High-Fidelity Surface Reconstruction

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Period ending 2026-09-21

2 new papers

A weekly snapshot of new work published in High-Fidelity Surface Reconstruction.

Period ending 2026-09-07

2 new papers

A weekly snapshot of new work published in High-Fidelity Surface Reconstruction.

45 papers

Latest in High-Fidelity Surface Reconstruction

Sep 15, 2026cs.CV

HLC-GS: Risk-Map-Guided Height-Layer Consistency Gaussian Splatting for DSM Reconstruction from Optical Satellite Imagery

A Digital Surface Model (DSM) is a fundamental geospatial data product for representing the elevation of the Earth's surface. Recently, 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has shown considerable potential for DSM reconstruction from multi-view optical satellite imagery due to its explicit scene representation and efficient optimization. However, in 3DGS-based DSM generation, alpha-weighted aggregation of Gaussian altitudes may blend splats from different height layers at the same rendered pixel or DSM sampling location, producing non-physical intermediate elevations and height-layer mixing errors. To address this problem, we propose HLC-GS, a risk-map-guided height-layer consistency Gaussian Splatting method for DSM reconstruction from optical satellite imagery. HLC-GS consists of a risk map module, a dominant-layer reliability correction module, and a secondary-layer suppression module. The risk map localizes high-risk pixels with abnormal height dispersion and unreliable dominant-layer responses, while the latter two modules regularize unreliable dominant-layer responses and suppress weakly supported far secondary-layer responses. Extensive experiments are conducted on the DFC2019 and IARPA2016 datasets. Compared with six state-of-the-art DSM reconstruction methods, HLC-GS achieves better overall accuracy. Compared with the latest and precision-enhanced EOGS, HLC-GS reduces the average MAE from 1.46 m to 1.18 m and the average RMSE from 2.78 m to 2.58 m over the evaluated scenes, while improving PAG2.5_{2.5} from 86.09% to 88.61%. Overall, these results demonstrate that explicitly modeling per-pixel height-layer consistency alleviates height-layer mixing and improves the geometric quality of 3DGS-based DSM reconstruction from optical satellite imagery.
Jie Yang, Yingdong Pi, Qiyan Luo +3
Sep 14, 2026cs.CV

Integrating Multi-view Multi-light Surface Reconstruction into Cultural Heritage Workflows

Cultural heritage documentation increasingly relies on image-based 3D surface reconstruction, with photogrammetry software making such workflows accessible to archaeologists, conservators, and heritage technicians. These tools have been successful for conventional multi-view acquisition, but they do not routinely exploit richer multi-view, multi-light data, despite its potential for improving fine-scale surface reconstruction. This limitation is particularly relevant in heritage contexts, where controlled-light acquisition devices such as RTI domes are already used to capture illumination-varying image sets. The challenge is therefore to connect these existing acquisition practices with recent computer vision methods in a form that can be used within operational heritage workflows. In this work, we address this need by integrating state-of-the-art components from computer vision for multi-view, multi-light surface reconstruction into Meshroom, an open-source photogrammetry framework. Rather than proposing a new reconstruction algorithm, our contribution is to assemble and expose existing advanced methods, namely a complete photometric stereo ecosystem (calibrated, self-calibrated and universal), automatic object masking, and multi-view normal-and-reflectance integration, within a usable heritage-oriented workflow. The proposed system thus provides an intermediate software layer between computer vision research code and practical cultural heritage applications, making recent techniques easier to use and evaluate.
Baptiste Brument, Robin Bruneau, Benjamin Coupry +6
Sep 3, 2026cs.CV

STARS-GS: Structure-Aware Regularized Gaussian Splatting for Large-Scale Aerial Surface Reconstruction

Large-scale 3D surface reconstruction from aerial imagery is fundamental to geospatial mapping and urban modeling. Recent advances in 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) have demonstrated considerable potential for this task. However, existing methods still face three major challenges in large and complex scenes: scene partitioning may split continuous scene elements across independently optimized sub-regions; geometric constraints mainly focus on the attributes of individual Gaussians while overlooking their local organization; and uniform regularization struggles to accommodate heterogeneous geometric structures. To address these issues, we propose STARS-GS, a structure-aware 3DGS framework for large-scale surface reconstruction. First, we introduce a structure-aware scene partitioning strategy that better preserves continuous scene structures during partitioning and reduces cross-region geometric inconsistencies and stitching artifacts through boundary refinement. Second, we develop neighborhood-aware Gaussian organization that extends geometric constraints from individual primitives to their neighborhood organization, encouraging Gaussians to better conform to local surface geometry. Third, we introduce adaptive surface regularization that adjusts the regularization strength according to local geometric characteristics, promoting geometric consistency in structured regions while preserving plausible variations in unstructured regions. Extensive experiments on large-scale aerial photogrammetry benchmarks demonstrate that STARS-GS consistently outperforms the evaluated Gaussian-based methods in surface reconstruction. It increases the average F1-score from 0.640 for the second-best method to 0.698, corresponding to a relative improvement of approximately 9.1%, demonstrating effective improvements in geometric accuracy and surface completeness.
Bocheng Li, Wenjuan Zhang, Jie Pan. Dongxu Han +3
Sep 3, 2026cs.CV

P-CORE: Self-Supervised Surface Consistency for Point-Based Neural Editing

Advances in neural rendering have enabled high-fidelity multi-view reconstruction of 3D scenes. However, free-form non-rigid shape editing remains a significant challenge. Point-based neural representations are highly desirable for multi-view reconstruction because they lack fixed connectivity, which does not constrain the learned surface topology to that of the initialization. Yet this same property causes point-based representations to struggle with holes and surface discontinuities under large deformations. To address this, we propose a novel self-supervised method to enable point-based representations to adapt to large deformations without requiring ground truth multi-view images of deformed geometry. The key idea is to generate random deformations and to ensure consistency in the predicted surface before and after deformation. In particular, the surface prediction from the deformed point cloud should be the same as the deformation applied to the surface prediction from the original point cloud. We incorporate our approach into attention-based point representations, which differ from splatting-based point representations in their use of a learned interpolation kernel between points as opposed to a Gaussian kernel around each point. This learned interpolation kernel can learn to adapt to large deformations, without requiring addition or removal of points. We show that our framework significantly enhances its robustness to large deformations. Experiments on synthetic geometry editing benchmarks (Neural Editor, Objaverse) demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing point-based methods in zero-shot editing and significantly reduces artifacts. Furthermore, qualitative results on the DTU and Mip-NeRF 360 datasets demonstrate our method's effectiveness on real-world scenes.
Yanshu Zhang, Shichong Peng, Mehran Aghabozorgi +2
Aug 30, 2026cs.LG

When 3D Gaussian Splatting Recovers Real Surfaces

When does 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) recover the true scene surface rather than just overfitting view-dependent appearance? We answer this by developing a mathematical framework based on a first-hit rendering abstraction that cleanly isolates geometry from appearance. We prove that geometric misalignment forcefully converts spatial textures into high-frequency angular signals via parallax. This establishes a strict identifiability window: if angular capacity is bounded, surface-consistent solutions are mathematically preferred; if unrestricted, the same images can be perfectly explained by an incorrect, opaque billboard geometry. Experiments on synthetic stress tests confirm this prediction, showing billboard failures emerge precisely at high angular capacities. Conversely, in the real-world datasets we evaluate under standard capture protocols, reconstructions remain surface-consistent even at high SH degrees, which is consistent with the prediction that rich spatial texture can push billboard solutions outside the tested angular-capacity range.
Songhe Wang, David Johnathan Miller
Aug 12, 2026cs.CV

