Daily Papers

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has revolutionized neural rendering with its efficiency and quality, but like many novel view synthesis methods, it heavily depends on accurate camera poses from Structure-from-Motion (SfM) systems. Although recent SfM pipelines have made impressive progress, questions remain about how to further improve both their robust performance in challenging conditions (e.g., textureless scenes) and the precision of camera parameter estimation simultaneously. We present 3R-GS, a 3D Gaussian Splatting framework that bridges this gap by jointly optimizing 3D Gaussians and camera parameters from large reconstruction priors MASt3R-SfM. We note that naively performing joint 3D Gaussian and camera optimization faces two challenges: the sensitivity to the quality of SfM initialization, and its limited capacity for global optimization, leading to suboptimal reconstruction results. Our 3R-GS, overcomes these issues by incorporating optimized practices, enabling robust scene reconstruction even with imperfect camera registration. Extensive experiments demonstrate that 3R-GS delivers high-quality novel view synthesis and precise camera pose estimation while remaining computationally efficient. Project page: https://zsh523.github.io/3R-GS/

Calibrating large-scale camera arrays, such as those in dome-based setups, is time-intensive and typically requires dedicated captures of known patterns. While extrinsics in such arrays are fixed due to the physical setup, intrinsics often vary across sessions due to factors like lens adjustments or temperature changes. In this paper, we propose a dense-feature-driven multi-frame calibration method that refines intrinsics directly from scene data, eliminating the necessity for additional calibration captures. Our approach enhances traditional Structure-from-Motion (SfM) pipelines by introducing an extrinsics regularization term to progressively align estimated extrinsics with ground-truth values, a dense feature reprojection term to reduce keypoint errors by minimizing reprojection loss in the feature space, and an intrinsics variance term for joint optimization across multiple frames. Experiments on the Multiface dataset show that our method achieves nearly the same precision as dedicated calibration processes, and significantly enhances intrinsics and 3D reconstruction accuracy. Fully compatible with existing SfM pipelines, our method provides an efficient and practical plug-and-play solution for large-scale camera setups. Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/YJJfish/Multi-Cali-Anything

Camera pose estimation is a long-standing computer vision problem that to date often relies on classical methods, such as handcrafted keypoint matching, RANSAC and bundle adjustment. In this paper, we propose to formulate the Structure from Motion (SfM) problem inside a probabilistic diffusion framework, modelling the conditional distribution of camera poses given input images. This novel view of an old problem has several advantages. (i) The nature of the diffusion framework mirrors the iterative procedure of bundle adjustment. (ii) The formulation allows a seamless integration of geometric constraints from epipolar geometry. (iii) It excels in typically difficult scenarios such as sparse views with wide baselines. (iv) The method can predict intrinsics and extrinsics for an arbitrary amount of images. We demonstrate that our method PoseDiffusion significantly improves over the classic SfM pipelines and the learned approaches on two real-world datasets. Finally, it is observed that our method can generalize across datasets without further training. Project page: https://posediffusion.github.io/

A critical obstacle preventing NeRF models from being deployed broadly in the wild is their reliance on accurate camera poses. Consequently, there is growing interest in extending NeRF models to jointly optimize camera poses and scene representation, which offers an alternative to off-the-shelf SfM pipelines which have well-understood failure modes. Existing approaches for unposed NeRF operate under limited assumptions, such as a prior pose distribution or coarse pose initialization, making them less effective in a general setting. In this work, we propose a novel approach, LU-NeRF, that jointly estimates camera poses and neural radiance fields with relaxed assumptions on pose configuration. Our approach operates in a local-to-global manner, where we first optimize over local subsets of the data, dubbed mini-scenes. LU-NeRF estimates local pose and geometry for this challenging few-shot task. The mini-scene poses are brought into a global reference frame through a robust pose synchronization step, where a final global optimization of pose and scene can be performed. We show our LU-NeRF pipeline outperforms prior attempts at unposed NeRF without making restrictive assumptions on the pose prior. This allows us to operate in the general SE(3) pose setting, unlike the baselines. Our results also indicate our model can be complementary to feature-based SfM pipelines as it compares favorably to COLMAP on low-texture and low-resolution images.

