A Theory of Shape Reconstruction from Heat Conduction and Shading

Reconstructing complete 3D shapes from incomplete or noisy observations is a fundamentally ill-posed problem that requires balancing measurement consistency with shape plausibility. Existing methods for shape reconstruction can achieve strong geometric fidelity in ideal conditions but fail under realistic conditions with incomplete measurements or noise. At the same time, recent generative models for 3D shapes can synthesize highly realistic and detailed shapes but fail to be consistent with observed measurements. In this work, we introduce GG-Langevin: Geometry-Guided Langevin dynamics, a probabilistic approach that unifies these complementary perspectives. By traversing the trajectories of Langevin dynamics induced by a diffusion model, while preserving measurement consistency at every step, we generatively reconstruct shapes that fit both the measurements and the data-informed prior. We demonstrate through extensive experiments that GG-Langevin achieves higher geometric accuracy and greater robustness to missing data than existing methods for surface reconstruction.

We propose a convolutional neural shading (CNS), a novel pipeline to reconstruct high-quality 3D shapes from multi-view images. Several recent studies have used neural radiance fields and other neural differentiable rendering methods to understand 3D geometry. However, these approaches rely on single-point geometric information, such as positions and normals of the surface, leading to a lack of detailed local geometry. Our approach addresses the inherent limitations of single-point information by leveraging a neural shader to capture variations even in dark and textureless regions with a convolutional neural shader, resulting in far more accurate geometry predictions. Additionally, our method mitigates surface irregularities at image boundaries by introducing a fine-detail displacement network, which utilizes spatial information of surface geometry and learns fine displacement details by correlating neighboring values in the rendering coordinates. Through extensive experiments, our proposed method has demonstrated significant quality improvements in the reconstructed shapes and rendered images over current state-of-the-art methods.

Perceiving structured shapes, such as human faces, from pixels is an inherently ambiguous task in real-world conditions. Yet, shape inference is largely posed as a deterministic regression task predicting fixed spatial coordinates. We find that deterministic regression is brittle when visual evidence is ambiguous or incomplete; under severe occlusions deterministic models exhibit structural collapse, predicting incoherent shapes or reverting to generic averages. To address this, we introduce Shape-Bayes, a probabilistic framework that couples uncertainty-aware visual perception with Bayesian shape reasoning. Rather than forcing point estimates, Shape-Bayes dynamically weights visual evidence against geometric priors to infer a structurally valid shape posterior. Demonstrated on human face shape regression, a rigorous testbed featuring complex non-rigid deformations and strict anatomical constraints, Shape-Bayes comprises: (1) a base model predicting noisy landmarks alongside distilled aleatoric uncertainties; (2) a lightweight Transformer encoding these observations into an adaptive prior over a PCA shape manifold; and (3) a differentiable Bayesian solver computing closed-form posteriors by balancing the noisy predictions against this prior. By guaranteeing complete structural integrity, Shape-Bayes achieves an absolute improvement of up to ~34% IDR over state-of-the-art deterministic models. Simultaneously, it yields highly calibrated uncertainty bounds and reduces relative error by up to 12.5%, establishing a new state-of-the-art for robust 2D face shape regression under severe occlusion. The project page is at https://shape-bayes.github.io.