Surfsvr: 2D Surface Priors as 3D Geometric Regularizers for Sparse Voxel Reconstruction

Sparse voxel reconstruction offers an efficient representation for high-fidelity 3D modeling, yet its geometry is commonly optimized from local photometric evidence and discrete visibility statistics. This often leads to fragmented surfaces, excessive subdivision, and floating artifacts, particularly in weakly textured or sparsely observed regions. We introduce SurfSVR, a novel sparse voxel reconstruction paradigm that treats 2D surface priors as explicit 3D geometric regularizers. Instead of directly lifting noisy pixel-wise depth predictions, SurfSVR first organizes each image into coherent surface regions by jointly reasoning over appearance, monocular depth, normals and cross-view geometry. Each region is then represented by an adaptively selected planar or quadratic surface model based on fitting reliability and geometric complexity, while cross-model agreement distinguishes reliable geometry from ambiguous predictions. These structured 2D priors are lifted into 3D and integrated throughout the reconstruction pipeline. They guide surface-adaptive voxel subdivision, provide region-level depth and normal supervision during optimization, enhance geometrically reliable sparse-observed surfaces in voxel pruning, and suppress off-surface floaters during post-refinement training. This unified design converts semantic and geometric coherence in image space into persistent structural constraints in 3D. Extensive experiments on 3 public benchmarks demonstrate that SurfSVR consistently improves sparse voxel reconstruction across scenes with substantially different visibility and geometry characteristics, achieving state-of-the-art reconstruction quality. Codes and models will be released soon.
Yan Di, Chengxi Li, Yaoxing Wang +7
Aug 11, 2026cs.CV

Gaussian Sculpting: End-to-End Controllable Surface Reconstruction via Field Optimization

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has recently enabled real-time novel view synthesis with impressive quality. However, it struggles to recover accurate surfaces under limited viewpoints and due to the inherent irregularity of Gaussian primitives. The resulting geometric errors are notoriously difficult to correct manually. To address these issues, we propose Gaussian Sculpting, a fully differentiable end-to-end framework for high-quality surface reconstruction. Our key insight is to anchor Gaussians onto an evolving differentiable surface, allowing them to guide signed distance field (SDF) optimization instead of extracting the surface only during post-processing. To enable stable gradient isolation during joint optimization, we design a bi-level training strategy in which the outer loop optimizes the geometry represented by the SDF, while the inner loop updates the Gaussians with the geometry fixed. We further impose constraints on Gaussian parameters to ensure consistency with the underlying surface, thereby improving both geometric and appearance fidelity during optimization. In addition, we introduce a multi-resolution subdivision scheme based on octree-like partitioning to preserve fine details while reducing memory consumption. Experiments on object-level scenes demonstrate that our method effectively removes redundant surfaces, recovers missing structures caused by limited viewpoints, and achieves strong reconstruction quality even at relatively low resolutions.
Ke Jiaxin, Juncheng Liu, Yi Wang +4
Aug 11, 2026cs.CV

A second-order theory of texture for depth from focus

We present a theory of textured appearance of optically rough surfaces based on wave optics, emphasizing the role of texture for passive depth from focus. Our theory shows that even surfaces that traditional computer vision would consider textureless can produce textured appearance, due to subjective speckle from surface microgeometry. We analyze the properties of this second-order texture, and show that we can enhance its contrast under natural ambient lighting by simply using a narrowband spectral filter. Doing so results in dramatic improvements in passive depth reconstruction of seemingly textureless scenes, as we demonstrate through extensive theory, simulations, and real-world experiments.
Sreekar Ranganathan, Ioannis Gkioulekas
Aug 6, 2026cs.RO

ErgoSurf: Ergodic Control for the Coverage of Unknown Surfaces

Contact-centric tasks on surfaces, ranging from inspection and cleaning to sanding and polishing, require robots to systematically cover the surface while maintaining stable contact. Ergodic control generates trajectories that spend time at a location proportional to a desired, task-specific spatial distribution, enabling efficient information gathering and coverage. However, traditional ergodic control methods rely on prior knowledge of surface geometry or require a vision sensory input to scan the geometry beforehand, limiting their applicability in real-world scenarios with unknown or dynamic environments. This paper introduces a novel online ergodic control framework that achieves systematic surface coverage while simultaneously reconstructing unknown surface geometry. We employ a Gaussian Process Implicit Surface (GPIS) model that learns global surface geometry from intrinsic tactile sensing during execution. For efficient online planning, we approximate the surface locally using point clouds sampled from tangent planes at observed contact points and iteratively fit them to the Gaussian Process. This approximation simultaneously serves as the sampling domain for both the target and the coverage distributions. We employ a heat-diffusion analogy to compute potential fields that guide ergodic exploration, translating spatial coverage objectives into smooth robot trajectories. We demonstrate our framework through simulation and real-robot experiments, validating simultaneous ergodic coverage and online surface geometry learning with reconstruction errors approaching the ground truth.
Stefan Schneyer, Timo Bachmann, Maged Iskandar +4
Jul 31, 2026cs.RO

Receding-Horizon Next-Best-View Planner for Autonomous Leaf Surface Reconstruction

Accurate plant leaf modeling is fundamental to downstream tasks such as plant growth monitoring, and phenotyping for yield estimation. Autonomous robotic reconstruction for large-scale field deployment must address limitations on robot planning budget and computation resources while optimizing viewpoint utility for leaf surface reconstruction. Existing approaches either focus on rigid objects, point-cloud coverage or plant reconstruction without fully addressing the system limitations or exploiting task-driven point cloud utility. In this work, we study next-best-view (NBV) planning for leaf surface reconstruction under travel constraints. We develop a novel Centroid-based Information Gain (CIG) function that measures the spatial distribution of observed points relative to the centroid of the existing point cloud to compute viewpoint utility. We also develop a receding-horizon variant that reasons over future viewpoints. To benchmark our work, we use the LAST-STRAW [1] public dataset that includes point clouds of strawberry plants over different growth stages and compare our method with attention-driven NBV [2] that uses a visibility-based information gain approach. The proposed receding-horizon approach consistently reduces surface reconstruction error and improves geometric fidelity across multiple growth stages, especially under increased inter-leaf occlusion. Results demonstrate that our approach is able to visit viewpoints that reduce surface reconstruction error and improves reconstruc-tion accuracy as compared to the baseline by upto 10%.
Arif Ahmed, Sajal K. Das, Parikshit Maini
Jul 30, 2026cs.GR

Learning Manifolds in High-D Point Embedding for Anisotropic Surface Approximation from Unstructured Point Clouds