Structure-from-Motion (SfM), a method that recovers camera poses and scene geometry from uncalibrated images, is a central component in robotic reconstruction and simulation. Despite the state-of-the-art performance of traditional SfM methods such as COLMAP and its follow-up work, GLOMAP, naive CPU-specialized implementations of bundle adjustment (BA) or global positioning (GP) introduce significant computational overhead when handling large-scale scenarios, leading to a trade-off between accuracy and speed in SfM. Moreover, the blessing of efficient C++-based implementations in COLMAP and GLOMAP comes with the curse of limited flexibility, as they lack support for various external optimization options. On the other hand, while deep learning based SfM pipelines like VGGSfM and VGGT enable feed-forward 3D reconstruction, they are unable to scale to thousands of input views at once as GPU memory consumption increases sharply as the number of input views grows. In this paper, we unleash the full potential of GPU parallel computation to accelerate each critical stage of the standard SfM pipeline. Building upon recent advances in sparse-aware bundle adjustment optimization, our design extends these techniques to accelerate both BA and GP within a unified global SfM framework. Through extensive experiments on datasets of varying scales (e.g. 5000 images where VGGSfM and VGGT run out of memory), our method demonstrates up to about 40 times speedup over COLMAP while achieving consistently comparable or even improved reconstruction accuracy. Our project page can be found at https://cre185.github.io/InstantSfM/.

We consider the visual disambiguation task of determining whether a pair of visually similar images depict the same or distinct 3D surfaces (e.g., the same or opposite sides of a symmetric building). Illusory image matches, where two images observe distinct but visually similar 3D surfaces, can be challenging for humans to differentiate, and can also lead 3D reconstruction algorithms to produce erroneous results. We propose a learning-based approach to visual disambiguation, formulating it as a binary classification task on image pairs. To that end, we introduce a new dataset for this problem, Doppelgangers, which includes image pairs of similar structures with ground truth labels. We also design a network architecture that takes the spatial distribution of local keypoints and matches as input, allowing for better reasoning about both local and global cues. Our evaluation shows that our method can distinguish illusory matches in difficult cases, and can be integrated into SfM pipelines to produce correct, disambiguated 3D reconstructions. See our project page for our code, datasets, and more results: http://doppelgangers-3d.github.io/.

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) exhibit remarkable performance for Novel View Synthesis (NVS) given a set of 2D images. However, NeRF training requires accurate camera pose for each input view, typically obtained by Structure-from-Motion (SfM) pipelines. Recent works have attempted to relax this constraint, but they still often rely on decent initial poses which they can refine. Here we aim at removing the requirement for pose initialization. We present Incremental CONfidence (ICON), an optimization procedure for training NeRFs from 2D video frames. ICON only assumes smooth camera motion to estimate initial guess for poses. Further, ICON introduces ``confidence": an adaptive measure of model quality used to dynamically reweight gradients. ICON relies on high-confidence poses to learn NeRF, and high-confidence 3D structure (as encoded by NeRF) to learn poses. We show that ICON, without prior pose initialization, achieves superior performance in both CO3D and HO3D versus methods which use SfM pose.

3D reconstruction, which aims to recover the dense three-dimensional structure of a scene, is a cornerstone technology for numerous applications, including augmented/virtual reality, autonomous driving, and robotics. While traditional pipelines like Structure from Motion (SfM) and Multi-View Stereo (MVS) achieve high precision through iterative optimization, they are limited by complex workflows, high computational cost, and poor robustness in challenging scenarios like texture-less regions. Recently, deep learning has catalyzed a paradigm shift in 3D reconstruction. A new family of models, exemplified by DUSt3R, has pioneered a feed-forward approach. These models employ a unified deep network to jointly infer camera poses and dense geometry directly from an Unconstrained set of images in a single forward pass. This survey provides a systematic review of this emerging domain. We begin by dissecting the technical framework of these feed-forward models, including their Transformer-based correspondence modeling, joint pose and geometry regression mechanisms, and strategies for scaling from two-view to multi-view scenarios. To highlight the disruptive nature of this new paradigm, we contrast it with both traditional pipelines and earlier learning-based methods like MVSNet. Furthermore, we provide an overview of relevant datasets and evaluation metrics. Finally, we discuss the technology's broad application prospects and identify key future challenges and opportunities, such as model accuracy and scalability, and handling dynamic scenes.

