count of the extracted meshes.
Figure 15. Diffuse-shaded renderings of extracted geometry. Comparison on representative scenes from NeRF Synthetic and BlendedMVS. ADELE produces sharp, realistic renderings that preserve fine appearance detail, whereas PGSR and MILo smooth over high-frequency content as a consequence of their less accurate geometric reconstruction.
PSNR ↑ – Stanford ORB
Render
Method
Gnome
Cactus
Ball
Teapot
Pitcher
Avg
Native
PGSR
37.91
37.85
36.91
37.43
31.46
36.31
MiLo
37.01
37.17
34.80
37.57
32.98
35.91
Ours
35.24
35.09
37.45
35.85
32.96
35.31
Mesh
PGSR
30.93
32.25
31.04
31.56
27.91
30.74
MiLo
30.34
31.73
29.38
29.71
29.56
30.14
Appendix
Table 7. Novel-view synthesis under two rendering protocols. Native rendering uses each method’s own renderer (3DGS for PGSR and MiLo, neural-shaded mesh rasterization for ours); Extracted-mesh rendering renders the extracted mesh shaded with a per-vertex diffuse albedo. We report PSNR ( ↑ ) on Stanford ORB (top) and DTU (bottom).
Figure 16. Full results of our method on the 15 scenes of the DTU dataset used in the evaluation of the main paper.
Figure 17. Effect of depth offset rendering. Training with regular mesh rendering (top) produces both convex and concave surface artefacts across a variety of scenes. Training with depth offset rendering (bottom) largely eliminates them.
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YaQiao Dai, Renjiao Yi, Zhirui Gao +3
National University of Defense Technology, Changsha, China · Institute of AI for Industries, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Nanjing, China
Reconstructing surface meshes from multi-view images has remained a core challenge in recent years. Most existing methods, whether implicit or explicit, depend on intermediate representations and post-processing steps like Marching Cubes or TSDF fusion, often resulting in artifacts and fragmented geometry. Directly optimizing explicit meshes is a promising approach. However, it presents two critical challenges. The first is how to adaptively refine mesh topology to capture detail without introducing degenerate faces. The second is how to maintain consistent UV coordinates for high-fidelity texturing as the mesh structure evolves. To overcome these, we propose ExMesh, a novel framework that directly optimizes explicit meshes by integrating differentiable optimization with discrete topology updates. Specifically, we introduce an adaptive vertex splitting and merging strategy, along with real-time UV maintenance, to enable coarse-to-fine optimization while preserving geometric integrity. To our knowledge, ExMesh is the first framework to seamlessly integrate discrete topology operations into a continuous differentiable optimization pipeline. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ExMesh achieves a balance among accuracy, computational efficiency, and mesh conciseness.
Chuanjin Fan, Lifan Wu, Wenjie Chang +3
University of Science and Technology of China · 2National Key Laboratory of Deep Space Exploration, Deep Space Exploration Laboratory
Differentiable rendering has emerged as a powerful approach for 3D reconstruction and novel view synthesis. State-of-the-art differentiable rendering methods combine a variety of custom representations of 3D geometry and appearance with specialized renderers. However, most downstream tasks in computer graphics rely on 3D meshes. While prior work has attempted differentiable rendering with mesh representations, these approaches are limited to object-centric scenes and fail to reconstruct large-scale, unbounded scenes. In this work, we introduce Meshtryoshka, a novel mesh differentiable rendering framework that combines an off-the-shelf triangle rasterizer with a 3D representation that consists of nested mesh shells which resemble a matryoshka doll. In every forward pass, the mesh shells are extracted anew from a 3D signed distance function via iso-surface extraction, and the opacities for each vertex are computed as a function of signed distance. Each mesh shell is then rasterized independently, and the final image is created via alpha compositing. Crucially, mesh vertex positions are updated only indirectly via gradients that flow through the opacity values into the signed distance function, and hence, our method is compatible with off-the-shelf mesh renderers that need not be differentiable with respect to vertex positions. On object-centric scenes, our method performs competitively with surface-based differentiable rendering techniques. Our differentiable mesh rendering method scales to unbounded, real-world 3D scenes, where it yields high-quality novel view synthesis results approaching those of state-of-the-art, non-mesh methods. Our method suggests that it may be possible to solve the differentiable rendering problem without relying on specialized renderers, only using conventional tools from the computer graphics toolbox.
David Charatan, Daniel Xu, Richard Szeliski +2
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, United States · University of Washington, United States · Google DeepMind, United States