Dense 3D sensors in various real-world fields produce point clouds that are geometrically redundant for real-time processing. In this paper, we propose an efficient and scalable learning-based anisotropic surface approximation framework, HD-PEA, that operates directly on unstructured point clouds, integrating anisotropic optimization into reconstruction to produce compact, geometry-aligned surface representations with higher fidelity, fewer elements, and improved numerical stability compared to isotropic and adaptive meshes. Firstly, we develop a novel learning-based high-dimensional (high-d) Euclidean point embedding method to map the input point clouds into a high-d manifold embedding space. For handling large-scale point clouds without retraining and fine-tuning, a patch-based meta-embedding scheme is designed during the inference stage. Then, we develop a new tangent subspace estimation for the high-d embedding manifold approximation and anisotropic manifold reconstruction in high-d space. The main contribution of this work is to propose a scalable deep learning framework and a variety of datasets for constructing a high-d Euclidean point embedding space aimed to 3D anisotropic surface mesh approximation and Riemannian curvature tensor estimation from point clouds. We extensively evaluate our method against state-of-the-art surface reconstruction approaches using several datasets, such as Thingi10K dataset, AIM@SHAPE and Stanford 3D Scanning Repository, ScanNet dataset, and further demonstrate its generalization and usability on diverse unseen shapes and applications from these datasets.
Hongbo Li, Haikuan Zhu, Xiaohu Guo +3
Jul 28, 2026stat.ME

Retrospective Orthogonal Design: Response-Surface Reconstruction from Observational Data

Regression estimates from observational data can depend on specification under multicollinearity, while sequential sums of squares (SS) depend on term order. We introduce Retrospective Orthogonal Design (ROD), which reconstructs conditional mean surfaces on a probability-balanced lattice. ROD preserves observed cell means, completes unsupported cells, applies weighted tensor-product contrasts, and evaluates the reconstructed surface through piecewise-affine interpolation over Freudenthal polyhedra. Resolution and completion are selected jointly by validation among rank-admissible candidates, followed by refitting and evaluation on an untouched test set. For an admissible lattice, X⊤WX=cI\mathbf{X}^{\top}\mathbf{W}\mathbf{X}=c\mathbf{I}, yielding specification-invariant contrast effects and unique, order-independent SS within the retained contrast space. Response-free projection calibration maps the fixed reconstruction onto a declared scientific basis and corrects finite-resolution recovery loss. Across 6,480 simulation conditions spanning nine data-generating processes, ROD matched or exceeded polynomial regression in five processes and performed strongest on threshold, sign-interaction, and localized surfaces. For the quadratic-interaction process, mean out-of-sample R2R^2 differed by only 0.00010.0001, while calibrated coefficient bias remained small across prespecified targets. A Rao-based information adjustment provides dependence-aware sample-size guidance for ROD planning. In a weighted Mincer application, ROD produced the highest out-of-sample R2R^2 point estimate, with substantial interval overlap with polynomial regression, and provided exhaustive SS allocations invariant to term-entry order.
Lawrence Fulton, Christopher Fulton, Arvind Sharma +1
Jul 26, 2026cs.CV

RoadVGGT: Road-Structure-Aware Feed-Forward Road Surface Reconstruction

Large-scale road surface reconstruction supports high-definition mapping, autonomous-driving perception, annotation, and simulation. Existing road-specialized optimization methods can produce high-quality road representations, but they typically require per-scene training and scene-dependent coverage design around the driving trajectory, limiting scalable reconstruction over newly collected roads. To address these limitations, we introduce RoadVGGT, a road-structure-aware feed-forward framework that reconstructs compact Gaussian road surfaces without test-time per-scene optimization. RoadVGGT uses a geometric foundation model to exploit multi-view images together with provided pose and depth observations, and predicts dense pixel-aligned Gaussian attributes through a learned Gaussian head. To make these dense predictions usable for large road surfaces, we align them into a consistent metric world coordinate system and fuse redundant Gaussians on the road-aligned XY plane through confidence-weighted grid fusion. Category-aware grouping and road--sidewalk junction protection further control fusion around vulnerable road structures. The resulting representation supports RGB and semantic bird's-eye-view maps, elevation estimation, and novel view synthesis. RoadVGGT eliminates the need for per-scene optimization in prior methods, reconstructs complete road surfaces with a compact Gaussian representation, and improves image quality, semantic mapping, and elevation accuracy. Extensive experiments demonstrate the potential of geometric foundation models for scalable feed-forward road surface reconstruction.
Han Jiao, Chen Liu, Jiakai Sun +6
Jul 24, 2026eess.IV

Metric Surface Reconstruction of Neurosurgical Scenes from Monocular Operating Microscope Images and Microscope Pose

Objective: We evaluated whether metric 3D geometry of neurosurgical operative exposure can be recovered from standard monocular operating-microscope images combined with microscope pose data. Methods: In a phantom-based laboratory study, two aneurysm training phantoms were imaged with a ZEISS Pentero 800 microscope integrated with Brainlab Cranial Navigation. Microscope images from the standard composite video output were stored with synchronous microscope poses. After intrinsic and extrinsic calibration, depth was estimated with the pretrained Depth Anything 3 model without task-specific fine-tuning. Fused point clouds were converted to meshes using Poisson surface reconstruction. Reconstructions were compared with reference surfaces from structured-light scanning and fine-slice CT. Results: For phantom A, representing a deeper surgical corridor, reconstruction accuracy ranged from 1.95 ±\pm 1.70 mm to 2.33 ±\pm 2.15 mm. For phantom B, representing a directly exposed surface, accuracy ranged from 1.02 ±\pm 0.93 mm to 1.52 ±\pm 1.21 mm. Larger image sets mainly improved completeness, while accuracy remained within a narrower range. Corridor analysis showed preservation of overall geometry with local deviations in incompletely reconstructed regions. Conclusions: Standard monocular microscope images combined with navigation-derived pose data can reconstruct millimeter-range 3D surfaces using a foundation-model-based pipeline. These results show technical feasibility in a controlled phantom setting and support further development toward objective quantification of operative exposure, image fusion, and characterization of working spaces for future surgical instrumentation.
Thomas Bucher, Didier Neuenschwander, Thomas Petutschnigg +4
Jul 23, 2026cs.CV

Future Rendering ≠\neq Future Surface: A Benchmark and Dataset for Dynamic Surface Reconstruction Beyond the Observed Window

Dynamic-scene reconstruction is almost always evaluated inside the observed time window, yet deployment settings such as AR overlays, robot interaction, and anticipatory planning need the future surface: the geometry at times beyond those captured. No standard benchmark measures this. We introduce FutureSurf, a controlled diagnostic benchmark and dataset for future-time surface reconstruction that trades scene diversity for exact future ground truth and falsification controls. A method trains on the observed first 75% of a sequence; we score its extracted per-frame surface on the held-out future by Chamfer distance, reporting absolute future CD as the primary score and the future/observed gap as a diagnostic. The dataset contains eight analytically defined controlled motions, including three falsification controls, with exact per-frame ground-truth meshes. We also provide a ground-truth-side recoverability oracle. The release includes split files, scoring code, a benchmark card, and Croissant metadata. On the controlled motions, the DG-Mesh backbone leaves a 2.7-4.1×\times gap even for futures predictable in principle (four of five recoverable from observed motion by a fixed rule), while the falsification controls behave as designed (the surface-invariant motion shows no gap). Beyond the contributed dataset, the gap persists across six animated DG-Mesh asset scenes and a second backbone, Deformable-3DGS (2.0-6.6×\times; both share a deformation-MLP temporal model). The benchmark also shows that future rendering quality and future-surface accuracy are statistically decoupled, so the novel-view-synthesis metrics the field reports do not track future geometry. The future error is structured, concentrating where the surface moves. The dataset, evaluation toolkit, and scoring code are available on Hugging Face and GitHub (https://github.com/Ricky-S/futuresurf).
Yukun Shi, Minglun Gong
Jul 18, 2026cs.GR