A commonly observed failure mode of Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) is fitting incorrect geometries when given an insufficient number of input views. One potential reason is that standard volumetric rendering does not enforce the constraint that most of a scene's geometry consist of empty space and opaque surfaces. We formalize the above assumption through DS-NeRF (Depth-supervised Neural Radiance Fields), a loss for learning radiance fields that takes advantage of readily-available depth supervision. We leverage the fact that current NeRF pipelines require images with known camera poses that are typically estimated by running structure-from-motion (SFM). Crucially, SFM also produces sparse 3D points that can be used as "free" depth supervision during training: we add a loss to encourage the distribution of a ray's terminating depth matches a given 3D keypoint, incorporating depth uncertainty. DS-NeRF can render better images given fewer training views while training 2-3x faster. Further, we show that our loss is compatible with other recently proposed NeRF methods, demonstrating that depth is a cheap and easily digestible supervisory signal. And finally, we find that DS-NeRF can support other types of depth supervision such as scanned depth sensors and RGB-D reconstruction outputs.

While novel view synthesis (NVS) has made substantial progress in 3D computer vision, it typically requires an initial estimation of camera intrinsics and extrinsics from dense viewpoints. This pre-processing is usually conducted via a Structure-from-Motion (SfM) pipeline, a procedure that can be slow and unreliable, particularly in sparse-view scenarios with insufficient matched features for accurate reconstruction. In this work, we integrate the strengths of point-based representations (e.g., 3D Gaussian Splatting, 3D-GS) with end-to-end dense stereo models (DUSt3R) to tackle the complex yet unresolved issues in NVS under unconstrained settings, which encompasses pose-free and sparse view challenges. Our framework, InstantSplat, unifies dense stereo priors with 3D-GS to build 3D Gaussians of large-scale scenes from sparseview & pose-free images in less than 1 minute. Specifically, InstantSplat comprises a Coarse Geometric Initialization (CGI) module that swiftly establishes a preliminary scene structure and camera parameters across all training views, utilizing globally-aligned 3D point maps derived from a pre-trained dense stereo pipeline. This is followed by the Fast 3D-Gaussian Optimization (F-3DGO) module, which jointly optimizes the 3D Gaussian attributes and the initialized poses with pose regularization. Experiments conducted on the large-scale outdoor Tanks & Temples datasets demonstrate that InstantSplat significantly improves SSIM (by 32%) while concurrently reducing Absolute Trajectory Error (ATE) by 80%. These establish InstantSplat as a viable solution for scenarios involving posefree and sparse-view conditions. Project page: instantsplat.github.io.

This paper presents a neural incremental Structure-from-Motion (SfM) approach, Level-S^2fM, which estimates the camera poses and scene geometry from a set of uncalibrated images by learning coordinate MLPs for the implicit surfaces and the radiance fields from the established keypoint correspondences. Our novel formulation poses some new challenges due to inevitable two-view and few-view configurations in the incremental SfM pipeline, which complicates the optimization of coordinate MLPs for volumetric neural rendering with unknown camera poses. Nevertheless, we demonstrate that the strong inductive basis conveying in the 2D correspondences is promising to tackle those challenges by exploiting the relationship between the ray sampling schemes. Based on this, we revisit the pipeline of incremental SfM and renew the key components, including two-view geometry initialization, the camera poses registration, the 3D points triangulation, and Bundle Adjustment, with a fresh perspective based on neural implicit surfaces. By unifying the scene geometry in small MLP networks through coordinate MLPs, our Level-S^2fM treats the zero-level set of the implicit surface as an informative top-down regularization to manage the reconstructed 3D points, reject the outliers in correspondences via querying SDF, and refine the estimated geometries by NBA (Neural BA). Not only does our Level-S^2fM lead to promising results on camera pose estimation and scene geometry reconstruction, but it also shows a promising way for neural implicit rendering without knowing camera extrinsic beforehand.

Monocular object pose estimation, as a pivotal task in computer vision and robotics, heavily depends on accurate 2D-3D correspondences, which often demand costly CAD models that may not be readily available. Object 3D reconstruction methods offer an alternative, among which recent advancements in 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) afford a compelling potential. Yet its performance still suffers and tends to overfit with fewer input views. Embracing this challenge, we introduce SGPose, a novel framework for sparse view object pose estimation using Gaussian-based methods. Given as few as ten views, SGPose generates a geometric-aware representation by starting with a random cuboid initialization, eschewing reliance on Structure-from-Motion (SfM) pipeline-derived geometry as required by traditional 3DGS methods. SGPose removes the dependence on CAD models by regressing dense 2D-3D correspondences between images and the reconstructed model from sparse input and random initialization, while the geometric-consistent depth supervision and online synthetic view warping are key to the success. Experiments on typical benchmarks, especially on the Occlusion LM-O dataset, demonstrate that SGPose outperforms existing methods even under sparse view constraints, under-scoring its potential in real-world applications.