OB3D: A New Dataset for Benchmarking Omnidirectional 3D Reconstruction Using Blender

Recent advancements in radiance field rendering, exemplified by Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) and 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS), have significantly progressed 3D modeling and reconstruction. The use of multiple 360-degree omnidirectional images for these tasks is increasingly favored due to advantages in data acquisition and comprehensive scene capture. However, the inherent geometric distortions in common omnidirectional representations, such as equirectangular projection (particularly severe in polar regions and varying with latitude), pose substantial challenges to achieving high-fidelity 3D reconstructions. Current datasets, while valuable, often lack the specific focus, scene composition, and ground truth granularity required to systematically benchmark and drive progress in overcoming these omnidirectional-specific challenges. To address this critical gap, we introduce Omnidirectional Blender 3D (OB3D), a new synthetic dataset curated for advancing 3D reconstruction from multiple omnidirectional images. OB3D features diverse and complex 3D scenes generated from Blender 3D projects, with a deliberate emphasis on challenging scenarios. The dataset provides comprehensive ground truth, including omnidirectional RGB images, precise omnidirectional camera parameters, and pixel-aligned equirectangular maps for depth and normals, alongside evaluation metrics. By offering a controlled yet challenging environment, OB3Daims to facilitate the rigorous evaluation of existing methods and prompt the development of new techniques to enhance the accuracy and reliability of 3D reconstruction from omnidirectional images.

ErpGS: Equirectangular Image Rendering enhanced with 3D Gaussian Regularization

The use of multi-view images acquired by a 360-degree camera can reconstruct a 3D space with a wide area. There are 3D reconstruction methods from equirectangular images based on NeRF and 3DGS, as well as Novel View Synthesis (NVS) methods. On the other hand, it is necessary to overcome the large distortion caused by the projection model of a 360-degree camera when equirectangular images are used. In 3DGS-based methods, the large distortion of the 360-degree camera model generates extremely large 3D Gaussians, resulting in poor rendering accuracy. We propose ErpGS, which is Omnidirectional GS based on 3DGS to realize NVS addressing the problems. ErpGS introduce some rendering accuracy improvement techniques: geometric regularization, scale regularization, and distortion-aware weights and a mask to suppress the effects of obstacles in equirectangular images. Through experiments on public datasets, we demonstrate that ErpGS can render novel view images more accurately than conventional methods.

Sparse2DGS: Sparse-View Surface Reconstruction using 2D Gaussian Splatting with Dense Point Cloud

Gaussian Splatting (GS) has gained attention as a fast and effective method for novel view synthesis. It has also been applied to 3D reconstruction using multi-view images and can achieve fast and accurate 3D reconstruction. However, GS assumes that the input contains a large number of multi-view images, and therefore, the reconstruction accuracy significantly decreases when only a limited number of input images are available. One of the main reasons is the insufficient number of 3D points in the sparse point cloud obtained through Structure from Motion (SfM), which results in a poor initialization for optimizing the Gaussian primitives. We propose a new 3D reconstruction method, called Sparse2DGS, to enhance 2DGS in reconstructing objects using only three images. Sparse2DGS employs DUSt3R, a fundamental model for stereo images, along with COLMAP MVS to generate highly accurate and dense 3D point clouds, which are then used to initialize 2D Gaussians. Through experiments on the DTU dataset, we show that Sparse2DGS can accurately reconstruct the 3D shapes of objects using just three images.