Points as Tori: Fast Pointwise Signed Distance for Point Clouds

We describe a method for computing signed distance to point clouds that allows fast pointwise evaluation at arbitrary spatial resolution. As input, our method takes a point cloud with normals; as output, it provides an analytical parameterization that allows queries of signed distance to the approximate underlying surface at arbitrary points - simultaneously providing reconstruction and distance. Our key idea is to reconstruct shapes by locally fitting point clouds with tori, which have closed-form signed distance functions. Tori are fitted in a feed-forward manner, using a pre-trained network to output per-point curvature and shift parameters. Importantly, our method does not require costly global optimization or spatial discretization, and is easily parallelizable. Underlying our method is a new theory that unifies signed distance with the classic reconstruction methods of winding numbers and Poisson surface reconstruction. We use our method to compute signed distance to point clouds arising from photogrammetry, meshes, 3D Gaussians, and neural implicits. Our method allows point clouds to be used directly in applications, without explicit surface reconstruction: as examples, we take offsets of point clouds, apply morphological and Boolean operations, and directly visualize offset surfaces using sphere tracing.
Nicole Feng, Ioannis Gkioulekas, Keenan Crane
Jul 16, 2026cs.CV

RoGS: Adaptive Meshgrid Gaussian for Large-Scale Road Surface Mapping

Road surface mapping plays a crucial role in autonomous driving, supporting high-definition map generation, lane-level perception, and automatic road annotation. Recent mesh-based road surface reconstruction methods have shown promising results, but they still suffer from limited reconstruction quality and high optimization cost, especially in large-scale driving scenarios. To address these limitations, we propose ROADGS-T, a robust and efficient large-scale road surface mapping framework based on adaptive meshgrid Gaussian representation. Specifically, we model the road surface by placing 2D Gaussian surfels on a meshgrid, where each surfel explicitly stores color, semantic, and geometric information. Compared with conventional mesh-based representations and 3D Gaussian primitives, the proposed meshgrid Gaussian representation better matches the thin-surface property of roads while significantly reducing redundant primitives and overlap during optimization. To further improve representation efficiency and structural fidelity, we introduce a road-structure-aware adaptive meshgrid strategy, which allocates denser Gaussian surfels to geometrically or semantically complex regions, such as lane markings, road boundaries, and height discontinuities, while maintaining a compact representation in flat road areas. Moreover, instead of relying on a single nearest vehicle pose, we design a trajectory-consistency-guided pose-robust refinement strategy, which estimates local surface priors from multiple neighboring poses and adaptively weights pose-guided height regularization according to their geometric consistency.
Tianchen Deng, Zhiheng Feng, Wenhua Wu +3
Jul 16, 2026cs.CV

G2^2SR: Geometric Methods for Fast and Memory-Efficient Gaussian-based Surface Reconstruction

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.
Dasong Gao, Vivienne Sze, Sertac Karaman
Jul 15, 2026cs.CV

CASA-SDF: Curriculum-Aware Spatial Adaptation with Curvature-Guided Density for Neural Implicit Surface Reconstruction

Neural implicit representations have emerged as a powerful paradigm for 3D reconstruction. However, high-fidelity indoor surface reconstruction remains a significant challenge, primarily due to the pronounced \emph{geometric heterogeneity} of indoor scenes. Large texture-less planar regions typically require stronger regularization to suppress high-frequency artifacts, while thin structures demand sharper, more adaptive representations to mitigate the spectral bias of multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs) and prevent over-smoothing. Existing approaches often rely on spatially indiscriminate prior supervision and a scene-global SDF-to-density transformation, which constrains their ability to balance planar smoothness and detail preservation. In this paper, we propose CASA-SDF (Curriculum-Aware Spatial Adaptation for SDF), a unified framework that addresses this challenge via complementary adaptations of supervision and representation capacity. Specifically, Hybrid Spatially-Adaptive Uncertainty Annealing (SAUA) fuses semantic and photometric uncertainties to construct a pixel-wise curriculum for monocular prior supervision. This strategy maintains regularization in reliable regions while attenuating unreliable supervision early in training to enable data-driven photometric refinement. Meanwhile, Curvature-Aware Locally Adaptive Density Transformation (CALADT) progressively modulates the sharpness of the SDF-to-density mapping via a curvature proxy to enhance the representation of thin structures. Extensive experiments on benchmark indoor datasets demonstrate that CASA-SDF improves surface completeness and detail recovery on high-frequency structures, without compromising the stability of planar surfaces.
Lei Yang, Weiqing Li, Zhiyong Su +1
Jul 14, 2026cond-mat.mtrl-sci

DeepCormack: Fermi surface tomography using model-based data-driven algorithms

The experimental reconstruction of the 3D two-photon momentum density (TPMD) via angular correlation of electron-positron annihilation radiation (ACAR) is a particularly useful method for studying material Fermi surfaces. It does not rely on low temperatures, UHV conditions, or strong magnetic fields, and enables the study of the spin-resolved electronic structure of materials. Yet, it remains a challenging inverse problem. Typically, 10^8 positron annihilation events are measured for 3--6 projections of the TPMD at different angles. The standard reconstruction approach is an ACAR adaptation of Cormack's method (the MCM) that leverages the inherent symmetry in the crystal's structure. However, the poor signal-to-noise ratio means collecting data of sufficient quality for Fermi surface studies can take months per sample. We present DeepCormack, a family of data-driven model-based reconstruction algorithms that augments the MCM by integrating supervised deep-learning models (CNN, MLP, and UNet) at various stages. To overcome the lack of large experimental training sets, we propose a method which leverages singular value decomposition with dynamic mode decomposition to generate realistic synthetic TPMD volumes, requiring only a single reference momentum density computed via density functional theory. On test data, DeepCormack improves reconstruction quality over MCM by about 8.5 dB PSNR at 200M counts and remains stable at reduced counts, enabling significantly faster acquisition times. Generalisation to experimental data depends strongly on how well the training distribution from the reference momentum density matches the sample. We therefore recommend pairing DeepCormack with a DFT calculation of the target material to create sample-specific training data. Our proposed method offers either much higher quality reconstructions, or enables significantly faster ones, on the order of weeks.
Georg F. B. Lovric, Bryn Drury, Carola-Bibiane Schönlieb +2
Jul 13, 2026cs.GR

IBPA: Real-time Free-form Manifold Mesh Reconstruction via Incremental Ball Pivoting with Integrated Hole Detection

Both Remotely Operated underwater Vehicles (ROVs) and Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) are frequently deployed to acquire geometric bathymetric data. However, it is often discovered post-survey that the acquired data coverage is incomplete. Given the high operational cost associated with underwater deployments, it is essential to incrementally visualize surface coverage in real-time to support informed decision-making by both the operators of ROVs and the AUVs during data collection. In addition, traditional incremental surface reconstruction methods, such as Digital Terrain Models (DTMs), are inherently limited in expressiveness: they represent surfaces as height fields, allows only one elevation value per (x,y)(x, y) coordinate and thus cannot capture overhangs or vertical structures. To overcome these limitations, we adapt the original Ball Pivoting Algorithm (BPA) into an incremental, real-time, and free-form surface reconstruction method, referred to as Incremental BPA (IBPA). Our method incrementally constructs an orientable, manifold mesh from streaming point cloud data without imposing assumptions regarding point cloud overlap or spatial distribution. Furthermore, we introduce a hole detection mechanism that identifies and highlights incomplete mesh regions. Compared to existing approaches, our method supports more complex surface topologies without prior structural assumptions. The source code of our reference implementation is available: https://github.com/Mauhing/Incremental-BPA
Mauhing Yip, Mohit Singh, Kostas Alexis +2
Jul 12, 2026cs.CV

Incremental Online Scene Reconstruction by 3D Gaussian Triangulation

Incremental scene reconstruction is essential for real-world applications. Although 3D Gaussian Splatting shows strong potential, most existing approaches require offline conversion of the optimized Gaussians into an intermediate implicit field for explicit mesh extraction, which hinders seamless integration with downstream tasks. To address this limitation, we propose a novel online framework that incrementally reconstructs and updates high-fidelity explicit meshes by directly triangulating a dense geometric Gaussian representation, which supports both high-quality rendering and incremental surface reconstruction. Moreover, we present a direct meshing algorithm that efficiently extracts and updates the mesh from the Gaussian set. To ensure mesh accuracy, we enforce a plane-based pulling constraint that dynamically aligns 3D Gaussian primitives to the approximated local surface. Furthermore, our framework significantly reduces memory and computational overhead during long-sequence processing by dynamically freezing fully optimized historical regions. Experiments on public datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms conventional Gaussian-based methods on both rendering quality and reconstruction accuracy.
Yanjin Zhu, Shaofan Liu, Jianke Zhu
Jul 9, 2026cs.GR

HoloTetSphere: Unified TetSphere Mesh Reconstruction for Physical Simulations

Standard pipelines for physics-ready 3D reconstruction rely on a decoupled two-stage paradigm: extracting surface geometry followed by an error-prone tetrahedralization process. While recent Lagrangian methods like TetSphere Splatting attempt to bypass this by directly optimizing volumetric primitives, their homeomorphic constraints prevent topology-adaptive optimization. Consequently, they produce disjoint tetrahedra rather than a single connected mesh, rendering the structures unsuitable for further physical simulations. To address this, we propose a topology-adaptive framework for holistic tetrahedral mesh reconstruction through end-to-end topological and geometric optimization. First, by coupling Gaussian spheres to tetrahedral elements and leveraging edge connections, we estimate a continuous opacity field for differentiable element pruning. Next, jointly minimizing mesh smoothing energy and multi-view Gaussian rendering error drives alternating geometric refinement while preserving topological adaptivity. Consequently, our approach effectively constructs a unified and topologically coherent tetrahedral mesh. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art techniques by achieving superior geometric accuracy and producing coherent, single-connected tetrahedral meshes, thereby effectively bypassing the error-prone conventional tetrahedralization step for reconstructed surface meshes and streamlining downstream physical simulation.
YaQiao Dai, Renjiao Yi, Zhirui Gao +3
Jul 4, 2026cs.CV

City-Level 3D Surface Reconstruction with Viewpoint Orientation Partitioning and Scene Completion

Multi-view 3D surface reconstruction is a longstanding challenge in computer vision. Although recent large-scale reconstruction methods based on 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) achieve impressive novel-view synthesis, producing high-quality surfaces over large scenes remains difficult, due to complex geometry, long optimization, and limited memory. In this paper, we propose a novel yet simple partitioning method to efficiently and faithfully reconstruct large-scale scene surfaces. Our key insight lies in a scene partitioning method based on viewpoint orientation. This partitioning approach ensures that views with similar orientations are jointly involved for more accurate depth estimations, leading to precise surface reconstructions and balanced computation on multiple GPUs in parallel. In addition, we propose a strategy to detect and repair missing regions in the initial point cloud caused by sparse viewpoints or insufficient textures, thereby further improving the geometric quality. Extensive experiments on the GauU-Scene, MatrixCity, and UrbanScene3D datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches in surface reconstruction for large-scale scenes. Project page: https://hanl2010.github.io/VOP-GS.
Liang Han, Wenyuan Zhang, Junsheng Zhou +2
Jul 4, 2026cs.CV

Sparse-View Surface Reconstruction using Gaussian Splatting through High-Confidence Depth Propagation with Normal Priors

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.
Liang Han, Bangcai Wei, Junsheng Zhou +2
Jun 29, 2026cs.CV

Clinical Risk-Aware Multi-Level Grading for Coronary Artery Stenosis through Curved Feature Reconstruction

Developing a multi-level grading model for coronary artery stenosis holds great clinical significance for the diagnosis of coronary artery disease. However, designing an effective multi-level deep learning algorithm faces significant challenges. Specifically, utilizing CCTA or 3D SCPR images alone presents inherent shortcomings: CCTA images are difficult to analyze due to the tortuous paths of blood vessels, while 3D SCPR images are prone to abnormal distortions that hinder accurate grading. Furthermore, different stenosis grades are associated with varying clinical risks, and incorporating this association into the algorithm is non-trivial. To address the former problems, we propose the Curved Feature Reconstruction (CFR) module, which uses vessel curves as prior and employs a point-by-point correspondence strategy to precisely align and fuse features from both 3D SCPR and CCTA images. Meanwhile, a Clinical Risk-Aware (CR) Loss is employed to introduce clinical risk relevance into the network training so that the algorithm can better align with the clinical diagnosis. The experimental results on a in-house dataset reveal that our approach significantly outperforms other methods, and several ablation studies also demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed designs.
Shishuang Zhao, Hongtai Li, Junjie Hou +1
Jun 16, 2026cs.GR

Blended Chart Surfaces: A Seamless Explicit Representation for Smooth Surface Fitting

A surface representation suitable for geometry processing should be compact and explicit, provide global smoothness guarantees, support a wide range of surface topologies, and offer reliable access to differential quantities such as normals and surface energies, while remaining compatible with modern differentiable optimization. Existing neural representations typically sacrifice one or more of these properties: implicit fields typically require iso-surfacing for downstream use, while explicit neural maps are constrained by canonical-domain parametrizations or exhibit seam artifacts between local charts. We introduce Blended Chart Surfaces, a compact, network-free, explicit representation that is smooth by construction and anchored to user-provided topology. Given a coarse proxy mesh encoding the intended surface topology and approximate geometry, Blended Chart Surfaces jointly optimize for a polynomial map at each proxy vertex using an off-the-shelf optimizer to fit to an implicit target shape, avoiding the need for an input parametrization. Neighboring maps are fused using a smooth 'one-ring coordinate' blending scheme, decoupling topology and coarse geometry (carried by the proxy) from geometric details (carried by the local patches). The surface is globally smooth, fully differentiable, and enables stable evaluation of derivatives, making differential quantities and surface energies directly accessible. Additionally, our construction is equivariant to rigid motions and scaling of the proxy mesh. We evaluate Blended Chart Surfaces on various topologies and geometric complexity, and compare against explicit alternatives including interpolating-function baselines and mesh-displacement MLPs. Across these, Blended Chart Surfaces achieve a favorable trade-off among compactness, simplicity, access to differential quantities, and expressivity while remaining smooth across patch boundaries.
Romy Williamson, Niloy Mitra
Jun 16, 2026cs.CV

Contact-Based Fringe Projection Profilometry for High-Resolution 3-D Surface Measurement of Reflective and Transparent Objects

This paper presents a contact-based 3-D surface measurement method based on a Digital Fringe Projection (DFP) system, belonging to the vision-based tactile sensing family pioneered by the commercially successful GelSight sensor. Such sensors have proven effective for robotic fingertip manipulation and contact sensing. However, because GelSight employs photometric stereo with RGB LEDs, it does not measure absolute depth directly but instead infers it by integrating estimated surface gradients, which can accumulate reconstruction errors; in addition, it becomes increasingly difficult to calibrate as the sensing area grows, and its depth accuracy is challenged on highly reflective or transparent objects. To overcome these drawbacks, we propose a fringe-projection-based contact measurement technique that performs triangulation-based 3-D reconstruction on a coated silicone contact surface, providing dense per-pixel surface geometry and full-field 3-D shape measurement over the contact region. By integrating high-accuracy digital fringe projection into the sensor, our approach simplifies calibration over larger areas and enhances depth precision for complex surfaces. Experimental results, including a direct comparison with a GelSight Mini sensor, a sphere-fitting accuracy evaluation, and an uncertainty analysis, confirm that the proposed method significantly improves the accuracy and stability of structured-light-based 3-D measurements, allowing reliable reconstruction of objects with diverse optical properties.
Ingu Yeo, Hyung-Gun Chi, Jae-Sang Hyun
May 30, 2026cs.CV

Optimizing 3D Gaussian Splatting via Point Cloud Upsampling

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) is a technique for creating and rendering 3D scenes, however its performance depends heavily on the quality of initial seed points. To improve 3DGS initialization, this study presents and evaluates several point cloud upsampling approaches: linear interpolation, triangular interpolation, spline-based surface reconstruction, moving least squares surface fitting, and Voronoi-based point generation. Additionally, this research introduces a depth-guided point lifting method that leverages depth maps to maintain geometric consistency with Structure-from-Motion (SfM) reconstructions. Through extensive experiments on the Mip-NeRF360 and Replica datasets, the proposed methods demonstrate improvements in reconstruction quality across diverse scene types. Results indicate that different upsampling strategies excel in different scenarios: surface reconstruction methods perform better with organic, detailed scenes, while simpler interpolation approaches are more suited for scenes dominated by piecewise-smooth geometries. In comparison, the depth-guided approach shows promise for adding geometry-aware points across the entire scene, importantly in texture-less regions. These findings, which provide preliminary practical guidelines for selecting appropriate upsampling methods based on scene characteristics and computational constraints, advances the understanding of how point cloud initialization affects 3DGS quality.
Adrian Ramlal, Yan Song Hu, John S. Zelek
May 28, 2026cs.CV

Comparative evaluation of photogrammetric reconstruction methods and 3D Gaussian Splatting for road surface roughness analysis

Image-based 3D reconstruction offers a low-cost alternative to traditional sensor-based techniques for road surface assessment. This study compares four reconstruction pipelines--COLMAP, Meshroom, Metashape, and 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS)--to evaluate their ability to estimate road surface roughness from smartphone imagery. All point clouds were processed in CloudCompare using a consistent workflow involving orientation alignment, segmentation, normal estimation, and roughness computation at neighborhood radiuses of 0.2, 0.4, and 0.6 model units. The results show that COLMAP provides the highest sensitivity to micro-texture, while Meshroom yields balanced reconstructions with moderate roughness variation. Metashape produces the smoothest geometry due to its internal filtering, and 3DGS captures visible irregularities but exhibits higher noise and lower density. The comparison demonstrates that open-source pipelines are viable for relative roughness evaluation, offering a practical approach for low-cost pavement monitoring.
Marouane Elmegdar, Teng Xiao
May 23, 2026cs.GR

AnySurf: Any Surface Generation with Directed Edge

Open surface components prevail in real industrial 3D content and support rendering, physical simulation and geometric editing. Garments serve as a typical open surface type, with numerous existing generation methods leveraging sewing patterns to generate 2D panels and stitch them into 3D shapes. Such domain-specific designs lack scalability and cannot generalize to shoes and accessories. Common field-based 3D generators prioritize watertight meshes and tend to create flawed double-layer structures on open surfaces. Though Trellis2 adopts field-free representation, its open surface results still contain normal and topology errors. We present AnySurf, a unified framework generating open, closed and hybrid 3D surfaces with accurate face orientation. Built on directed-edge enhanced Flexible Dual Grid (FDG-D), our representation retains normal direction information via oriented grid edges. We also propose ROS-FT post-training and a lightweight DE-Adapter with merely 1% extra parameters, facilitating directed edge learning while preserving original generation performance. We further construct Outfit3D dataset containing industrial garments and closed accessories. Our work transforms garment modeling into a universal 3D generation task. Experimental results demonstrate superior mesh quality and better practicality for downstream applications.
Wenda Shi, Chenyuan Pan, Dengming Zhang +3
May 12, 2026cs.CV

Revisiting Photometric Ambiguity for Accurate Gaussian-Splatting Surface Reconstruction

Surface reconstruction with differentiable rendering has achieved impressive performance in recent years, yet the pervasive photometric ambiguities have strictly bottlenecked existing approaches. This paper presents AmbiSuR, a framework that explores an intrinsic solution upon Gaussian Splatting for the photometric ambiguity-robust surface 3D reconstruction with high performance. Starting by revisiting the foundation, our investigation uncovers two built-in primitive-wise ambiguities in representation, while revealing an intrinsic potential for ambiguity self-indication in Gaussian Splatting. Stemming from these, a photometric disambiguation is first introduced, constraining ill-posed geometry solution for definite surface formation. Then, we propose an ambiguity indication module that unleashes the self-indication potential to identify and further guide correcting underconstrained reconstructions. Extensive experiments demonstrate our superior surface reconstructions compared to existing methods across various challenging scenarios, excelling in broad compatibility. Project: https://fictionarry.github.io/AmbiSuR-Proj/ .
Jiahe Li, Jiawei Zhang, Xiao Bai +4
May 12, 2026cs.CV

VidSplat: Gaussian Splatting Reconstruction with Geometry-Guided Video Diffusion Priors

Gaussian Splatting has achieved remarkable progress in multi-view surface reconstruction, yet it exhibits notable degradation when only few views are available. Although recent efforts alleviate this issue by enhancing multi-view consistency to produce plausible surfaces, they struggle to infer unseen, occluded, or weakly constrained regions beyond the input coverage. To address this limitation, we present VidSplat, a training-free generative reconstruction framework that leverages powerful video diffusion priors to iteratively synthesize novel views that compensate for missing input coverage, and thereby recover complete 3D scenes from sparse inputs. Specifically, we tackle two key challenges that enable the effective integration of generation and reconstruction. First, for 3D consistent generation, we elaborate a training-free, stage-wise denoising strategy that adaptively guides the denoising direction toward the underlying geometry using the rendered RGB and mask images. Second, to enhance the reconstruction, we develop an iterative mechanism that samples camera trajectories, explores unobserved regions, synthesizes novel views, and supplements training through confidence weighted refinement. VidSplat performs robustly to sparse input and even a single image. Extensive experiments on widely used benchmarks demonstrate our superior performance in sparse-view scene reconstruction.
Jimin Tang, Wenyuan Zhang, Junsheng Zhou +5
May 11, 2026cs.CV

TransmissiveGS: Residual-Guided Disentangled Gaussian Splatting for Transmissive Scene Reconstruction and Rendering

Transmissive scenes are ubiquitous in daily life, yet reconstructing and rendering them remains highly challenging due to the inherent entanglement between near-field reflections from the surrounding environment on the transmissive surface, and the transmitted content of the scene behind it. This coupling gives rise to dual surface geometries and dual radiance components within each observation, posing ambiguities for standard methods. We present TransmissiveGS, a novel framework for disentangled reconstruction and rendering of transmissive scenes. Specifically, we model the scene with a dual-Gaussian representation and introduce a deferred shading function to jointly render the two Gaussian components. To separate reflection and transmission, we exploit the inherent multi-view inconsistency of reflections and leverage the residuals from reconstructing multi-view consistent content as cues for disentangled geometry and appearance modeling. We further propose a reflection light field that enables high-fidelity estimation of near-field reflections. During training, we introduce a high-frequency regularization to preserve fine details. We also contribute a new synthetic dataset for evaluating transmissive surface reconstruction. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world scenes demonstrate that TransmissiveGS consistently outperforms prior Gaussian Splatting-based methods in both reconstruction and rendering quality for transmissive scenes.
Zhenyu Liang, Xiao Zhang, Tianchao Li +2
May 11, 2026cs.CV

DySurface: Consistent 4D Surface Reconstruction via Bridging Explicit Gaussians and Implicit Functions

While novel view synthesis (NVS) for dynamic scenes has seen significant progress, reconstructing temporally consistent geometric surfaces remains a challenge. Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) and 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) offer powerful dynamic scene rendering capabilities; however, relying solely on photometric optimization often leads to geometric ambiguities. This results in discontinuous surfaces, severe artifacts, and broken surfaces over time. To address these limitations, we present DySurface, a novel framework that bridges the effectiveness of explicit Gaussians with the geometric fidelity of implicit Signed Distance Functions (SDFs) in dynamic scenes. Our approach tackles the structural discrepancy between the forward deformation of 3DGS (canonical→dynamiccanonical \rightarrow dynamic) and the backward deformation required for volumetric SDF rendering (dynamic→canonicaldynamic \rightarrow canonical). Specifically, we propose the VoxGS-DSDF branch that leverages deformed Gaussians to construct a dynamic sparse voxel grid, providing explicit geometric guidance to the implicit SDF field. This explicit anchoring effectively regularizes the volumetric rendering process, significantly improving surface reconstruction quality, with watertight boundaries and detailed representations. Quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate that DySurface significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in geometric accuracy metrics while maintaining competitive rendering performance.
Minje Kim, Younghyun Noh, Jaesoon Kim +1
May 8, 2026cs.CV

Sat3R: Satellite DSM Reconstruction via RPC-Aware Depth Fine-tuning

Accurate Digital Surface Model (DSM) reconstruction from satellite imagery is critical for applications such as disaster response, urban planning, and large-scale geographic mapping. Existing approaches face a fundamental trade-off: optimization-based methods achieve strong accuracy but require hours of per-scene computation, while generalizable geometry foundation models offer near-instant inference but fail to generalize to satellite imagery due to the domain gap introduced by the Rational Polynomial Camera (RPC) model and mismatched depth scale distributions. We present Sat3R, a feed-forward framework that bridges this gap via RPC-aware metric depth fine-tuning of Depth Anything V2 using the Scale-Invariant Logarithmic (SiLog) loss. By constructing physically consistent pseudo depth supervision from RPC geometry, Sat3R adapts a monocular depth foundation model to the satellite domain without per-scene optimization. Experiments on the DFC2019 benchmark demonstrate that Sat3R reduces MAE by 38% over zero-shot feed-forward baselines and achieves competitive accuracy against optimization-based methods, while delivering over 300x speedup. Sat3R demonstrates that feed-forward models, when properly adapted to the satellite domain, can match optimization-based accuracy at a fraction of the computational cost, paving the way for practical large-scale satellite DSM reconstruction.
Qiaoyi Yang, Chaoyi Zhou, Xi Liu +9
May 8, 2026cs.CV

High-Fidelity Surface Splatting-Based 3D Reconstruction from Multi-View Images

Multi-view mesh reconstruction remains a core challenge in computer graphics and vision, especially for recovering high-frequency geometry from sparse observations. Recent methods such as 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) and Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) rely on post-processing for mesh extraction, thereby limiting joint optimization of geometry and appearance. Implicit Moving Least Squares (IMLS) instead enables direct conversion of point clouds into signed distance and texture fields, supporting end-to-end reconstruction and rendering. However, existing IMLS formulations use exponential kernels that struggle with high-frequency detail. We introduce a compact polynomial kernel with local support and greater flexibility, allowing better control over frequency content and improved geometric fidelity. To further enhance fine details, we incorporate stochastic regularization with Laplacian filtering. Together, these improve the preservation of high-frequency structure while maintaining stable optimization. Experiments show state-of-the-art performance in both surface reconstruction and rendering, yielding more accurate geometry and sharper visuals from multi-view data.
Nandhana Sunil, Abhirami R Iyer, Avirup Mandal
May 8, 2026cs.CV

SatSurfGS: Generalizable 2D Gaussian Splatting for Sparse-View Satellite Surface Reconstruction

Sparse-view satellite image surface reconstruction remains highly challenging, fundamentally because the reliability of multi-view matching under satellite imaging conditions is strongly spatially heterogeneous. Affected by large photometric differences, weak textures, and repetitive textures, multi-view geometric constraints are often sparse, unevenly distributed, and locally unreliable. Although 2D Gaussian Splatting (2DGS) is more suitable than 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) for the explicit representation of continuous surfaces, research on generalizable feed-forward 2DGS frameworks for sparse-view satellite surface reconstruction is still lacking. To address this issue, we propose SatSurfGS, a generalizable sparse-view surface reconstruction method for satellite imagery based on 2DGS. The proposed method builds a coarse-to-fine Gaussian attribute prediction framework and explicitly models local geometric reliability at three levels: feature learning, Gaussian parameter estimation, and training optimization. Specifically, we propose a confidence-aware monocular multi-view feature fusion module to adaptively integrate monocular priors and multi-view matching features according to local confidence; a cross-stage self-consistency residual guidance module to stabilize stage-wise Gaussian parameter refinement using the residual between the rendered height map from the previous stage and the current-stage MVS height map, together with confidence information; and a confidence bidirectional routing loss to achieve differentiated allocation of geometric and appearance supervision. Experiments on satellite datasets show that the proposed method achieves improved rendering quality, surface reconstruction accuracy, cross-dataset generalization, and inference efficiency compared with representative generalizable baselines and competitive per-scene optimization methods.
Min Chen, Wei Guo, Bin Wang +9
May 7, 2026cs.GR

3DSS: 3D Surface Splatting for Inverse Rendering

We present 3D Surface Splatting (3DSS), the first differentiable surface splatting renderer for physically-based inverse rendering from multi-view images. Our central insight is that the surface separation problem at the heart of surface splatting admits a direct formulation in terms of the reconstruction kernels themselves. From this foundation we derive a coverage-based compositing model whose per-layer opacity arises directly from the accumulated Elliptical Weighted Average reconstruction weight, yielding anti-aliased silhouettes and informative visibility gradients at sparsely covered edges. Combined with forward microfacet shading under co-optimized HDR environment lighting and density-aware adaptive refinement, 3DSS jointly recovers shape, spatially-varying BRDF materials, and illumination. Because the optimized representation is a set of oriented surface samples, it bridges natively to mesh-based workflows via surface reconstruction from oriented point cloud methods. We evaluate 3DSS against mesh-based, implicit, and Gaussian-splatting baselines across geometry reconstruction, novel-view synthesis, and novel-illumination relighting.
Mae Younes, Adnane Boukhayma
May 6, 2026cs.GR

A Bayesian Approach for Task-Specific Next-Best-View Selection with Uncertain Geometry

We develop a framework for task-specific active next-best-view selection in 3D reconstruction from point clouds, by casting the problem in the language of Bayesian decision theory. Our framework works by (a) placing a prior distribution over the space of implicit surfaces, (b) using recently-developed stochastic surface reconstruction methods to calculate the resulting posterior distribution, then (c) using the posterior distribution to carefully reason about which view to scan next. This enables us to perform camera selection in a manner that is directly optimized for the intended use of the reconstructed data - meaning, we reduce uncertainty only in those regions that make a difference in the task at hand, as opposed to prior approaches that reduce it uniformly across space. We evaluate our method across three distinct downstream tasks: semantic classification, segmentation, and PDE-guided physics simulation. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework achieves superior task performance with fewer views compared to commonly used baselines and prior general uncertainty-reduction techniques.
Jingsen Zhu, Silvia Sellán, Alexander Terenin
May 1, 2026cs.CV

2D-SuGaR: Surface-Aware Gaussian Splatting for Geometrically Accurate Mesh Reconstruction

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.
Prajwal Gupta C. R., Divyam Sheth, Jinjoo Ha +2
Apr 30, 2026cs.CV

From Images2Mesh: A 3D Surface Reconstruction Pipeline for Non-Cooperative Space Objects

On-orbit inspection imagery is crucial as it enables characterization of non-cooperative resident space objects, providing the geometry and structural condition essential for active debris removal and on-orbit servicing mission planning. However, most existing neural implicit surface reconstruction methods have been confined to synthetic or hardware-in-the-loop data with known camera poses and controlled illumination. In this work, we present a pipeline for neural implicit surface reconstruction of non-cooperative space objects from monocular inspection imagery. We demonstrate it on publicly released ISS inspection footage from the STS-119 mission and publicly released on-orbit inspection footage of an H-IIA rocket upper stage. We find that segmentation-based background removal is essential for successful camera pose estimation from real on-orbit footage, where background variation between frames caused direct processing to fail entirely. We further incorporate photometric correction of per-frame exposure variations and analyze its behavior across datasets, finding that performance in shadowed regions varies with the illumination characteristics of the input footage.
Bala Prenith Reddy Gopu, Patrick Quinn, George M. Nehma +4
Apr 17, 2026cs.CV

Neural Gabor Splatting: Enhanced Gaussian Splatting with Neural Gabor for High-frequency Surface Reconstruction

Recent years have witnessed the rapid emergence of 3D Gaussian splatting (3DGS) as a powerful approach for 3D reconstruction and novel view synthesis. Its explicit representation with Gaussian primitives enables fast training, real-time rendering, and convenient post-processing such as editing and surface reconstruction. However, 3DGS suffers from a critical drawback: the number of primitives grows drastically for scenes with high-frequency appearance details, since each primitive can represent only a single color, requiring multiple primitives for every sharp color transition. To overcome this limitation, we propose neural Gabor splatting, which augments each Gaussian primitive with a lightweight multi-layer perceptron that models a wide range of color variations within a single primitive. To further control primitive numbers, we introduce a frequency-aware densification strategy that selects mismatch primitives for pruning and cloning based on frequency energy. Our method achieves accurate reconstruction of challenging high-frequency surfaces. We demonstrate its effectiveness through extensive experiments on both standard benchmarks, such as Mip-NeRF360 and High-Frequency datasets (e.g., checkered patterns), supported by comprehensive ablation studies.
Haato Watanabe, Nobuyuki Umetani
Mar 26, 2026cs.RO

Neural Surface and Reflectance Modelling from 3D Radar Data

Robust scene representation is essential for autonomous systems to safely operate in challenging low-visibility environments. In these conditions, radar has a clear advantage over cameras and lidars due to its resilience to environmental factors such as fog, smoke, or dust. However, radar data is inherently sparse and noisy, making reliable 3D surface reconstruction challenging. To address this, we propose a neural implicit approach for 3D mapping from radar point clouds that jointly models scene geometry and view-dependent radar intensities. Our method leverages a memory-efficient hybrid feature encoding to learn a continuous Signed Distance Field (SDF) for surface reconstruction, while also capturing radar-specific reflective properties. We show that our approach produces smoother, more accurate 3D surface reconstructions compared to existing lidar-based reconstruction methods applied to radar data and can reconstruct view-dependent radar intensities. We also show that, in general, as input point clouds get sparser, neural implicit representations render more faithful surfaces than traditional explicit SDFs and meshing techniques.
Judith Treffler, Vladimír Kubelka, Henrik Andreasson +1
Nov 24, 2024cs.CV

GSurf: Learning Signed Distance Fields from Splatting Opaque Gaussians for High-quality 3D Reconstruction

High-fidelity surface reconstruction from multi-view images is a core problem in 3D computer vision. While neural implicit surfaces like SDFs offer smooth geometry, they are often bottlenecked by the computational intensity of volume rendering. Conversely, 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) provides rapid training but lacks geometry continuity, often leading to fragmented surfaces. This paper presents a novel framework that integrates Signed Distance Fields directly into the splatting pipeline. By leveraging the continuous nature of SDFs to regularize Gaussian primitives, our method effectively fills geometric holes and suppresses noise inherent in sparse point clouds. Unlike hybrid approaches that rely on heavy volumetric sampling, our approach utilizes the efficiency of splatting to achieve faster convergence. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that our method produces high-quality surfaces with significantly fewer primitives, offering a more compact and efficient representation for both indoor and outdoor environments.
Baixin Xu, Jiangbei Hu, Jiaze Li +1